Wendy Elia

Artist statement

Wendy Elia works in series that explore the futile quest for truth and interrogate the legacy of postmodernism: Derrida claimed if we had understood we had misunderstood; Baudrillard provoked us with the assertion the gulf war never happened; we were consumed by the society of spectacle where images proliferated virally and news and entertainment disintegrated into infotainment. Nothing was real except the hyperreal; identities were fluid and shifty. Elia's lack of a singular painting language aims to mimic this dislocation. Through constantly re-inventing herself as an artist, she prevents us from taking a singular viewing position.

In 'Half-Naked' and 'The Visit' life-size clothed, naked or semi-naked portraits of Elia’s friends and family confront our voyeurism and ask questions about painting’s relationship to authenticity and illusion; her self-portrait 'I Could Have Been A Contender' lays her ageing body open to our scrutiny. Their content is a testament to the artist’s exploration of enforced domesticity; of the repetitive grind of work, child-rearing, care for the elderly, that creates a sense of entrapment within the home studio. The architecture and fittings of the latter – the boarded up fireplace and the laminate floor – are recurring motifs. Within those portraits lie smaller paintings: a network of allusions to familial relations, previous art works, and art history. These and Elia’s focus on the desire for escapism through mediated experiences (tv, the internet) prompted 'It Will Happen When You Least Expect It'.

Here are paintings that try to act like photographs, that would defy the uniqueness of the art object, but they fail, caught out by their own nuances. Because these works are painterly, seducing us with their high key color palette and intimate scale, drawing us into their little worlds. If they infiltrated our consciousness as photographs, as part of the endless circulation of images sold, copied, downloaded, uploaded, overloaded… they take hold of us all over again as paintings. Even the most repellent subjects are rendered ambiguous: a terrorist morphing into Jesus, 'In Fidelity'; the delicate stillness of hung men in 'Elsewhere'.

Through these continual shifts in painting language and juxtapositions of imagery Wendy Eiia's work asks ….In the enjoyment of the ironic and in the search for the iconic have we forgotten how to feel.

©Marie-Anne Mancio, 2011