AMBER KOROLUK-STEPHENSONBEYOND THE GATE

AMBER KOROLUK-STEPHENSONBEYOND THE GATE

AMBER KOROLUK-STEPHENSON

BEYOND THE GATE

31 OCTOBER TO 21 NOVERBER 2014

Bett Gallery

The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is

ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. 1

- Christopher Hitchens.

Beyond the Gate dwells on the impossibility of utopia. At first glance, the scenes in Amber Koroluk-

Stephenson’s paintings are bright and playful. They depict a kind of urban paradise with soft grassy hills,

colourful and exotic flora and fauna, generous dwellings, and leisure activities aplenty. Mannequin-like

figures dot the paintings, either hard at work, or enjoying the sunny weather next to pools or on the golf

course.

However, things aren’t quite right in paradise. Within the flattened picture plane, angles begin to slip.

We see impossible walls, paths that lead to nowhere, and awkwardly placed ladders. Two boys peer over

a white picket fence where confident black swans have occupied a domestic pool. The treehouse above

their heads, although colourful, is clumsy and impractical, and the title – Flying into Shallow Waters –

suggests more is at risk than the boys’ toy aeroplane.

In Edward Scissorhands, Tim Burton’s suburban landscape is the backdrop to an extraordinary tale at

odds with the absurd uniformity of the pastel houses, lawns and topiaried hedges. Like Koroluk-

Stephenson’s paintings, his sets exaggerate suburban life, emphasising uniformity over creativity. This

conformity is emphasised in Koroluk-Stephenson’s work through the repetition of plants, the Sims-like

characters, and unremarkable dwellings. Like film sets, the paintings are dotted with props: slides,

ladders, umbrellas, deck chairs, towels and inflatable swimming rings. They’re items of leisure and play,

and in many instances, their presence and location are deliberately nonsensical, and their numbers

excessive. In the presence of children, they represent an obsession with short term attention and

instant gratification at the expense of lifelong learning and the development of creative play.

The artist refers to her scenes as “unreal spaces” that reveal the “absurdity of utopia,” but equally, the

absurdity of suburbia. She sets up contradictions: on one hand, she believes the lush foliage alludes to

the Garden of Eden, and yet the gardens, with their patterned plants and carefully constructed

landscaping, are a little too tidy. Large stumps of trees are repurposed to support balconies, platforms

and treehouses. With the trees removed from the environment, they’re replaced with ‘instant’ plants

evidently out of place.

1 Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays (New York: Nation Books, 2004) p. 68

The stairs, ladders and slides symbolise instability, cautioning against false aspirations and utopian

dreams. Before the Flood depicts a young family watching kayakers paddle upstream. Biblical reference

aside, the presence of the dam appears to threaten the safety of the elegant, yet precarious-looking

house. On closer examination, it looks like the only access to the relatively large house is via an

unsecured red ladder, suggesting that practicality was not the architect’s forte. But it looks nice. With

its strong lines and geometric forms, the house has a Japanese aesthetic, which is complemented by the

nearby cherry blossoms, cone-shaped trees and placid-looking pelicans. It’s a façade, and a potentially

dangerous one.

The scenes in Koroluk-Stephenson’s paintings are composites. They’re non-places populated by generic

buildings, swimming pools, and rolling grassy hills, most of which are modelled on images found online.

The large house in Evergreen is largely drawn from a contemporary prefabricated housing catalogue.

Dwarfed by its neighbour, the other house is an original 1960s design with a similarly sloped roof and

floor-length windows. Both are puzzlingly empty, even though (with the exception of the delicious-

looking lawn) the surrounding plants look artificially well established and immaculately pruned. The

exotic plants are unrealistically and uncomfortably perfect, as if dragged from a digital catalogue.

As constructions, Koroluk-Stephenson’s paintings lack a specific locality. However, there is a distinct

Australian aesthetic, and in some of the images we can see hints of Hobart: a notorious Sandy Bay unit

block, a low bridge, yachts leaning into the ocean breeze, and a tiny Mount Wellington. Of all the

paintings in the exhibition, End of the Line is the most suggestive of Hobart. It is a collage of local

imagery from realestate.com, resulting in unlikely angles, a redundant garage, and an awkward and

painful-looking slide that is not only impractical due to the presence of a hedge, but also surplus to the

needs of the bored-looking children.

The mythical ‘Great Australian Dream’ of home ownership has encouraged urban sprawl on our city

fringes, and while End of the Line, Flying into Shallow Waters and On the Rise, hint at inner city living,

other paintings such as Making Way and From the Ground Up suggest new, greenfield developments

dominated by large kit homes. Home ownership has a special place in Australian society. It’s an

obsession. Type ‘Australian real estate’ into Google and it identifies 124 million results. The first page

lists sponsored investment sites, homeloan deals, and newspaper articles reporting record auction

prices and the consequential unaffordability of ‘the dream’. It’s political, it’s social, and it’s dirty. In the

1940s and 50s, Prime Minister Robert Menzies openly established home ownership initiatives to counter

communism. He reasoned that people who owned a house, a garden and a white picket fence, were

unlikely to turn revolutionary. Despite the fact that home ownership is now financially out of reach for

many young Australians, the ‘dream’ remains central to Australian culture and identity. Like Koroluk-

Stephenson’s paintings, it’s a constructed ideal. Her houses, landscaped pools, golf courses and

colourful plants would not be out of place in a housing development brochure or model.

Although many of the figures in Koroluk-Stephenson’s paintings seem emotionally neutral, the

relationship between the people in Upper Limits is intriguing. In front of a modest house balanced on

stilts, a young woman crouches over a partly-constructed swimming pool, while two men appear to be

holding a conversation on the grassy slope. One is dressed in a suit, and could be a real estate agent,

and perhaps the title refers to a ‘maxed out’ mortgage and the ‘limits’ of the dream. Of course, it could

equally relate to the precariousness of the raised house on the edge of a rocky retaining wall, or the

wooden staircase perched on worryingly high supports. A tree stump, absurdly incorporated into a

bizarre wooden platform, represents the destruction of the natural environment, and a desire to control

nature through the replanting of more desirable and flamboyant foliage. The golf courses located in

most of the paintings further symbolise this drive to impose order on the natural environment through

the artificial construction of smooth surfaces, varied lengths of grass, water hazards, and ‘natural’

grassy knolls.

Despite the exhibition title, few of Koroluk-Stephenson’s paintings depict physical gates or fences.

Notions of ownership, division, and even exclusion, are suggested via more subtle means. For instance,

Divided Living depicts a block of units on the left, and a large modern house with floor to ceiling windows

on the right. The two are not divided by a fence, as would usually be expected. The division is instead

implied by the size and the distinction between public and private space. Although the house is closer to

the front of the picture plane, it still seems disproportionately large compared to the sad-looking flats.

In the early twentieth century, Modernist architects associated glass and transparency with

technological and ideological virtue, destroying the distinction between public and private life. Walter

Benjamin remarked: “to live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence. It is also an

intoxication, a moral exhibitionism that we badly need. Discretion concerning one’s own existence, once

an aristocratic virtue, has become more and more an affair of petit-bourgeois parvenus.” 2 However, the

practicality of the material means that these kinds of houses tend to be quite costly, and not as

egalitarian as once imagined. Unlike the shrouded units, the occupants of the house aren’t concerned

with curtains, and we can see their vast living and bedroom area, along with their designer furniture and

artwork, suggesting that the links between class and privacy have greatly changed over the last century.

While Divided Living comments on class through ownership, many of the other paintings suggest social

division through labour and leisure. Themes of work and play are repeated throughout the paintings,

depicted by two distinct groups of people: the workers and the holidaymakers or ‘leisure makers’. The

workers, heads down, are absorbed by their labour, subject to the gaze of the leisure class. In Making

Way, the workers are watched by a group of children and teenagers wearing t-shirts and swimming

costumes. A teenager observes from a deckchair, while others stand on an oddly situated viewing

platform, phone in hand and uncomfortably out of place. Where there are no ‘leisure makers’ (or ‘leisure

seekers’) on scene, their presence is nonetheless suggested: in Higher Ground a towel lies casually on

the freshly laid turf, and in From the Ground Up, an inflatable ring sits atop a turquoise pool. Throughout

the paintings, surplus deckchairs and brightly coloured umbrellas sit empty, waiting, and the pools,

treehouses, golf courses, slides and tents - things usually associated with holidays – sit in a landscape

that’s still being created. Again, it’s a contradiction designed to deconstruct notions of luxury and

ownership.

2 Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’ in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, Peter Demetz ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 180.

Koroluk-Stephenson’s paintings address an overwhelming number of themes, from the destruction of

the natural environment to the absurdity of suburbia and notions of greed and desire. The works

highlight our harmful attempt to control nature through the irrational recreation of exotic landscapes in

our gardens and parks, and that instant gratification can be a substitute for happiness. As Richard

Flanagan writes in The Narrow Road to the Deep North:

And his life was now, he felt, one monumental unreality, in which everything that did not

matter – professional ambitions, the private pursuit of status, the colour of wallpaper, the size

of an office or the matter of a dedicated car parking space – was vested with the greatest of

significance, and everything that did matter - pleasure, joy, friendship, love, - was deemed

somehow peripheral. 3

It may be sunny in paradise, but those exotic plants have a sting.

Dr Lucy Hawthorne is a Hobart-based writer and artist.

3 Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’ in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, Peter Demetz ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 180. 3 Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (North Sydney: Vintage Australia, 2013), p. 400.

From the ground up 2014oil on canvas122 x 152cm

$5,100

Before the flood 2014oil on canvas112 x 153cm

$4,900

End of the line 2014oil on canvas112 x 153cm

$4,900

Evergreen 2014oil on canvas112 x 153cm

$4,900

Divided Living 2014oil on canvas112 x 153cm

$4,900

Beyond the pale 2014oil on camvas

112 x 137

$4,700

On the rise 2014oil on canvas112 x 137cm

$4,700

Making way 2014oil on canvas112 x 137cm

$4,700

Upper Limits 2014oil on canvas122 x 137cm

$4,700

Higher ground 2014oil on canvas112 x 122cm

$4,500

Flying into shallow waters 2014oil on canvas

76 x 91cm

$3,500

Image: Before the flood 2014 (detail)

AMBER KOROLUK-STEPHENSON

1988 Born Tasmania, lives and works in Hobart

Education

2011 University of Tasmania, Graduate Certificate (Painting)

2010 University of Tasmania, Bachelor of Fine Art with Honors (Painting)

2007-2009 University of Tasmania, Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting / Photography Double Major)

Solo Exhibitions

2014 Beyond the Gate, Bett Gallery, Hobart

Half Full / Half Empty, Sawtooth ARI, Launceston

Half Full / Half Empty II, Archive Space, Sydney

2013 Quixotic Habitation, MOP Projects, Sydney

2012 Spaces Between, Bett Gallery, Hobart

2011 Closer to Home, Bett Gallery, Hobart

Not At Home, Top Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre (SAC), Hobart

2009 Bittersweet Nonsense, Entrepot Gallery, Tasmanian School of Art, Hobart

Just Like a Woman, Graduate Exhibition, Tasmanian School of Art

Ripe, Little Space Gallery, Hobart Polytechnic

Selected Group Exhibitions

2014 Arts Factory Open House, Arts Factory, Hobart

2013 Forged Environments, 146 Elizabeth Street, Hobart

Poets and Painters, Bett Gallery, Hobart

Constance Makes the Art Grow Stronger, Constance ARI, Hobart

Affordable Art Fair, Gaffer, Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre

Paddington Art Prize, Mary Place Gallery, Sydney

A Century of Aesthetics, Hobart College Centenary Exhibition, Hobart

Glover Prize, Falls Park Pavilion, Evandale

Members Group Show, Contemporary Art Tasmania, Hobart

MONAISTA, Stable Gallery, Hobart

A4, Sawtooth ARI, Launceston

2012 Members Group Show, Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania, Hobart

Sawtooth ARI Gala Fundraiser Auction, Sawtooth ARI, Launceston

MONAISTA, Stable Gallery, Hobart

2011 Preview Exhibition and Honours Award Exhibition, Bett Gallery, Hobart

Open Doors, Painting Society Exhibition, Entrepot Gallery, Hobart

Painting Society Exhibition, Top Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre SAC), Hobart

Painting Society Petite Prize, Tasmanian School of Art, Hobart

MONAISTA, Stable Gallery, Hobart

2010 Magna & Magister, Plimsol Gallery, Tasmanian School of Art, Hobart

Members Group Show, Contemporary Art Space Tasmania (CAST), Hobart

Painting Society Petite Prize, Tasmanian School of Art, Hobart

Mixed Tape, Painting and Sculpture Society Exhibition, Long Gallery, Salamanca Arts

Centre (SAC), Hobart

Birchalls Tertiary Art Prize, NEW Gallery, University of Tasmania, Launceston

2009 Future Legends, University of Tasmania Graduate Exhibition, Hobart

Painting Society Petite Prize, Tasmanian School of Art, Hobart

Primed, Fine Arts Gallery (FAG), University of Tasmania, Hobart

Painting Society Exhibition, Top Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre (SAC), Hobart

La Femme Thrice, Nourish Café, Hobart

Painting Society Petite Prize, Tasmanian School of Art, Hobart

2006-2007 ARTRAGE Touring Exhibition, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston

2006 Tasmanian Potters Society Annual Exhibition, Sidespace Gallery, Salamanca Arts

Centre (SAC), Hobart

2004 Tasmanian Potters Society Annual Exhibition, Sidespace Gallery, Salamanca Arts

Centre (SAC), Hobart

Awards and Grants

2012 ArtStart Grant, Australia Council for the Arts

2012 Artist in Residence, 146 Art Studio, Arts Tasmania, Department of Economic

Development, Tourism and the Arts

2012 Shotgun Professional Development Mentorship Program with MOP Projects Sydney,

Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania (CAST), Hobart

2012 Artist in Residence, University of Tasmania, Hobart

2011 Zonta Award: Young and Emerging Artist Prize, Tasmanian Regional Arts

2011 Artist in Residence, School House Studios, Melbourne

2007-2010 Commonwealth Education Costs Scholarship

2007 Seize the Day Award 2007, The Cancer Council, Tasmania

2006 Tasmanian Potters Society Annual Exhibition, Undergraduate Student Award,

People's Choice Award

Collections

Hobart Polytechnic

Private Collections: Australia, United States of America

Bibliography Dr. Lucy Hawthorne, Catalog Essay for Beyond the Gate, Bett Gallery 2014

Jess Bradford, #25 HALF FULL / HALF EMPTY, Amber Koroluk-Stephenson,

20.4-3.5.2014, Writers’ Program, Archive Space

Dr. Lucy Hawthorne, All that Glisters is not Gold, Catalogue Essay for Solo

Exhibition Quixotic Habitation, MOP Projects 2013

Speer, R, Concrete Playground (online journal),’ Amber Koroluk-Stephenson: Quixotic Habitation - Urban

Utopias with an Edge’, Writeup for Solo Exhibition, MOP Projects, 2013

‘Hong Kong Picks: Affordable Art Fair’, March 8 2013,Hong Kong Magazine, p. 6, 28

Hawthorne,L, Taswrap, October-December 2012, Australian Art Collector, Issue 61,p. 241

Selby, C,Saturday Magazine, ‘Eye on suburbia, December 29 2012 p. 22

Ashley Crawford, Australian Art Collector, Issue 59, January-March 2012, 50 Things Collectors Need to

Know 2012, Debutantes: Amber Koroluk-Stephenson, p.151

Meryl Naido, The Mercury, So Suburban, artist interview, May 18 2012 p. 45

Cate Harding, Untapped Tassie, Artist Interview, Edge Radio, August 11 2011

Clyde Selby, The Mercury, Dystopian Reminiscence, February 5 2011 p. 22

Smart Map Tasmania, Arts Tasmania, Department of Economic Development, Tourism & the Arts,

paintings used to promote Smart Map in: Australian Art Collector 2011-2012, Art Almanic 2011, Warp

Magazine 2011, Travelways 2011, LOOK Magazine 2011.

Magna & Magister, Tasmanian School of Art 2010 Honours Catalogue, pp. 18, 19

Anica Boulanger-Mashberg, Islet (online journal), Island Magazine, Spring 2010, Featured Visual Artist

Future Legends, Tasmanian School of Art 2009 Graduate Exhibition, pp. 58, 77

The Australian Journal of Australian Ceramics: Pottery in Australia 43#3 2004. pp. 54

Amber Koroluk-Stepenson, Studio detail 2014