Adoration is group exhibition featuring new works by Kitty Callaghan, Rachel Farlow, Eliza Gosse, Bindi Steel & Ellen Virgona; with each artist working across the mediums of collage, painting, weaving & photography.
Kitty Callaghan works with found imagery, collaged with deconstructed photographic self portraits. By merging masculine, nostalgic landscapes with her own effeminate bodyscapes, Callaghan reflects upon self awareness and the duality of gender roles in society. As contrasting as the polarising subjects are, they converge to create a mirror of self empowerment, in an alternate reality.
Rachel Farlow creates paintings in abstraction and mark making. Her works deliver spontaneity of the hand and brush, suggesting Farlow channels the subconscious in producing her latest series 'Field Recordings'. What anchors the work is the return to certain forms, the strokes become familiar and repeated across different works, they consist of shapes not dissimilar from that of text. One stroke across, one down, one diagonal. Cross like structures serve as scaffolding that hold the paragraph of marks together. This is Farlow’s vocabulary. A vocabulary dotted across white grounds, most no bigger than a sheet of paper. There is an openness to Farlow’s approach, pragmatic, flexible, diffident. The paintings serve as a deposit of fleeting thoughts and moments on any given day, varying in density in the same way one may consider a journal entry. Not one that consists of any explicit narrative, but rather glimpses of thoughts happening all at once. Some suggests forms indicative of the world around her while others hint at more emotive internal responses, each painting serves as an extension of Farlow’s life in a broader sense an exploration of the fundamentals of painting versus references to her personal life and surroundings.
Eliza Gosse’s paintings depict Australian Suburbia. Working within the canon of Australian artists who have debunked stereotypical suburbia through a “super flat” lens, Gosse comes to her painting from a design background having commenced architectural studies before transitioning to a Bachelor of Fine Art at the National Art School (2017). Focusing upon post war architectural domesticity - Gosse’s paintings flaunt blocks of colour, reduced geometric forms and play off utopian architectural ideals with a nostalgic inflection. In a time of rapid gentrification, increasing unaffordability and rising inequality, Gosse turns focus to design history. With the majority of the houses depicted now gone she questions our value assessment of past culture through the built environment. Her depictions of these buildings is not merely a love letter to this period of design but more so an attempt to posit such homes as an integral component of Australia and its national chronology.
Bindi Steel is a multi-disciplinary artist whose mediums include painting, weaving and ‘domestic crafts’. Gender, spectatorship and performance have been recurrent themes in Stehli’s work, which focuses on alternative perspectives to the hegemony of the hetero-male gaze in contemporary culture. Steel’s practice employs humour, kitsch visual language and low-brow reference material as vehicle for collapsing binary positions of gender and the tropes assigned to them. By reversing the conventional subject/object dichotomy, Steel subverts the traditions of the objectifying gaze, turning it back upon its source.
Ellen Virgona is a Sydney based artist working with the medium of photography. Her latest series of work 'Uncommon Spaces' presents a visual dialogue between author and space, when exploring details of North American culture. Ellen’s work shows an eye for finding the delicate beauty in the world around her, with her subjects glowing under her preference for soft light, immediately being transported to another era of retro future & playful jest.
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