Keywords:
Visual association
Nested space
Trompe-l'œl
In an era where every artist is eager to seek a personal stale and an IP to enhance recognition, her solo exhibition shows another possibility. Can an artist's nuanced narrative, with its varied perspectives, really be told in an unchanging visual language? The way Allison explores apparently separate subjects in her paintings to eliminate traces of artist's authority has given painting subjectivity to narrative organically.
Artery, Camden Art Centre
In Katz's work, the viewer is compelled to seek out connecting lines running through those disparate subject matter. She builds her world by taking advantage of the audience's visual experience of space. Associations and conversations must be imagined and elaborated in order to complete the
circuit. Just as the title of the exhibition Artery, which refers to the arteries of the body, circulate through the heart. It also alludes to roads, rivers, systems of transportation and more tangential networks of communication.The architecture and choreography of the exhibition design itself is an integral part of her work
"The world the artist seek to give form to is one where chance gives access to poetic order inside life's apparent chaos; where one's own subjectivity and experience collides with the universality of the world, to be read as a route into that which cannot be seen."[1]
She plays games with images and language, which unfolds biographical anecdotes, allusions, double entendre and slips. Titles as tips and easter eggs left for the audience to explore are important in her game. In the work M.A.S.K , She transforms her name into a slogan, which can be seen as her playfully 'signature' touch on the top of her self-portraits.
In this exhibition, just like all the other contemporary painting shows, the gallery uses flat light instead of spotlight when they exhibit. The bright lighting diminishes the mysterious quality of the painting, and the details on the picture are all in front of the viewers. Thus, the painting develops a perspective space different from the traditional painting space. Such a space does not produce visual depth, nor is it a perceptual illusion space created by a pictoriality-the number of sparse brush strokes, but new layered space. I called it nested space.
Celia, Hockney's Muse, 2019, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 125 x 175 cm
On the plane of the painting canvas, the artist sees the painting as a container filled with images in layers, with various elements nested in each other. Allison's painting of the elevator at the Camden Art Centre is a Trompe-l'œil
Such an image is reminiscent of the props on a theatre stage.
In her work, in addition to the frames, the addition of new frames inside the canvas, the equal distribution of images on the same plane but using different painting methods, and the indiscriminate overlay of the same pattern. Finally, there are some nested, repetitive structures.
The new sound artists represented by her, such as Jana Euler, and Anne Speier. They tend to use the thin painting method to rethink the relationship between painting and space, painting and architecture. Artists no longer tend to fully reveal their personal style, but skillfully use titles and language to hide behind their own works.
Related Artist
Jana Euler
Anne Speier
Valeska Soares
Books and other resources
[1] Introduction of Artery, 2022 Allison Katz, Cameden Art centre.
Allison Katz, Allison Katz. [Online]
Available at: https://allison-katz.com/
