Archive : 2012

Through her practice Yuria Okamura explores the duality of the physical and the metaphysical worlds by examining the relationship between geometry and figuration, the interior and the exterior, as well as perception and the illusion of space. She draws her inspiration from Zen architecture and their gardens in an attempt to construct a meditative pictorial space. It is hoped that the viewer can imagine the spiritual world within the realm of the material world. In the process of constructing such pictorial spaces I explore the ways in which geometry can convey the nature of a meditative space.

Laura Skerlj explores the space between nature and the interior world through painting. Her relationship with painting is imperfect and exploratory, using the alchemical quality of the medium to transform an image of the organic to a vision of the supernatural. In these works, landscape is an imagined entity that transcends naturalistic representation. Here, heightened colour and an unusual perspective conjure a zone that is fantastical: a place where our dreaming and mythologizing of the wilderness defines its taking shape. In making these works, the artist was interested in deconstructing the wilderness space in order to create a zone where our memorializing becomes the fundamental basis for its visual materialization.

Eugene Howard’s painting works present us with a distinctive and idiosyncratic visual language that openly grapples with forms of abstraction and observational painting practice, in a continued attempt to arrive at new and exciting visual experiences. Working from life, Howard’s paintings re-arrange our perceived realities and force us to see our environments, both natural and built, with renewed verve.