Poster design by Mateo Muratore. Install shots by Karl Halliday.
BEAMERS
TAMARA MARRINGTON
Curated by Karl Halliday CASPA Gallery 1 - 29th October 2022
"Beamers marks the latest chapter in Tamara Marrington’s exploration in painting, presenting a new body of work that follows the Naarm-based artist as she wades further through the muddied waters that flow between the figurative and the formless.
The exhibition signals a turning point in Tamara’s practice. No longer referring to pre- existing images as source material, Beamers sees Tamara purge her paintings of scripted outcomes, choosing instead to brave the journey without a destination in mind.
For Tamara, painting is a method of investigation, of “searching” and “following leads”, intuitively pursued in the hopes of discovering unexpected serendipities and synchronicities that supply shape and meaning to the work. With this gesture of creative liberation and self- conviction, the canvas becomes transformed into a tabula rasa of unknown potential to be excavated. The paintings, much like the show’s title, encourage this probing, patient means of observation, carrying with it the prospect of revelation as reward.
With Beamers, we are reminded that the word painting is as much a verb as it is a noun, each picture the product of a process, each brushstroke the record of a decision gleaned from doubt. Often in the paintings, abandoned artefacts of previous layers and discontinued threads are left visible, converting the static, fixed object into a living, breathing archive of its own becoming.
It is within this restless space of movement, mutation, and mirage that Tamara channels her pictorial language, an ambiguous syntax of symbols and signs that appear to us as celestial bodies of fugitive forms, singing and flickering in some sublime cosmic dance.
Drifting through this cosmic forest of infinite possibility, Beamers faithfully hands you the torch, the promise of illumination.
All that we see is light.
Tell me, what does it reveal?"
Exhibiton text by Karl Halliday, September 2022
Tamara Marrington is an artist based in Naarm / Melbourne. In 2018 she completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Drawing and Printmaking) at the Victorian College of the Arts. In 2017 she was awarded the Stuart Black Memorial Scholarship and the year after was shortlisted for the Majlis Travelling Scholarship. Since graduating, she has shown in solo and group exhibitions in Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. In 2021 she was artist-in-residence at Fremantle Arts Centre, concluding with an off-site solo exhibition. Most recently she has been included in exhibitions at Seventh Gallery and PICA’s annual Salon Vernissage (WA).