Hyphen

West Space, Melbourne 1999



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Felicity Spear Hyphen (detail)
(Oil on linen)

These paintings, whose surfaces consist of minimal, abstract and distorted anamorphic images, reference the optics of the camera obscura through the use of pin-hole photographs, as well as fragments of mechanically reproduced art-historical images. The surfaces of these works vary from opaque, to reflective and transparent, creating a tension between flatness and illusion. The three dimensional floor model, based on a tessellated floor, a characteristic of Baroque architecture and referencing a fragment from the 17thC. Dutch painter Vermeer’s work The Music Lesson (1662-1665), is also like a raised sarcophagus. It is said that photography re-visits memory.This dark and melancholic form, is an object both in and of space, between past and the present, between loss and renewal.



Writings