About the exhibition

Amanda Johnson is a painter and writer living and working on Gadabanud country at Cape Otway. Her work was recently represented in the 2022 Glover Prize, the 2021 and 2019 Hadley’s Art Prize, the 2018 Bruny Prize and the 2016 Bruny Prize. Her most recent solo exhibition Colonial Heat was held at In the Skies Gallery in Lorne in 2021. After the Archive: Parklife was held at 45 downstairs gallery in Melbourne in 2019. Since graduating from a Masters course at Victorian College of the Arts in 1995, she has been the recipient of Asialink and Arthur Boyd Bundanon residencies for painting. A previous solo show, Friable: The Lost Garden, was held at Geelong Gallery in 2015 as part of the gallery’s regional artists program. Sunset Clause continues the artist’s long-term exploration of landscape, place and toxicity in response to the troubled ecological present.

SUNSET CLAUSE: ARTIST STATEMENT As with my previous show, my process typically involves retracing locations where optimistic views of early colonial landscape painting were made. I deliberately mimic nineteenth-century landscape silhouettes but strong warm colour manipulates generic scenes, suggesting disturbance and ecological urgency. While ‘sunset views’ traditionally suggest the passing of time, encouraging lyrical feeling and sense of escape, twilight is now suffused with subtle threat. New landscapes variously depict the aftermath of logging and blackberry infestations in Gadabanud Country (Otway State Forest), the latter an enduring form of colonisation by seed. I see the paintings as temporal ‘mash-ups’ suggesting a compression of colonial past time with the colonial present.

View the Sunset Clause Catalogue here (please note, sales from this catalogue have now closed)

For available works by Amanda Johnson, please contact the artist directly

GALLERY STATEMENT: Following on from the themes Amanda Johnson’s work speaks to, In the Skies Art & Music also wishes to acknowledge the Gadubanud owners of the land that this work was created on, and where our gallery is located, as well as all regional First Nations peoples. We recognise that climate change/environmental destruction and First Nations displacement/oppression go hand in hand and we seek to do all we can to reverse this, to stand in solidarity for decolonisation, and to live and work in a way that respects First Nations’ sovereignty.