Beatrice Wharldall (VIC)

25 March– 15 April 2017

Beatrice Wharldall’s work is concerned with the internet’s impact on the way we see the world around us. Her latest body of work critically responds to image saturation in 21st century visual culture.

Referencing symbols from life and digital media, political coverage to personal iPhone snapshots, memes, memories, social media interface, eBay listings, and other peculiar images typically unearthed during a late night web-surf, the paintings in Live Simulacra pull together fragments of found imagery as they arise throughout the course of the painting process. Translated into paint, these ubiquitous images can be considered from an atypical distance, allowing us to look from a new perspective at the disparate and overwhelming spectrum of visual stimuli we sift through unseeingly every day.

Live Simulacra asks us to examine what we can really see in the symbols that pervade our everyday life. Brought together, and split from their context, can we make sense of these images in a way that allows us to make sense of it all a bit better? Life is abstracted by the precession of simulacra, Baudrillard opined in 1981. Now, as our everyday existence is increasingly assisted by technology, Live Simulacra considers the relationship between our experience of living, and our experience of life filtered through digital representation and simulacrum.

Beatrice Wharldall is a recent graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, where she studied painting up to 2016. Based in Melbourne but born in Adelaide, her art practice has been fostered and expanded by mentor, Adelaide ceramicist Liz Williams. Her work has been exhibited at RMIT Design Hub, George Paton Gallery, and Margaret Lawrence Gallery, and her graduate exhibition work was recently shown at Metro Gallery. This is her first solo show.

Images courtesy of the artist.