Artist Speak: Tamara Winikoff (NAVA)

This week's presentation provided valuable insight concerning NAVA's myriad initiatives, including industry advice, workshops, and advocacy. Tamara Winikoff's advice regarding career sustainability, whilst relevant, was undermined by time constraints. However, once the new NAVA website launches next month access to this and more is as easy as membership.

Justin Mortimer

Colony, 2010
Oil on panel, 100 x 70cm 

Haftling, 2010
Oil on Canvas, 230 x 184cm

 British painter Justin Mortimer (b. 1970) renders his own interpretation of the human condition in oils, characterized by a blend of photorealism and painterly strokes. Anachronistic in tone, Mortimer’s work combines imagery sourced from a range of disparate sources to arrive at a unique aesthetic, which often explores the dividing line between ‘us’ and ‘them’, juxtaposing the idyllic and the atrocious to create a dynamic uneasiness. Mortimer’s palette includes but is not necessarily limited to hues cooled by their complimentary, and exemplifies an eye adept at witnessing light’s relationship to form, including its absence resulting in chiaroscuro reminiscent of painters such as Dutch Master, Rembrandt. Mortimer’s paintings, however, attempt to deny the persistence of a singular historical narrative, to transcend the linear insistence of time in order to demolish the arbitrary geographical, and temporal demarcations ubiquitous with History’s limited gaze. Never before in human history have we been able to gaze so far across space and time to discover a subjectivity, once quashed by geographical, and ideological myopia, now liberated, if not at times confused, by a rhizomatic view of reality. Thus, there is little if any shock in learning Mortimer’s imagery is often sourced by that most omnipresent of infrastructures, the internet. A virtual landscape with no perceivable horizon, receding by the nanosecond, provides no shortage of narrative fodder, and as our worldview bloats it becomes apparent there is no ‘them’, if ever there was, there is only ‘us’ and we are each other’s responsibility. 

Family Dollar, 2009
Oil on Panel, 80 x 60cm

David Trigg's critical appraisal of Mortimer's work is well worth repeated examination, as is the wealth of information contained here.

Note: Mortimer's anachronistic compositions resonate with my own practice aims; collapsing notions of space and time in an attempt to deprive the audience of a comfortable space, inciting critical engagement with the imagery confronting them.