Em Davenport
love

From July 18 to September 5 , 2026

Galerie Nicolas Robert is pleased to present Em Davenport’s first solo exhibition in Canada, presenting a new body of works around the theme of love.

“love” 

to experience shifting illusions that are constructed as a way to deal with the post-haste terror of heartbreak. to lean on a newfound philosophy and see it through is to experience love, not necessarily with certainty but with a desire to understand and feel. it is represented here as pop art psychedelia that you have projected onto before and will again. you listen to that song that sends you through to the other side or was it— that movie, that book, that friend, that party? to also consider what portion of heartbreak is to remain private or intimate and explode any notions of it. to swallow the ache with this unknowing color that calls to me like a psychic vision. to be an artist that has to consider “love” for the first time.

Em Davenport, born and raised in Missouri, currently lives and works in Chicago. Em Davenport’s practice exists within contemporary questions of visibility, mediation, and the construction of subjectivity, particularly as these concepts relate to social media and cultural economies of attention. The work is a critical investigation of how artists operate as both producers and products within contemporary media systems. Using multiple formats—painting, assemblage, writing, and curatorial projects—Em Davenport reflects on a research-based, conceptually integrated practice. Em Davenport examines the systems that circulate images, including how identity, belief, and intimacy are performed and consumed. The emphasis on parasocialism, sincerity, and authenticity signals a strong alignment with current discourse around digital labor, affect economies, and influencer culture. The work interrogates relational dynamics between artwork, artist persona, and audience. Semiotics and projection function as organizing frameworks: images are understood as unstable sites where meaning is assigned by viewers, positioning the paintings as activated objects that invite belief, desire, and identification. Invoking iconography and devotion places the work in dialogue with religious imagery, while reframing it within contemporary image economies.