WHEN : 30th July – 17th Aug
WHERE : Jan Murphy Gallery
Leslie Rice has spent more than15 years as an established tattoo artist (from a lineage of tattooists including his father and sister) and finds the transition to velvet to be strangely familiar. Like painting the body with a needle, painting velvet with a brush is exacting and unforgiving.
Rice’s subjects side-step the usual preoccupation with sunsets and pin up girls made popular mid last century in velvet painting’s halcyon days. Instead dramatic, Mannerist tableaux including biblical and mythological references proliferate. These subjects find their source in Rice’s immediate world where friends and families close at hand are transposed into dramatis personae.
Making paintings with their longevity in mind, Rice now secures each work under glass, often choosing to pigment the glass lending the works a holographic quality where the beholder is invited into the picture.
Drawing on Renaissance, Baroque and Victorian art and ideas, Julia deVille creates contemporary ‘memento mori’ that raise our curiosity through the use of paradoxical processes and materials. While all deVille’s creatures have died a natural death, they live on as beautiful and compelling allegories, begging a reflection on our symbiotic but decidedly unequal relationship with the animal world and our cavalier disregard for mortality in general.
