Becc Orszag: Inaugural

Immaculate Landscape V, graphite pencil and 24kt gold leaf on paper, 53x40cm 2015.

Immaculate Landscape V, graphite pencil and 24kt gold leaf on paper, 53x40cm 2015.

 
 

INAUGURAL, Nicholas Projects, 6th of November 2015

A foaming waterfall forks into two inky rivers of unknown depths, defying the laws of nature.  Figures assemble awkwardly for a group portrait, their bodies blurring into one organism, only their faces recognisable. Young girls gather, their bodies swaying in some incomprehensible ritual, a man’s contorted body raised overhead as a result of a formidable magic. Have we stepped through Alice’s looking glass, and stumbled upon a netherworld, an alternate reality in which the world is endlessly repeated, tessellated and fractal?

Melbourne artist Becc Ország creates exquisite drawings that pull their viewer into eerie and fantastical other worlds. Despite an underlying element of the bizarre, Ország’s body of work is steeped in human past and in art history.  Histories, both real and imagined, are crucial to Orszag’s practice. In her Immaculate Landscape series there is something of the devotional: perhaps of gilded illuminated manuscripts or fantasies of a Garden of Eden. Immaculate Landscape V, sprawling with the minutiae of foliage is reminiscent of meticulous Victorian naturalism: Millais painting the river in Ophelia for hours en plein air. In Immaculate landscape VI, a naked woman lies suspended in an a rocky chasm, engulfed in an erotic rhapsody that  brings to mind Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Theresa.

Within their wooden frames, these images are almost like dioramas, or stereoscopes…one becomes wholly absorbed in each drawn universe. Ország sources found photographs, amalgamating random unconnected images until she has created an imagined universe where events and individuals collide, creating fictitious moments. With an interest in social constructs, Ország creates alluring composites to question established regimes, questioning politicised master narratives.

You can read the interview with Orszag for Nicholas Projects' Inaugural Opening here