About

Emma McKay Koppinger (formerly Emma McKay Ryan) is an artist born and raised in Nebraska who now lives and works in Metro Detroit. She earned her MFA in Studio Art with a minor in Visual and Material Culture from the University of Notre Dame and currently serves as Studio Manager for the Print Media Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art. She completed internships at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha and the LUX Center for the Arts in Lincoln, Nebraska. Her work has been exhibited at Manifest Gallery, the Indianapolis Art Center, the South Bend Museum of Art, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. She has participated in artist residencies at the Peninsula School of Art in Fish Creek, Wisconsin, and Kylemore Abbey in Ireland.

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Koppinger’s practice explores beauty, desire, and overconsumption through drawing, painting, and installation, often using imagery and objects drawn from social media and popular culture. At the core of her work is an interest in the slippage between what something is and what it appears to be. Influenced by artists such as Martha Rosler and Cindy Sherman, she is fascinated by how social media and advertising shape the ways images are created and consumed, particularly how they affect the ways women view themselves and their own desires. By mimicking and exaggerating the visual language of online content, she questions how ideals of beauty and desire are constructed and performed.

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More recently, Koppinger has considered a personal question: are the things she wants actually her own desires, or has she been taught to want them through repeated exposure to images and consumer culture? She continues this exploration through the performative use of cake and frosting, which embody kitsch and wish-making while functioning as bodily symbols of consumption. Through these works, she examines the tension between desire and disgust, pleasure and discomfort, and appearance and performance.