Anthea da Silva, Who’s Asking (detail), 2023. Image courtesy of the artist.
Anthea da Silva
Gallery 1
Friday 26 January - Sunday 18 February 2024
Opening Thursday 25 January 2024, 6-8pm
Trans(ap)parencies is a contemporary meditation on the skin & bones, blood & guts that we’re all made of. Multidimensional humans can be wonderfully empathetic, identifying with the dynamic ‘language’ of other bodies and with facial expressions cross-culturally. Skills we start learning as babies.
Using charcoal, oil and acrylic mediums, collaged X-rays and light-boxes, shadows and reflections, da Silva develops layered and transparent themes in her work, suggesting surreal undertows and the bleeding obvious, beyond the surface of our bodies. The work reflects the transparencies, apparencies, opacities and duplicities that challenge social constructs around bodies and gender.
Da Silva’s art is informed by studies in anatomy, physiology and kinesiology and careers in paediatric occupational therapy, tertiary arts education and Gallery Public Programming. Concurrently, da Silva has worked in the visual and performing arts sectors in WA, NSW & Victoria with festival teams presenting burlesque and circus performances and large-scale public artworks.
Da Silva also presents Life Drawing sessions: yoga-for-artists. While everyone focuses on line, form, tone and likeness, there’s a shared experience of pulsing veins, fleeting thoughts, muscles relaxing and tightening, often in sync with the model. A welcome break from the parallel reality of ‘real life’ – where some dominant religions, political and legal systems (for example) attempt to shame & pornographise the human body, and the person in it. Our clothes, our language and our pronouns can be attempts to keep ourselves safe and maintain agency in a world so curious about gender identification, as if a person’s worth is primarily measured by our chromosomal count.
In Trans(ap)parencies, da Silva’s art references pink bits that may be genital, cerebral, or heart-shaped. And old X-rays suggest a search for what’s really going on. Apparently.
