Emma Beatrez Polyester March 8th, 2025 – April 26th, 2025.

In this suite of new paintings, Emma Beatrez renews her visual exploration of small town pep-rally bonfires and the cheerleaders that conduct these wild spectacles. This customary occurrence, when rendered in frozen moments lifted from home video screengrabs or sewn together from open-source imagery by the artist’s blurred strokes, takes on a haunted, apocalyptic impression as its mistresses-of-ceremony — the prototypical Cheerleaders — leap and chant, enwreathed by tongues of orange flame. Clad in polyester vestments, extremely flammable, Beatrez’s priestesses speed through their sportive katas in ecstatic trance, a choreography of escalating risk, summoning danger, the adrenaline surging, melding individuals into group, their eyes glinting in the camera flash or the fire, and a fairly ordinary secular tradition transmogrifies into an otherworldly ritual emblematic of America’s conflicted priorities.
Drawing on influences including the occult, her midwestern upbringing, and the hidden and overt symbolism and rituals inherent in our everyday lives, Beatrez’s work encompasses sculpture, painting, video and installation. Her recent paintings explore core psychoanalytic notions of the symbolic and the real as well as the emergence of new meanings through distortion and recontextualization of established iconography. Images flicker between personal and public open source, taking shape in a constant state of flux. Like a game of telephone, everything comes full circle in the end, altered through the degradation of transference.

POLYESTER ESSAY BY CHRISTIAN MICHAEL FILARDO:
She was so high up she wished she would never return to Earth. The green green grass, the little black beads in the astro turf. How she was allergic to one and the other burnt her feet when it had been in the sun all day. She could have been a satellite after all, backdropped by firework explosions and drone light figures for the Friday night games. She corkscrewed through the air like a bottle opener diving into the ozone layer. Most people forgot to exhale, most people forgot the home team was down by seven. When her ponytail spun like a propeller her skirt became a cloud, head draped in a halo as if Christ was real. People often forget that every pretty girl has a secret. Every heart wants an arrow through it.
In the locker room they started calling them prescribed burns. Between the back handsprings of practice and beneath the sodium yellow lights of game night. It was something about the rush of heat on their faces, the way their shadows flickered like illusions in the hell and smoke. Smell of old wood soaked into the polyester skirts. Each girl liked it a different way, each girl had a preference, each girl got their opportunity to make a statement. Even if their uniforms were the same and they got dressed in the same locker room. School field scorched in apocalyptic blaze state playoff weekend, cheer captain missing. In the newspaper she was posed looking tenderly over her right shoulder, sitting on her knees, ass touching heels, pompoms in lap, shoulders relaxed, perfect white smile, hair braided tightly into the shape of a heart. Every girl on the squad was questioned but they would never rat. People had questions, a lot of questions. A few weeks later the team bus was discovered melted into the asphalt two nights before the championship game. All surveillance footage from nearby cameras mysteriously erased or blacked out. When the missing posters started to appear the championship game had been played. No one really remembers who won. Girls started to imitate the hairstyle and wear ash around their eyes. It was a phenomenon. Each disciple looked like a shooting star that had just crash landed on the planet, chem trails burnt from their eyes. Impact crater more mental than physical. The memorials only grew bigger and bigger until one day people just acted like she never disappeared at all.
You just might see her walking by the side of road on the way to a Friday night game or in the parking lot leaning up against the bed of a truck. Devils just can’t be beat, Devils make you feel the heat! Give them hell Devils. There are castles to be burnt everywhere if you choose to see them. Go into the bathroom and say her name three times. She might be right behind you, or in your heart, or miles and miles away. Body twirling in the sticky summer air. Unfurling like a banner in the gym rafters for the homecoming pep rally.

Christian Michael Filardo is a Filipino American artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Their work utilizes photography, poetry, sound, and sequencing to create complex visual narratives. Filardo’s latest works have focused around human happiness, climate change, and trans humanist philosophy. Currently, Filardo is developing a body of work based around theology, alien myth, ancestral history, and drug use. Often, Filardo works in show and book form when developing bodies of work. Their latest publication “Christian” comes out in spring 2025 on Friend Editions. Collecting over ten years of photographing blurring the line between reality and the surreal.

ARTIST BIO:
Emma Beatrez (b. 1995, New Prague, MN) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Minneapolis. They graduated from Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2020 with a MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio Art and received their BFA with an emphasis in painting at North Dakota State University in 2018. Beatrez is the co-founder/curator at Night Club gallery in St. Paul alongside artist Lee Noble. Solo shows include “Device of Love” (Nemeth Art Center, Park Rapids, MN, 2024), “TECHNOLUST 3000” (HAIR+NAILS, Minneapolis, 2022), and “Quarter Turn” (Fierman Gallery, NYC, 2022). Other recent shows include a two-person show at LVL3 (Chicago), and group shows at Enari (Amsterdam), Nathalie Karg Gallery (NYC), Swivel Gallery (Brooklyn), Guts Gallery (London), Anthony Gallery (Chicago) and in collaboration with Lee Noble at the Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis). Emma Beatrez is represented by HAIR+NAILS Gallery, Minneapolis.

www.emmabeatrez.com
Instagram: @emma.beatrez