Fiona Kain

Smock

9 - 20 October 2024

G3

Opening Night

Friday 11 October | 6 - 8pm

◼︎

Through meticulously designed artist smocks, Fiona Kain paints portals into moments throughout art that take on new meanings with the passage of time.

As a storyteller, Kain reinterprets the mystery and tragedy of the late artist Ana Mendieta and the role her partner, Minimalist artist Carl Andre, had in her death. Using imagery from Mendieta’s “Blood and Feathers”, Andre’s “Magnesium Square 144”, and chopsticks symbolizing their final night together, she asks us to reconsider the way these stories influence the way we think about their art decades later.

Featuring the words of artist Marina Abramovic’s memoir, “An Artist’s Conduct in His Life and exploring her 1974 work, “Rhythm 0”, Kain deconstructs and reassociates those objects, creating harmony from the interplay between beauty and brutality.

Artist Bio

In pursuit of unveiling the unknown, Australian-based artist Fiona Kain creates simple compositions of clean lines and minimalist palettes that reveal deceptively complex reimaginations of the world around us. Schooled in Fine Art and Design with an extensive career as a motion graphic designer, she brings these two realms together in a painting practice that explores the intersection of traditional methods of artistic creation and the world of digital technology.

Each painting begins on the screen. With her concept in mind, she formulates her compositions, lines, and colours digitally. This allows her to rearrange and create concise yet nuanced interpretations of her subjects. Once complete, she converts her creations to canvases and paper with acrylic paints. She often overlays these painted images with hand-drawn details or mixed media elements. Through the added use of paper, and in some cases even items such as buttons or paper doilies, she exposes the extraordinary qualities of these commonplace objects. Despite the amalgamation of materials, processes, and techniques, the work coalesces into clean lines that radiate a graphic quality.

What emerges is Kain’s uniquely illustrative style. Removed from their context, she often places the objects or subjects on a solid background. They are depicted in clean fine lines that manipulate their two-dimensionality, elevating these hyper-detailed composites to that of traditional notions of portraiture. She uses a deliberate monochromatic palette to focus the attention of the viewer on the meticulously selected nature of each painted element. Adding to the intricacy of her work, she engages her passion for typography with the inclusion of text, haunting in the background, echoing her underlying messages. 

Through paint, Kain extracts hidden realities, subtleties of character, and plot that go unnoticed, lost to the noise. Having lived both locally and abroad extensively, with studios among the cacophony of metropolitan epicentres such as Melbourne (Naarm), Hong Kong, Singapore and Sydney (Gadigal), she has discovered a way to distill the energy and dynamism of a place, a person, or a pattern. The extensive narratives are translated into beautiful symbolism. Among her work have been investigations into the automotive industry, with her ongoing practice Artomobile which specialises in detailed custom illustrations and paintings, as well as explorations into the world of fantasy, as seen in her work portraying the famous story of Alice in Wonderland. However, we see her take on everyday objects, moments in history, and more with her distinctive style. 

Removed from the chaos of their environments, Kain’s approach to simplicity allows unforeseen subtexts within their stories to unfold before us. They are a masterful reinvention of our histories, a close-up examination of the everyday that unearths the surreal, and the formulation of a new visual language that allows viewers to rethink the stories and experiences they thought they knew.

Contact
Phone : (03) 9482 3550
mail@redgallery.com.au

Address
157 St Georges Rd
Fitzroy North, Victoria, 3068
Map

How to get here
Tram: Route 11
Stop 21 just north of Edinburgh Gardens

Melway Ref: 30B12
Parking in nearby streets

Bus: 504 (Reid Street)