GLUE MAGAZINE - NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1999

In her first gallery show, Toni Wells showed a color photograph measuring almost two feet by two feet of roadkill on the highway of her native Australia. The body of the cow was intact, but the head had exploded and the juices were oozing out. When the print, along with photographs of clouds, dead kangaroos and her naked husband ran at Newspace Gallery last year a Los Angeles Times art critic said the work had "lots of eclecicism, but little discipline".

Maybe that's what fans of Wells' work like about it. Without an art-school background, and spending more time in the rock scene than in galleries, Wells creates in a space outside the airless world of curators and critics. "It's hard for me to call myself an artist or a photographer", says Wells. "I only studied photography in high school, and when I came to the States, I started assisting a photographer and he re-taught me all the darkroom techniques". Showing first in a tenant art show at her apartment building, Wells was within a year chosen for group shows at the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and at Cal State Northridge's Art Dome. "I had a piece that was a double exposure of a woman's butt with the Los Angeles skyline over it. And it was in a show with Man Ray and Weegee!" Wells laughs.

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