AT UTOPIAN SLUMPS
GROUND FLOOR, 33 GUILDFORD LANE MELBOURNE
WWW.UTOPIANSLUMPS.COM
HOURS: WED – SAT 12 – 6PM
OTHER TIMES BY APPOINTMENT: +61 3 9077 9918

Utopian Slumps is pleased to announce the opening of Dark Gully/Sex Drawings from Amber Wallis on Thursday 10 November 2011.

Dark Gully/Sex Drawings is a solo exhibition focusing on Wallis’ experiences of place and sexual thought. Following on from her exhibition I Fuck Mountains in 2010, she continues to explore the merging of form and metaphor; landscape and sex; and atmosphere and mortality with this new collection of paintings and drawings.

The paintings depict the terrain of ‘Dark Gully’ — a hirsute bend in the road leading to Palm Beach, Sydney — and its vistas.  In a furtherance of earlier works, Wallis captures the line, weather and movement of the landscape in which she lives, and continues to transpose elements of her tangible surroundings with those of an equally-precipitous inner realm.

Wallis’ contemporary landscapes are tightly rendered yet simultaneously loose in composition. They bear the mark of an original hand whilst paying tribute to the traditional language of painting. Her rich colour palette, playful lines and uninhibited form are inspired by the mid-20th century Abstract Expressionist movement and its underpinning ethos: that the canvas should serve the artist as a recipient of an event rather than simply the substrate on which to fix a picture.

The sex drawings are gentler, layered materially with collage and metapsychologically with sexual implication. The inquiring lines that traverse the drawings reference a landscape that merges into the undulations of the body as a sort of transcendent fecundity.

Also present is a collaborative work with close friend and fellow painter William Mackinnon. This sees Mackinnon’s landscape prints of the hills and sea at Port Fairy paired congruously with Wallis’ collage and delicate line work.

Dark Gully/Sex Drawings is a generous and lyrical representation of the artist’s ongoing residence in a dynamic, hedonistic and oft tumultuous niche between real and imagined worlds.

Wallis is currently on the cover of Australian Art Collector, the subject of an eight page feature written by Carrie Miller entitled ‘Psychoactive Painting’. She completed a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Photomedia at the Canberra School of Art, ACT and participated in an exchange program with Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Canada in 2002. She completed her Master of Visual Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne in 2008 and was the winner of the tenth Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship in 2008. During her scholarship she worked from studios at ISCP, New York, Redbird Studios, Montreal and completed a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. Wallis was also resident artist at the Canberra School of Art in 2009. Solo exhibitions include Mountains Full of Sky/Salty Lines, Edwina Corlette Gallery, Brisbane, 2011; I Fuck Mountains, Utopian Slumps, 2010; Dark Gully/Psychic War, Chalk Horse, Sydney, 2010; and Circle of Eagles, Utopian Slumps, 2009. Selected group exhibitions include Need to Seem to Glimpse, C3, 2011; The New Arcadia, Lismore Regional Gallery, 2011; Worm Mountain, C3, 2010; Territorial Pissings, Utopian Slumps, 2010; The Shilo Project, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2009; Chalk Reindeer, Chalk Horse, Sydney, 2009; South, Monster Children Gallery, Sydney, 2009; Brett Whiteley Travelling Arts Scholarship, Brett Whiteley Studio AGNSW, Sydney, 2008;Thank God We Died Together, TCB art inc., Melbourne, 2008; Autumn 2008, Moving Galleries, Melbourne, 2008; Robert Jacks Drawing Prize, Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria, 2008; and Swans and Ammo, with Lizzie Hall, Utopian Slumps, Melbourne, 2007. Wallis currently lives and works in Palm Beach, NSW.

Dark Gully/Sex Drawings from Amber Wallis will take place at Utopian Slumps, Ground Floor, 33 Guildford Lane Melbourne, from 10 November to 3 December 2011. For further information please contact Melissa Loughnan on +61 3 9077 9918 or melissa@utopianslumps.com.

c3 Contemporary Art Space
Abbotsford Convent Foundation
1 St Heliers St. Abbotsford VIC

opens 31st august 6-9pm
exhibition runs from 31st august to 18th september 2011
gallery hours wednesday to sunday 10am-5pm

Kit Wise, Danie Mellor, Siri Hayes, Jake Walker, Amber Wallis, Hobie Porter, Jan Davis, Joan Ross, Kelly Hussey-Smith, Kendal Murray, Sarah Smuts-Kennedy, Fiona Lowry, Shelagh Morgan, Grant Stevens, Judith Van Heeren, Sam Leach. curated by Kezia Geddes

The New Arcadia brings together artists responding to notions of arcadia and the picturesque. It throws light on an idealised depiction of landscape, but with visible disruption. This is the old world butting up against the new as the artists attempt to locate where arcadia is now.

The idea of arcadia is one that has long been dealt with in Western art. The classical arcadia, explored by artists such as Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and Claude Lorrain (1600-1682), presented an unspoiled wilderness, where any implied human presence was harmonious. The word arcadia was derived from the mountainous Greek province of the same name, which dates to antiquity. Arcadia is therefore imbedded with notions of looking back to a paradise enjoyed but lost through the heavy touch of progress and the human hand. It defines nature as transcendent, and ancient beyond our reckoning.

Although we share an awe for environments primordial and pristine, our attitude towards the bountiful landscape can be explained through the alternative definition of the word: ‘to direct, graze, grow, harvest’. These two meanings collide in the pastoral arcadia explored by Western European artists, notably John Constable (1776-1837) and the painters of the French Barbizon school (1830-1870), who studied a landscape in which there was a history of intensive land use. These artists found untamed nature in the clouds and in the atmosphere. Our present civilisation has achieved unparalleled domination over nature and the ‘improved landscape’ is now a loaded term. Most arcadias have already been touched and the idea of yet-to-be discovered environs seems a fanciful notion. In an era of competing interests, today’s arcadia evokes both beauty and compromise. It is out of this context that The New Arcadia unravels.

Lismore Regional Gallery is supported by the NSW Government through Arts NSW and is a Creative Industries Initiative of Lismore City Council.

Meanwhile better late than never:

Lost and Found are hanging Dark Gully/Psychic War (recently purcahsed by Artbank)

The Your Welcome Show was a great success with all proceeds going to the Asylum Seekers Resource Centre

and

The Design Files did a great write up about Kate Tucker and her family,  she is a friend and collector of mine. The article shows a great selection of art and their recently sold abode.

sorry for the bulk update, see my blog for further info.

a

I have a new show opening in Brisbane:
Mountains Full of Sky/Salty Lines
Opening Friday 18 March 2011, 6-8pm
Edwina Corlette Gallery
555 Brunswick St, New Farm, QLD

Amber Wallis’ show Mountains Full of Sky/Salty Lines continues her investigation of her surrounds and home in Dark Gully on Sydney’s Northern Beaches.

With the thread of landscape, both literal and in the interior life, the works are rich in emotion, colour, movement, line and form, pushing the image near to a point of collapse. They provide an experience of Wallis’s world, where the act of artistic creation is as vital as the outcome.

Often approaching the paintings like drawings they are considered and carefully assembled leaving no room for error, the linen treated like a blank piece of paper, enabling the painted mark to have an energy equal to drawing.

The painting Trees is based on Grace Cossington Smiths ‘Trees‘, a rework of a painting set near to Wallis’ current residence. Present is her overall concern with the language  and history of painting reflecting the land in which she lives, as well as her more sexual and psychological interior landscapes.