Ambera Wellmann “Nosegay Tornado”

Company (88 Eldridge St)

[Image: Ambera Wellmann "Roses for Oso" (2020) Oil on linen, 36.50h x 36.50w x 0.89d in.]

This event has ended.

Nosegay Tornado is Ambera Wellmann’s first exhibition at Company Gallery and presents a body of paintings produced during the last six months. Inspired by William Blake’s apocalyptic works, Wellmann distorts perspective through a constellation of objects that reference interior spaces, yet squarely place the pictures within the universal realm of the elements. In these familiar, yet unrecognizable scenes, the inside-outside landscape becomes an extension for the body and its psyche.

Multiple bodies, animals and flowers extend suddenly into landscapes that offer up a thawing mise-en-scene within which a queered pictorial logic appears. In this new body of work, a dramatic want for the catastrophic coexists with an expectation of possibility; in Wellmann’s work an alternative landscape within which to form relations is almost within reach. Refusing placement in terms of perspective, site or time, the paintings sit on the precipice of a dream-state and alternative future, collapsing time through the avoidance of clear signifiers in the backgrounds of the work. The hollowness of the present, as cited by Jose Muñoz, is what defines queerness as a potential yet to be reached. The emptied-out landscapes of Wellmann - in complete refusal of straight time - are demonstrative of this hollowed-out state of yearning to become outstretched toward the potentials that exist on Muñoz’s horizon.

The figures in these works are allowed to operate in the vacuums created by Wellmann, their engagement with each other emphasized in the amalgamation of bodies. Here, their small-scaled confinement is an always-unfolding universe; Wellmann’s figures reach for a dynamic of non-hierarchal horizontality, their heaving oscillation into one another tests out power arrangements in a new landscape of potentiality.

- Rozsa Farkas

Ambera Wellmann was born in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin; MoCO Montpellier; Lulu, Mexico City and Projet Pangée, Montreal as well as participation in the 16th Istanbul Biennale and group shows at MoMA Warsaw; Australian Center for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; KAI 10 / Museum Marta Herford, Düsseldorf / Herford and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Upcoming projects include exhibitions at MAC Belfast, United Kingdom and the Pond Society, Shanghai. She currently lives and works in NY.