ANYA SINCLAIR – Mise en Garde – 10 Oct-3 Nov, 2017
‘Looking at a series of Anya Sinclair’s works, it is hard to know exactly when we, as viewers lose our hold on reality. The break is never instant, but the longer we spend looking, the further we fall from what we know.
Critically, these landscapes are empty, emphatically devoid of any human or animal subject. The question of what we are doing there, of who we are – or what we are looking at – will not be answered.
Even the undeniable anxiety of these landscapes seems to alter as you look at them. At one moment, the unease on display feels like our response to the darkness of nature, of ourselves, our inability to ever fully encompass it. The next, it is an anxiety for nature itself, its degradation at our hands, these landscapes that are actually falling to pieces.
Like ourselves, these abstracted works bear a vestigial relation to nature – they are ‘from’ it – but have almost severed their ties to it – they are no longer ‘of it’. Here we are brought to a halt, allowed to look around and see just how far we have strayed from the path.’ – Henry Feltham, 2017
ANYA SINCLAIR
Born in 1978 Anya Sinclair is a painter based in Koputai – Port Chalmers. She grew up in the Waitakere Ranges, Auckland, where she spent much of her childhood exploring the surrounding bush.
This experience of the natural world has remained an integral element in the creation of Sinclair’s paintings. She draws on the living world from her early years, along with the rambling, overgrown section by the sea where she currently resides with her family.
Anya graduated from the Dunedin School of Art in 2007. Since then she has shown regularly including several South Island public galleries, with solo exhibitions at Tauranga Art Gallery (2014) and Ashburton Art Gallery (2017).