Sarah Ortmeyer’s recent 'EMOJI SHADOW' series (2019) includes monochromatic representations of symbols that capture the essence of particular characters in the Emojicon codex. In these works, the silhouettes of each signifier are painted in a single tone of black pigment on either a paper or a metal surface. The paper, often silver, but sometimes an eggshell hue or black, appears weightless in comparison to mounted metal works of the same scale—powder-coated aluminum surfaces in matching silver, ivory, and black backgrounds—which hang against the wall in shallow profile like suspended sheets of a manuscript. While the works are serial in nature, each image is distinct. The expressive lines of exotic trees appear to either burst like a firework or droop like broken fronds after a storm; the apparition of an eight-legged creature appears almost weighted and swollen, or otherwise buoyantly dancing in a gust of wind upon a web; the arch of a rainbow appears as a series of unbroken lines, a representation that could have only been achieved by the artist’s hand stretching the length of her body from one limit to the other along a particular axis. Ortmeyer’s reductive yet anthropomorphic style transforms familiar forms of conversation into a vehicle for idiosyncratic language.

Nothing grows in these Russian tropics. Their fanned leaves appear to be forged of silver and metal, mechanical in nature. Cool canopies of silver, like moonlight.

When they fall, it is at the hand of a manufactured storm. They bear no fruit; rising from the barren soil of a concrete floor or a velvet carpeted staircase. Their tubular trunks are unmarked, without the scars left by leaves as they die out.

Like real palm trees, they will outlive you.

Silhouettes of their form are painted like hieroglyphs, images cast upon the inside of ancient caves. Transformed into shadows by the gesture of a hand—another palma—they are as pure as language.

Latin is the root of all Romance languages. Which could also be rephrased: Latin is a shadow upon this language.

Like words, shadows make no distinction between the material essences of objects. They absorb any landscape, object, or being into their realm.

Any surface can serve as a backdrop to its stage: an anti-opera.