Tropes, 26 May – 20 June 2026, Velvet Lobster Gallery, Level 1 / 45 Hutchinson Street, Surry Hills. Photography: Jessica Maurer
For a number of years now, I have been thinking about recognition and misrecognition within painting. Sometimes this is a question of opacity and sometimes of repetition. I find myself returning to certain images to reprise them, at first hoping to understand their familiarity before having to contend with their strangeness.
Derived from the Ancient Greek tropos, meaning “way” or “turn,” a linguistic trope denotes a figure of speech. These devices, such as metaphors or synecdoches, permit certain things to stand in for others. A trope is both something recognisable and something that produces a change in direction: a recurring motif or common plot device that moves a story along, or a turn of phrase that redirects language.
Thinking about these shifts in direction, I was reminded of a 2023 visit to Arezzo to see Piero della Francesca’s The Legend of the True Cross fresco cycle, painted between 1452 and 1466. I was researching annunciation pictures at the time, having been fixated on the recurring depiction of the Virgin Mary holding a book. In the Arezzo Annunciation, Mary’s index finger rests between the book’s pages, holding her place in the story as the angel interrupts her to deliver the news. What struck me upon seeing the fresco cycle, however, was how Piero does not adhere to chronology but instead organises the narrative through a logic of mirroring. Everything shifted depending on the direction in which I looked. The frescoes seemed less concerned with delivering meaning than with these points of inflection.
The works in Tropes centre on different kinds of turning, shifting, and circling. There are lines which direct the gaze (without necessarily leading anywhere) and forms that appear recognisable before slipping back into pure surface. The strangeness of the image, its persistent otherness, is what I continually return to.
Shrimp Show, 2 December - 20 December 2025, Velvet Lobster Gallery, Level 1 / 45 Hutchinson Street, Surry Hills. Photography: Rachel Mackay
End of year group show to mark the 1 year anniversary of the gallery. Artists include Angus Hamra, Nuan Ho, Mungo Howard, Bahman Kermany, James Little, Rachel Mackay, Erin Murphy, Tim Price, Shanti Shea An, Taylor Steel and Bridget Stehli.
Tapestry, 3 July - 20 July 2025, Tiles Lewisham, 24 Victoria Street, Lewisham. Photography: Jack Lanagan Dunbar.
Tapestry is an exhibition featuring artists who consider various kinds of interweaving in their practices.
Split screen, double vision, Velvet Lobster Gallery, Sydney, 27 May – 21 June 2025. Photography: Jessica Maurer
Split screen, double vision extends my ongoing investigation into multiplicity in painting. In each work, the singular painted surface, which invites an intimate encounter between viewer and object, carries multiple levels of representation. Duplicated images appear alongside pairs of objects or people to suggest that something can be two things at once. This can also take the form of an averted gaze, a shadow, or an image that has been cropped or obscured.
My work engages with states of suspended recognition, where subjects may seem familiar but remain unknowable. I see this as a constant negotiation between what a painting seems to “say” and how it simultaneously retreats from view or comprehension. In this sense, painting allows me to rename or reconfigure what I see, to attend to the visual information that continually confounds me.
These paintings are not intended as representations of linear narratives, but rather they are concerned with a desire for narrative as an enclosed, reassuring structure. Forms and figures shift, search for stability, and remain on the move. Alongside this restlessness, I also find myself returning to the stillness—and silence—of an image and its capacity to momentarily fix things in place.
The Painted Double, 11 July - 25 July 2024, ANU School of Art & Design Gallery, Cnr Liversidge St & Ellery Cres, Acton ACT.
Despite painting’s capacity to present images before our eyes, the medium has always been haunted by absence. The works in The Painted Double address this duality through the formal qualities of mirroring, symmetry, and folding. These paintings invite the viewer to see two things at once—a surface to be looked at and a narrative to be opened. Shanti Shea An’s project attends to this complex sense of twofoldness by interrogating how painted images place us at a threshold between looking and reading.
The Painted Double first developed out of my interest in the relationship between painting and textual experience. I had sensed that there was a kind of rustling, or touching, between what a painting can say to a viewer and what it is able to show. As a painter, I often asked myself: how does a painting differ from a text? The philosopher Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez suggests that painting is a language because it transfigureswhat it shows, allowing for a departure from ordinary experience. However, as this project reveals, there is always a trace of what has been transformed. This process of seeing two things at once—of seeing double—involves putting things into pictures and trying, but not always succeeding, to put them into words.
Folded Memories, group exhibition, Galerie Elsa Meunier — Galerie Mathilde le Coz, Paris. Photography: Margot Montigny
The world folding in upon itself, 19 April - 7 May 2023, ANCA Gallery, 1 Rosevear Place, Dickson ACT. Photography: Brenton McGeachie.
Which is the reality and which the projection? It is often not possible to say, for emulation is a sort of natural twinship existing in things; it arises from a fold in being, the two sides of which stand immediately opposite to one another.
- Michel Foucault, “The Four Similitudes” in The Order of Things, 1966
Artists such as Dorothea Rockburne, Tauba Auerbach and Simon Hantaï have employed practices of folding within their work. This often leads to unexpected forms and compositions, whilst also making visible a certain tension that persists between our understanding of surface and space within painting. Looking to the art of the seventeenth century, folds also appear in various guises, from the drama and theatricality of folded drapery in baroque art to the depiction of folded paper in illusionistic letter-rack paintings.
For Shanti Shea An, the gesture of folding is explored through the formal qualities of mirroring and doubling. In some works, a sheet of paper is folded to reveal both sides simultaneously. In others, the fold brings two figures closer together—perhaps into conflict—suggesting an impending break or rupture. Throughout these paintings, the fold becomes a way of reconfiguring an image and meditating upon the processes of painting and looking.
Back to front, 3 March - 19 March 2023, Airspace Projects, 10 Junction St, Marrickville. Photography: Docqment.
The works in Back to front extend Shanti Shea An’s interest in ideas around flatness, blankness and ambiguity within painted images. Shea An addresses these pictorial concerns through the depiction of scenes that appear still and almost silent, focussing her attention on moments where activity is paused or a sudden recognition is taking place.
Fuzzy logic, with Lani Shea-An, 2 February - 23 February 2020, Tributary Projects, Molonglo Mall Unit 9, 105 Newcastle Street, Fyshwick.
