Emanuela Harris Sintamarian Artist Talk

Emanuela Harris Sintamarian’s current exhibition, The Theater of Premature Truths, consists of a series of works that explores her personal identity and lived experiences within context. As a Romanian immigrant in the United States, Emanuela Harris Sintamarian’s work is shaped by the negotiation between belonging and estrangement. Concepts of dualism, fragmentation, and migration show up in Sintamarian’s pieces, reflecting on the complexity of identity and memories. “I construct polyphonic images - fractured allegories of my physical, emotional, and intellectual journey. Loss, displacement, and containment become catalysts for ritualized acts of self-expropriation, transforming absence into generative force,” Sintamarian describes.

This event gives you the opportunity to meet the artist and learn more about her and her work, while viewing the artist's current exhibition at the Triton Museum of Art.

This event is free and open to the public (including free parking).

Emanuela Iuliana Harris Sintamarian is an artist originally from Romania, but currently she lives and works in Oakland, CA.

Her work is informed by the relationship between her identity to her sense of displacement, and the ways she has devised to reconcile those incongruous elements. She is interested in perception, memory and the mechanics of motion, their visual translation, and the dichotomies intrinsic to them. She explores the fluidity and tension generated by contradictions: organized chaos and uncontrolled order, machine-like generated imagery, and imperfections, organized chaos and logical absurdity. Ema also tends to adulterate the boundaries between representative and abstract. She leverages marks, colors, shapes, and textures to construct an undefined world, rather than mirror reality.

Ema's work has been shown in solo and group shows at Sunny Art Center, London, UK; Museum of Contemporary Arts, Constanta, Romania; Museum of Art, Arad, Romania; Triton Museum in Santa Clara, CA; Jack Fischer Gallery, San Francisco, CA; the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, DE; Rosenfeld Gallery in Philadelphia; Niklas Belenius Gallery in Stockholm, Sweden; Institute of Contemporary Art, CA and Angel Orensanz Foundation, New York, NY.

She was the recipient of the Leigh Weimer Award, (2021), the Artist Award SVCreates, San Jose, CA (2020), the Golden Foundation Fellowship, Golden Foundation, New Berlin, NY (2018), the Eureka Fellowship, Fleishhacker Foundation, San Francisco, CA (2013), ArtShift Award (2008) and the Silicon Valley Arts Council Award (2010). She is the finalist for the Sunny Art Award (2021), and has been nominated for SECA-SFMOMA-History Art Award, SF, CA

Ema received her first MFA in printmaking from University of Delaware, and her second MFA in painting from San Jose State University. She is a Professor Associated at San Jose City College.

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