Australian artist, Camille Hannah, and her works are surging in popularity around the globe. Her 2019 art collection, AVA, will make its début as a Solo Exhibition at the House of Fine Art (HOFA) in LA this May. This will be Camille’s first Solo Exhibition in the US and it promises to deliver the rich, sensually engaging experience for which her works are famous.
Camille’s works have received critical acclaim for their abstract explorations of femininity through contemporary mediums. Barbara Dowse, Art Consultant and Curator, describes the Heroine collection, which was released in 2014, as seductive with “alluring brush strokes in rich, viscous oil encapsulated within shallow domes of convex Perspex” adding that they “…at once tantalise and distance the viewer at that ‘push me pull you’ threshold of vision and touch.” The skilful awakening of tactile impulses and the dynamics of engaging them through a medium that is inherently restrictive, are some of what make Camille’s exhibitions a vivid and intriguing visual experience.
Camille Hannah’s paintings are quintessentially a part of twenty-first century gestural abstraction with the addition of being both conceptually influenced and vested in the digital and screen technologies that dominate the times. Her works present the contemporary aesthetic of mediated visuality in a model of art that has evolved since the emergence of gestural abstraction in the mid-1800s. The influence of the screen paradigm is pronounced in her works, through elements of fluidity and transition, and the perception of interactivity achieved through the suggestive cues of virtual tactility and the creative engagement of other senses.
Hannah’s new body of work is a continuation of themes developed in collections like Barbarians (2018) and Heroine (2014). In Barbarians, the spatial relationship of each work, and the dimensionality and movement induced through the placement of curved ‘mirror screens’, were deployed to circumvent mediation through active engagement, whilst incorporating and extending the viewer’s body,and in Heroine, archetypes of femininity were symbolized through dimensionality and fluidity. Developing these further, AVA features works with heightened fluidity and compositional mobility. Hannah incorporates metallic bronze and prismatic iridescent glazes, some of which can only be seen and activated by the viewer as they move around a work, with the effect that it is impossible to see the whole of a painting from a static position, adding to this, the viewer engages with reflected paintings which appear to be in an ongoing state of movement.
Referencing contemporary mediated visuality as epitomized by the screen, AVA also explores ideas about the relationship between the senses and digital culture, alongside established notions of the conflict between female desire and patriarchal structures.
OPENING RECEPTION: 23 MAY, 6-9 PM
