Melbourne Art Rooms [MARS]
October, 2012
Catalogue Essay
Futuristic plant specimens, floating in empty office spaces? Are these scenes the set of a speculative horror movie? For painter Saffron Newey, splintered schisms between reality and imagination inspire her to formulate a sense of unease and fatalistic awareness, of missed chances, strange slippages and converging temporal moments. If the morphed skeins of woven husks, which appear in this series of paintings, are the only live matter, postextinction, then we know the past is all that remains.
There is an insinuation that these plastic-surfaced plants are alive in an other-worldly way. Alive, but only in our imagination. Alive, but only as a reminder of a past when nature was abundant and grew by the light of the sun, rather than fluorescent office bulbs. To be honest, if these plant specimens are alive, we’re all in trouble. Autonomous and active, such species can only mean we have crossed a light-year threshold into the future.
Newey uses photography and computer software to manipulate her images, before painting them in oil on canvas. These saturated, virtual scenes of a simulated reality satisfy a natural curiosity about what is in store for us. Newey speaks of ‘double visions,’ the result of using photographic double exposures as a tool of her craft. The idea of the double steers the viewer towards a contemplation of our own image, the reflective power of the independent soul. The mismatch between life and antilife, which she so expertly explores, reminds us of our own culpabilities in the flickering drama of the image-sequences of our lives.
Prue Gibson
Art writer
Lecturer, COFA, UNSW
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