Shannon Smiley

Fox Galleries is proud to present Current State; a series of idyllic landscape paintings that explore the burdens of beauty. The sprawling brush strokes, slip in and out of a dreamstate, capturing the order of sensations in a utopic state.

Presenting a broader conversation with notorious painters, landscape history and romantic tradition, Smiley employs impressionistic and fleeting brushstrokes as a seductive portal to escapism. The tension is to survive the fantasy, mapped out in this captivating series of paths, gardens, and quiet distillations of urban nature flourish, providing a subtle glimpse into the unwelding space between subject and the artwork; memory and experience, reality and the real.

Shannon states:

I’m drawn to overlooked and undefined corners of the Australian suburban environment – an alleyway, a patch of weeds between a trainline and a warehouse, the twists and turns of the creek that refuse the encroaching development. Leftover land at the fringe of a development that no one can work out what to do with. In these edgelands, a wilderness grows with an urgent will to live, and I recognise in them something of the fantasy that runs through the Romantic tradition.

As I encounter these spaces in my daily routines, I think about the tension between the natural and built environments, about the language of European landscape painting, and about how much I love that language at the same time as questioning the inherent values within it.