Interior Motives

Interior Motives reflects the common influence of domestic patterns in Guthleben and Clark’s work. Patterns bring with them notions of behaviour and middle-class conformity, which each artist wishes to challenge in their practices. By including the decorative and the floral in their work, both engage with the normative and metaphorical aspects of patterns, in different ways.

Clark’s large-scale drawings of exotic hybrid figures include areas of embellished detail cavorting alongside unpolished naked bodies on raw material.  These highly stylised  stagings ask which is the spectacle;  the hybrid ‘other’ or the homogenous ‘norm’?

Guthleben’s smaller paintings use wallpaper in a collage-style format to question tendencies of narcissism and obsession with decoration. Her portraits, which begin with digital drawings and images on photoshop, question what it is to make a painting in the age of the profile picture and selfie, when airbrush, apps and filters such as ‘beauty face’ can always represent and distort and image.

Gallery open Tuesday–Saturday 11am–6pm | Sunday 11am–4pm

Jane Guthleben Artist bio

Jane recently completed her Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) studies at UNSW Art and Design, where she received the Derivan Painting Award for 2015 and a Dean’s Academic Award. Her final Honours graduation paintings were selected for the BresicWhitney Emerging Artist Award and were exhibited at .M Contemporary Gallery in February 2016. During her time at UNSW she was twice a finalist in the Jenny Birt award for painting, and was highly commended in 2014. Jane grew up on a sheep farm in Victoria and had a career in journalism and four solo painting exhibitions before starting at UNSW. During her studies she experimented across a range of styles and media, always asking - What is it to make a painting in the internet age? Her practice is a lament on the restless gaze, superficiality and narcissism that our media-saturated culture thrives upon.

Jodi Clark Artist bio

Originally from Western Australia, Jodi Clark began studies for her Bachelor of Fine Art  in California, and has recently completed the degree (Honours) at UNSW Art and Design, Sydney.

Concerned with outmoded societal constructs and the either/or binaries of gender and sexuality, Clark’s work provides a divergence from the ‘norm’ and presents us with the unapologetic ‘other’.  Her inaugural solo show, “Drawing the Line: New Works by Jodi Clark” was held in 2010 in Los Angeles, and she has been selected for many group exhibitions. Recent awards include the Faber-Castell Artscene Drawing Award in the 2014 Art & Design Annual and the BresicWhitney Emerging Artist Award as part of the Young Artist Initiative 2015 (YAI) of .M Contemporary Gallery. In 2015 she was a finalist for the Jenny Birt Award, the Tim Olsen Drawing Prize, The Naked and Nude Art Prize at Manning Regional Gallery, and The Kudos Emerging Artist Award.