Vicki Stavrou
The title for "Home Spun," Vicki Stavrou's most recent body of work, contains a play on words: though they might most clearly be considered paintings, many of the domestic scenes in the series are in fact delicately embroidered. We take a look at Stavrou's glamorous, historically informed, and deftly critical works before her exhibition opens with Anthea Polson Art this weekend.
Vicki Stavrou’s new body of work is sleek and sly. It both remembers and re-casts domestic life in mid-century modern style, conjuring a rich and sometimes troubled tapestry of art and design histories before the viewer. Sometimes, these tapestries are actually delivered as tapestries on Stavrou’s canvases, but the work nevertheless remains grounded in the painting practice which Stavrou has sustained in a variety of forms throughout her career.
Alongside a career in fine art which began with group exhibitions around 2000, and has since grown to achievements including a solo show at Tweed Regional Gallery & Margaret Olley Art Centre, much of Stavrou’s early practice in painting was in murals. This included projects for commercial spaces both at home and overseas. Prior to this, she worked for the ABC, painting background scenes for television productions. The shift from painting “on” buildings to paintings “of” buildings in this most recent body of work is sharply self-aware, as Stavrou appraises tropes of modern interiority and domesticity with wit and criticality.
Picture this: blue birds – not necessarily bluebirds – skit through the shadow of a palm tree, on a completely smooth front lawn. Big, glass windows on an unpeopled house promise an interior view, just to obscure their promise through reflections of the environment outside: iterative rows of trees and misty hills. From time to time a wind seems to be blowing, setting the bushes to a flurry and disturbing the waters of a highlighter-bright pool – but nothing much else “happens,” as such. In a lounge room, everything is seen through haze except the paisley pattern on a couch. You want to blink the buzz away, but you can’t.
Clearly, Stavrou knows the mid-century modern home and its histories of representation in the visual arts intricately. There are echoes of Hopper and of David Hockney’s Californian pool-scapes, with over-perfect smoothness of surfaces, and a sense of glamour which can veer into a feeling of uneasiness. There is a scarcity of actors on the scene, save one or two figures around the pool, peering into the water or already floating face-down in it. These scenes are soaked through with that distinctly Californian combination of beauty and jarring hyperreality – a feeling which is more acute today, even, than it was in the middle of last century. In this world of domestic bliss, the image becomes reality itself; the shadows of Stavrou’s tasteful, sophisticated chairs and lounges are embroidered where the objects themselves are not.
Home Spun has its eye on the history of our visual culture, and the condition of our lives in the present. It is set to be a presentation both historically rich and prescient in its depiction of domestic life, at once troubling and totally gorgeous.