artists: Ron Adams, Craig Bender, David Lawrey & Jaki Middleton, Fiona Lowry, Evelyn Malgil, Adam Norton, Samuel Quinteros. Curated by Samantha Ferris
Schmick Contemporary, Sydney, 22 June – 8 July 2023.
This exhibition was inspired by travel, in particular those trips where you find yourself nimbly moving from one place to another, drawn in by inclinations and succumbing to a floating feeling. For me, the same sensation can occur when reading static artworks, when you allow yourself to melt into a setting or atmosphere that has been created.
The works in this exhibition exceed boundaries and while a sense of vastness is created, they provide a certain intimacy giving room for one’s own adventure. We are suspended in Space; gliding above the Kimberley; emerging from an otherworldly icy pool. We are directed and disoriented; Nature has felled a man-made structure; elsewhere the body merges with or is landscape.
Through various pictorial techniques, the distance between the picture and the viewer is collapsed, an experience akin to a cinematic journey. A sense of a (new) Australian Gothic prevails -post-apocalyptic and/or romantic outcomes are entirely possible, and the associated and inexorable drama feels more real, as you melt into it.
Samantha Ferris, June 2023
Samantha Ferris 