Islands

The New York-based Canadian painter Ambera Wellmann produces paintings that, according to Tat Bellamy-Walker (‘6 queer artists to watch at Art Basel in Miami Beach. From painters to sculptors, these artists are bringing attention to LGBTQ identities at the world-renowned art show’, NBC News, 2 December 2021), investigates “the politics of queer space and futurity,” and “encourages a continued understanding of fantasy to reimagine the future […], remaking the everyday world as an act of resistance.”

The bodies in Ambera Wellmann’s paintings often navigate the potentiality of their present circumstances whilst endeavoring to generate a domain informed by the ethos of queer futurity. Her compositions have, sometimes, been compared to some of Francis Bacon’s (1909 – 1992) haunting canvases, where spectral bodies seem trapped in the confined spaces of a cage, bed or bathroom (bathroom appliances, like sinks, appear in works by both artists, in Wellmann’s case possibly most famously in the monumental canvas Strobe, 2021).

Like Bacon’s, Wellmann’s works are also populated with elusive figures and indeterminate motifs, manifesting in uncanny physical states. Coco Romack (writer, editor, and author based in New York) writes (about Strobe, in ‘Liquid skin, blurred lines: How Ambera Wellmann creates startlingly intimate scenes. The painter’s obscure, orgiastic works evoke emotional vulnerability, but come from clarity and careful planning’, article written for Art Basel):

There is no logical narrative, no clear focal point, no attempt to draw clean conclusions. Uncertainty is a mist over Wellmann’s obscure depictions of spectrous humans, apocalyptic landscapes, and bathroom fixtures. She sometimes bookends her picture planes with floating figures that mirror each other, an attempt to generate an endless visual loop by redirecting the gaze toward the orgiastic vignettes within. Her bodies are distortions in time, ambiguous and fragmented, with liquid skin and lopped-off limbs, so that they appear in perpetual action.

Some of this is apparent in Islands, where Wellmann explores figuration within the horizontal domain of the bed. In such inherently internal spaces, her amorphous bodies resist the binaries of active and passive, male and female. Wellmann, herself, has also stated: “I’m thinking about the bed as a frame and as a framework for the paintings.” When Wellmann centers on the bedroom, she turns it into a site of naked vulnerability – of lovemaking, as is frequently the case between Wellmann’s queer subjects, but also of sickness and death. It is an equalizing space: Bodies, when lying down, are without hierarchy.

Her spectral and ruminative work ought, as pointed out by Canadian writer and video artist RM Vaughan (‘Ambera Wellmann wants her paintings to have “a subconscious of their own” [and just won $25K]’, CBC Arts, 18 October 2017), to come with an advisory: if you think you see other paintings lurking like ghosts underneath the highly finished surfaces, it’s because you do. There are always under-paintings bleeding through — “images that have caught me and been the starting point,” Wellmann explains:

I have an unconscious desire to poke through, visually, see what is underneath an image, and I want the finished paintings to have a strange history — a subconscious — of their own. I’m interested in the material legacy of an image. I love how things can have an apparent, immediate reality and then a more camouflaged, veiled history.

Provenance

Company Gallery, New York.

Firestorm Foundation (acquired from the above).

Copyright Firestorm Foundation