Drawing from my present visual environment, the series of new paintings explore perceptual reality, tethered to a system of memory that involves movement, change and flux. The layered and intersecting imagery incorporates symbols, landscape and figurative elements to create a blurred visual experience and to explore the rupture between internal and external realities.
Drawing upon the surreal nature of the past two years, the paintings attempt to depict ambiguities of perception and experience and to present something familiar that nevertheless looks unsettling or strange. Within the paintings, imagery tips in and out of focus, subjects are depicted oversized or undersized, abrupt shifts in surface textures interrupt the image, sky’s press forward in a reversal of atmospheric perspective and areas lift up from their proper pictorial location.
In many of the works symbols and imagery intersect with the landscape. Nondescript and partially transparent figures reflect on the repository of history and memory, etched into and shaping our shared present. Within the use of colour and application of paint, I want to invite viewers to stand in overlapping times and spaces to see beneath a surface image, beneath a surface or single layer. There is a suggestion when looking at the work that it is not real. There are blanks and voids breaking up the pictorial surface just as there are gaps and holes in our perception. – Nicole Kelly
Press release courtesy THIS IS NO FANTASY.
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