Stranger Than Paradise
In David Lynch’s 1986 film, ‘Blue Velvet’, a pretty picket fence home with manicured lawns and sunny flowerbeds, hides dark and violent occurrences that take place within. For painter Amelia Disspain, her seemingly innocuous depictions of peaceful suburban houses operate in much the same way.
The Sydney artist’s ink and oil paintings are layered in delicate pastel washes – peppermint greens and hazy pinks. But don’t be deceived appearances. The longer one lingers on these gentle compositions; a sense of unease creeps in. There is something off kilter about the buildings – the dimensions are slightly askew, the colours are dreamy and otherworldly, yet slightly nauseating. The wintry trees framing the houses appear ghostly and sinister.
Disspain intends her compositions to appear like film noir stills. A fan of Hitchcock, Lynch and Lars Von Trier, she is drawn to the ‘shadows’ that linger behind seemingly banal subject matter.
Raised outside Auckland, in rural New Zealand, the 32 year old moved to Sydney in 1998 to study printmaking at the College of Fine Arts. After college, she abandoned printmaking and began painting dark tonal landscapes reminiscent of Colin McCahon. She remarks that:
“Coming from New Zealand, I tended to paint huge mountainous ranges. I was always interested in the magical, spiritual aspect of it; the sublime…”
Her childhood memories of New Zealand were also dominated by her family’s involvement in a fundamentalist Christian parish.
“I saw all these beautiful churches, but for me there was an ominous feeling about them; all this underlying hypocrisy.”
These buildings have slowly worked their way into her paintings and more and more sinister undertones have begun to emerge. Many of the houses she paints now have been the scenes of violent crime. Not knowing what took place behind the façade of these seemingly benign buildings make them appear even more portentous and menacing.
Her intimate worlds also speak of loneliness and isolation. No human life is present in these ghostly, melancholic images. The soft tones and stillness of the compositions also bring to mind the paintings of Clarice Beckett and Edward Hopper.
Having participated in group shows over the past decade at Australian Galleries and Gosford Regional Gallery in New South Wales., Disspain is holding a second solo show with Sydney’s MICK Gallery in September of this year. Gallery Director Megan Dick comments that
“Amelia’s paintings are often small in size and unlike a large canvas, you need to choose to look at and into them. Once engaged, it is evident that large universes are contained within.”
Plans are afoot for the artist to start making 3D models of her otherworldly landscapes, contained within giant snow domes and based on the sites of supernatural phenomena. Nostalgic yet spooky, tranquil yet malevolent, pale in palette yet dark in mood, Amelia Disspain’s strange little worlds are quietly seductive but not for the faint-hearted.
