- PRESS
- 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.
-
- As
part of this summer's Absolut LA International
Biennial Art Invitational, Newspace Gallery
showed nine photographs from Wells' latest work,
the Body Part series. The glossy fabrication,
expert exposure and meticulous arrangements of
the images would undoubtedly impress those
discipline freaks. A gnarled tree trunk is
actually a human wrist, the shadowy veins
mottling the skin like ridges of bark. There's a
startling dichotomy in it. "Our body is the most
familiar thing to us, yet when we take it out of
context, it's somehow unfamiliar", says Wells.
She photographs body parts, then mounts the
prints on white frames and paints them with a
resin so they become shiny square tiles. The
final product comprises several squares,
arranged so the images-an arm, a hand, a
shoulder-create a pattern. The perspective and
scale differ among the tiles, so an ankle could
be as big as an entire leg. Viewed from a few
feet back. the amalgam looks like a tree. Closer
up, the pictures seem comic and creepy at the
same time.
-
- Sitting
in a cafe in the downtown Artist District, Wells
wears black leather cuffs around her wrists and
violet eye shadow. The unexpected success of her
photography is just one of the tumultuos aspects
of her life lately. Travelling through North
America in 1995, she stopped in Seattle, met a
man and fell in love. She subsequently moved to
LA and married in Las Vegas, wearing knee-high
platform boots. Then she started taking
pictures. "I'm going through a time when I'm
really finding out a lot about myself", says
Wells, who has separated from her husband. Now
she has turned the lens on herself. Shooting the
self-portraits is cathartic, she says. "A few
nights before I moved out of Paul's and my
apartment, I was wearing a black slipdress and
no makeup. I cooked a piece of chicken - and
I've been vegetarian for years - and sat down
with the plate on my lap, a bottle of beer in
one hand and cigarette in the other. I sort of
had a moment of clarity. I set up my camera and
shot a whole roll. I took long exposures since I
didn't light it at all. I wanted it to be
honest". Wells is unsure if she'll show the
portraits publicly. Her gallery can't wait for
her next show. She shrugs and smiles. There's
plenty of daylight left to shoot and a band to
check out that night.
|
|
|
