Emma Winkler’s exhibition, Shadow Puppets, has arrived at the Bowery Theatre in St Albans, delving into death, failure, and the absurd using collage, painting, and animation.
Her work examines the way we respond to our own mortality, confronting the futility of attempting to ward off death.
Emma, who has had her work featured in Moorabool previously, said the project explores a number of ideas and puts them into one gallery.
“Shadow Puppets combines a range of references from Victorian magic tricks to slapstick comedy to explore reactions to death and anxiety around the unknown to encourage viewers to get more comfortable with the idea of dying,” she said.
“Initially, I was exploring ‘the unknown,’ looking at topics such as pseudoscience, alternative belief systems and conspiracy theories to investigate how we approach topics at the limits or outside the bounds of our current understanding.
“Drawing on experiences of mental health conditions and encounters with death, my practice humorously reflects on the futility of fixating on our inevitable demise.
“The exhibition features works created in the past two years to fill the entire Bowery Gallery and includes large-scale paintings, multimedia works and an animation.
“This exhibition brings together many mediums and imagery, with pictures from outdated secondhand books that are collaged and used as painting references.”
With such a variety of works and visual material, there is lots to explore within each painting and the whole exhibition.
‘It’s All Soup in the End’ is a hand-painted stop-motion animation that is a unique addition to the exhibition created through an intensive process using oil to paint each frame.”
The exhibition is now open and viewable to the public just in time for school holidays. Open hours are 9am to 5pm from Monday to Friday, and 9am to 12.30pm on Saturdays.
There is also a closing event for the exhibition that coincides with a number of other events at the Bowery gallery as part of Brimbank’s ‘Be Bold’ Festival on November 9.
Gerald Lynch
