VĚRA STUCHELOVÁ, AMANDA CHURCH

The Hyper-Real Photography of Věra Stuchelová and abstract paintings of Amanda Church. THE HYPER-REALITY SERIES
In The Hyper-Reality Series, Věra Stuchelová works imaginatively with the infiniteness and fragmentation of space, narrative, and time. She depicts ordinary places, the still life in her home, in a hyper-realistic manner. The portrait itself ultimately becomes more real than reality itself – it becomes hyper-real. This gives rise to a new hybrid format in which the main element of reception shifts from narrative to fascination with the image.
The fragmented views of certain extracted sections of reality together compose a mosaic of narratives of intimately familiar places viewed anew. The narrative touches on the issues: Who am I? How does my private life shape and characterise me? Am I visible? Or am I an invisible woman, hidden behind a mass of detail and ritualised acts? In the Hyper-Reality Series Věra Stuchelová conveys a fascination with space, its details, and everyday material, often commonplace, sensitively abstracted into an artistic form.
LOVELY, DARK, AND DEEP
Amanda Church is showing a collection of smaller paintings at Vernon Gallery under the title Lovely, Dark, and Deep. The works from this exhibition could easily be divided into several sections: landscape, pornography, pattern and decoration, and biomorphic abstraction. All the paintings were created from reworked colour sketches that the artist created during her travels. Amanda Church speaks with a specific artistic language. The un-concrete anthropomorphic shapes and pastel colours in her works in an almost strange way connote concrete images.