Alda's Inaugural Exhibition - Artist Profiles

LAURA ADEL JOHNSON graduated from Curtin University of Technology in 2004 completing a BA Art. Johnson has since exhibited her work locally and interstate, and most recently held a solo show at Chalk Horse Gallery in Sydney. Johnsons’ work has been curated into significant group shows such as Linden 1968 at Linden Contemporary Art Gallery Melbourne, Drawn Out at PICA in 2005 and was included in New Works, New Faces at Perth Galleries in 2005. In 2008 Johnson interned with New York artist Mickalene Thomas after completing a residency at the Bemis Centre for Contemporary Art in Nebraska. It was during this residency that Johnson started working with fairy lights inspired by gaudy Christmas decorations.

As multimedia artist I use unconventional materials to make drawings that describe or comment on the current social/political environment. My most recent series of works utilize fairy lights to create large scale illustrative portraits that seductively spill down the walls and floors tracing the hypnotic gaze of the subject.

RIZZY graduated from Central TAFE with an Advanced Diploma in Sculpture in 2007 and has since exhibited widely in Perth and was included in Hatched 2008 at PICA, as well as TAFE Survey at the Bunbury Regional Art Gallery. Rizzy continues to work collaboratively with artists initiating artist-run projects throughout Perth.

I am a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice incorporates installation, photography, performance, print and sculpture. Through my work I explore the decadent trappings of femininity and society’s expectations of women are examined using materials that reference the female experience and body.

CAROL WELLS has lived and worked in New York for over 25 years and has divided her time between Australia and the States since 1990. Wells completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Parsons School of Design in New York and has worked extensively as an artistic director in film and television, as well as graphic design while simultaneously maintaining her studio practice. Wells’ 25 years of creating sets and props for film and television has influenced her practice significantly, working between paint, print and wall sculptures using recycled packaging.

These sculpture and prints works are part of an ongoing series begun in 2004 concerning the luxury of detritus, weaving together the formal visual language of the artificial and organic into an abstract landscape of shape, colour and light. “Disparate influences co-exist happily in Carol’s work, without asking to be inserted into a tight hierarchy…Clouds of cones are sometimes dark and stern — rigorous echoes of modern living, or white and pink — a ballerina in a music box turning lightly on a single whimsical point. Musical, repetitive, obsessive, reprised, interdependent, the clouds inspire their own shadows on walls.” Josephine Wilson - From her essay “Tweaking the clouds” 2009