Exhibition Opening Event:
Saturday 23rd November from 2-5pm

For the final exhibition of 2024, Artereal Gallery is delighted to present mise en scéne, a group show with Anna Carey and Isabella Seraphima Rose.

Created with deft artifice, the mise en scènes of Anna Carey and Isabella Seraphima Rose share allied model-making and photo-media techniques but transport us into quite separate realms. 

Derived from Australian colonial literature and painting, Isabella’s video sequence is an animated, dramatized, nostalgic narrative of bush living, whereas Anna’s images are quiet, still and unpeopled atmospheric architectural reveries. With blenched light and the languor and somnolence of daydreams, her created milieux hover on the cusp of reality and dreamlike escapism and memory.

Anna was isolated in her California home and studio during the Covid pandemic, a prolonged period, worldwide, of extreme physical, emotional and social distress and economic upheaval. People craved assurances, pining for love and loved ones in a traumatic time of personal and global uncertainties. Deemed a barometer of social anxiety, patronage of psychics proliferated during the pandemic, along with their associated spirit-world avenues of Tarot readings, dream interpretation, crystal healing, fortune telling and feng shui practices.

This longing is reflected in Anna’s small-scale architectural models made from cardboard and paint of fictive but credible and familiar buildings and streetscapes. With a conscious ambiguity she plays with perceptions to evoke emotional states and capture locations that transport beyond fixed place and time.

The artist moves her meticulous maquettes of astrologers’ and psychics’ shops and love hotels with their distinctive neon-lit signage and colourful facades outside of the studio to be photographed ‘en plein air’, against the glow of big, atmospheric, soft-hued desert skies. Isolated from their expected urban habitat and shot from below for a cryptic depth of field, her images embody a sense of stasis and an enigmatic element of remove that transcends scale and temporal location.

A range of memorabilia and merchandise that includes monogrammed ceramic ashtrays with customized matchbooks from the “Stardust” and “Amour” hotels and packs of spirit-cleansing feng shui incense from the “Exotic Grocer”, all sites that are depicted in Anna Carey’s Madame Mystery series, augments and muddles the co-existence of what is real and unreal.

In comparison, Isabella Seraphima Rose’s four channel video sequence, The Drover’s Wife, The Bush Hut and The Dream is melodramatic, peopled, once-upon-a-time, stylized fantasy and storytelling.

It is a pastiche of performance and cut-and-paste digitisation, an animated screening, a narrative enactment drawn from the colonial mythology of the Australian bush and Henry Lawson’s tale, The Drover’s Wife.

The drama unfolds within a miniature model of a settler’s rough slab hut crafted by the artist and set against the backdrop of Hans Heysen’s distinctive Australian pastoral landscape painting. Dramatis personae include a snake, the inevitable fly, a crackling lightning storm and bushfire. Isabella inserts herself into the scene in the role of mother, with the baby a treasured childhood doll.

The video’s early settler bark hut looks much like the artist’s rustic childhood cubby house that was set among towering eucalypts on the large rural property where she grew up. A half-forgotten small, yellowed family slide she unearthed mid-project, shows her with her grandma on the verandah. Unlike typical depictions of colonial life as a masculine frontier, she portrays the hidden domestic world. This memory of her childhood home and enduring maternal relationships manifests years later in this consciously theatrical mise en scène that invites us into the mystique and cultural mythology of early Australian bush life and the heroine’s isolation and calamitous vulnerability, yet power to prevail, against the forces of nature and rigours of the bush.

In 2023 Isabella Seraphima Rose received the Artereal Mentorship Award on her graduation from Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. During her mentorship program in 2024, the early-career artist has been a finalist in several art prizes and exhibited in regional galleries throughout NSW while undertaking painting studies at the Julian Ashton Art School.

Anna Carey lives and works between the Australian Gold Coast and Los Angeles USA. Both places are coastal cities perched on the edge of elsewhere and associated with aspiration, fantasy and escape; an ethos which she captures so eloquently in her images. Her works are held in prestigious Australian and international collections, among them the National Gallery of Australia and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California. Anna Carey: Magic + Memory: make me a home is currently showing at HOTA, Home of the Arts, Gold Coast until April 2025.

Barbara Dowse
Curator

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