{Suite} artists Richard Lewer and Tia Ansell as well as Melbourne-based artist Georgia Spain featured in John Daly-Peoples article 'Highlights of the Aotearoa Art Fair'.
"In Naarm/ Melbourne based Georgia Spain’s paintings people are repeatedly together in. In their collectivity, they’re always in the middle of something — often the most cataclysmic and euphoric moments of existence. With limbs akimbo, flesh melting into flesh, Spain has a sea of figures awash in a tsunami, or wielded together as flood waters sweep in. Other canvases contain a sheer jumble of bodies, signalling the messiness that however much power we might ascribe to solipsism or individuality, we are inescapably tied up with another.
Richard Lewer is showing a series of four works based on Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick is an epic story revolving around Captain Ahab and his obsession with a huge and elusive white whale. The whale caused the loss of Ahab’s leg and the disciplinarian is so preoccupied by his desire to kill the whale, that he is prepared to sacrifice everything, including his ship, the lives of his crew, and his own life, in order to exercise revenge.
The ocean features often in Richard Lewer’s work, for him the sea is an overwhelmingly powerful force, but also a place to find one’s self. In this instance the ocean is a place to investigate human delusion, power and control. The white whale brings to the surface emotion from the depths, and reminds us of the peril and futility of human’s desire to contain and control nature.
Deconstructing fundamental elements of a painting, Tia Ansell practice calls attention to the origin of the woven substrate and its context within contemporary art. Tia Ansell utilises the loom to explore intricate weaving patterns generated using her idiosyncratic coding system based on urban landscapes. Her weaving-paintings form a structure of intertwining colours with bold compositions of geometries and hardlines, a language of architecture which frames the weaving medium. Tia threads these ideas within the context of Melbourne architecture extrapolating facade compositions into the construction of the woven plane, with painted architectural patterns and design symbols interrupting the image."
