Elyss McCleary

Artist Statement

An angle of light creates a mood of unease. It’s to do with the setting, the time of day, a light wind. There’s familiarity in it, the feeling that you’ve known it before, but also the sense that something’s out of place. You can’t put your finger on it, but it unsettles what was otherwise an uneventful afternoon.

In ‘Shutter Speed Luminosity’, Elyss McCleary captures these moments in uncertain scenes, underpinned by a cinematic construction. Figures are blurred, details merge with their surroundings, images are smudged. The locations – supermarkets, conference centres, parklands – are at once identifiable and anonymous. Light and colour are amplified and distorted, at times verging on the lurid – green-tinged yellows, salmon pinks, vivid oranges – while elsewhere, the desaturation is haunting.

These works are not without nostalgia, a feeling that’s reinforced by their cinematic framing. Each painting is banded by a black strip across the top and bottom, transforming the still lifes into film stills. Each set then becomes an undefined plot sequence, grouped together by location, evoking an unexplained narrative. Even the range of colour and hue seems to occur by adjusting aperture and contrast more than changing palette.

There’s a degree of parody here, too. Awareness and choice. The use of yellow, for example, is based on a survey of anxiety-inducing colours. It’s deliberately used to provoke, while the moments are deliberately constructed to unsettle, and deliberately staged to appear as if through a lens. And so we discover wit in the choice of location as well. While most of the settings are banal and suburban, the series around a country house sits somewhere between the romantic and the gaudy, with pinks and greens threatening to capsize the would-be earnest images. The scenes play out as a calmly disturbing narrative of paranoia, underpinned by a sardonic sense of humour.

Paranoia and anxiety thus occur in ‘Shutter Speed Luminosity’ less as themes and more as emotional responses. In particular, as a reaction to the play of light in place. McCleary’s work is about acknowledging these responses as at once serious, unsettling, embarrassing and funny. Looking at the paintings, you can’t pick what’s been added or removed to create the sense of unease. But you can appreciate that at certain times, in certain places, where the light angles a certain way, there’s a system that brings on that particular disquiet and foreboding.

Aden Rolfe 2010

Art Forms