Memento | Karen Gray

  • Karen Gray, Teetering
  • Karen Gray, Keepsake 5
  • Karen Gray, Keepsake 6
  • Karen Gray, Cradling
  • Karen Gray, Totems
  • Karen Gray, Remember
  • Karen Gray, Birds Nest Soup
  • Karen Gray, Tempest
  • Karen Gray, Nestled
  • Karen Gray, Relic II
  • Karen Gray, Memento Mori
  • Karen Gray, Matriarchs
  • Karen Gray, Chinoiserie II
  • Karen Gray, Coupling II
  • Karen Gray, High Tea II
  • Karen Gray, Nestled II
  • Karen Gray, High Tea
  • Karen Gray, Ordinary Relic
  • Karen Gray, Totems II
  • Karen Gray, Barchetta
  • Karen Gray, Keepsake 3
  • Karen Gray, Keepsake 9
  • Karen Gray, Keepsake 7
  • Karen Gray, Keepsake 4
  • Karen Gray, Keepsake 8
  • Karen Gray, Keepsake 2
  • Karen Gray, Keepsake 1

Memento
1 - 19 July 2010

Please note that the date of the official opening for this exhibition is Thursday 8 July 2010

KAREN GRAY - Memento

Through the arrangement of nests, bowls, cups and paper cranes which populate Karen Gray’s latest works, the artist investigates both the formal and symbolic relationships between various elements within the picture plane. In Gray’s serene series of oil paintings, she plays with shapes and composition within the timeless genre of still life. However throughout Memento, it is the re-contextualisation of objects into a shallow, tonally rendered space that allows for their connection to memory and restrained emotion to be quietly conveyed.

The dialectic between presence and absence that exists throughout Memento plays an important role in how we read these paintings, beyond their aesthetic qualities. The presence of humble nests and bowls are made more pronounced through the lack of their natural contents, as whether holding life sustaining food or avian inhabitants, both objects are primarily defined by what they are designed to contain. Removed from their usual function, rendered suddenly aimless and empty, each object comes into focus in its own right for both its aesthetic qualities and its symbolic associations. In this context the nest becomes a forlorn, lonely subject when the life it once nurtured has flown away - yet also one of beauty and fascination, expressing the genius found within the natural world.

Gray’s series of sensitive watercolours that depict various isolated domestic and natural objects reflect this innate human ability to transform the most average item into a coveted possession, when it acts as the bearer of meaning. As mementos these fragments bring forth memories of experiences and relationships that are now long past. A broken shard of fine bone china might immediately conjure cultural nostalgia for a genteel middle-class society of yesterday, while simultaneously referencing private memories held by its owner, but unknown to all else. Some works in Memento seem more a meditation on the endless array of unremarkable objects that fill our lives, and the disarming loveliness that the artist can draw from them. While in certain small watercolours, buttons, broken porcelain, lace and other ephemera are treated with reverence, imbued with a sense of the sacred that betrays the importance these every-day bits and pieces hold when overlaid with personal significance. And it is this quality of subdued reverence that allows these works to speak to us all - transmuting the realm of the personal toward sentiments that are universally understood.

Marguerite Brown

June, 2010

Marguerite Brown is an Arts Writer, currently completing a Masters of Art Curatorship at the University of Melbourne

©Marguerite Brown 2010