Ann Debono Starview

5 October –
2 November 2024

Sutton Gallery is thrilled to present Starview, Ann Debono’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. For the exhibition, Debono has produced a suite of five monochrome paintings that cite the artist’s extensive photographic study of the construction of the Westgate Bypass Flyover, adjacent to the cargo docks on Footscray Road in Naarm/Melbourne.

The title Starview alludes to the Melbourne Star, a defunct Ferris wheel in Docklands, adjoining the Footscray Road site. The Melbourne Star presents a latently dynamic visual experience that can no longer be consummated. This view would encompass cargo docks, articulated lorries, trains and rail corridors, construction vehicles and machinery, cargo ships, scaffolding, container cranes, incomplete elevated roadways, the Westgate and Bolte bridges on the horizon, the sun, and the sky that vaults the whole site. But the wheel stands still, and this view is denied.

Aesthetically and ideologically, the material construction of the Melbourne Star mirrors the field it statically surveys: its steel struts recall construction scaffolding and structural beams, its tinted glass gondolas the windscreens of trucks and diggers. The smooth motion of its (now stalled) rotation rhymes with the way cargo containers steadily float into the air hoisted by cranes, or how a car glides up a curving entry ramp. In the midst of the brute utility of transport logistics and infrastructure development, the Star is the only member of this industrial array designed expressly for spectatorship.

For Debono, the Star emblematises the cinematic potential of the site. She regards the machinery and vehicles that populate the area, and the interlaced roadways that traverse it, as devices and dolly tracks for propelling a film camera. Her paintings are an imaginative, kaleidoscopic rendering of what such an apparatus might capture.

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Biography

For Ann Debono, representational paintings are uniquely paradoxical objects. Her work makes the sheer experience of vision seem alien, melding realism with abstraction to offer a newly incomprehensible world not arranged according to normative familiarity.

Interested in the idea of a disconnect between truth and legibility, her collage-like compositions corrode pictorial legibility to try and reveal an image that is peeling away from the conventions of pictorialism. Debono’s painting plays on the impossibility of a purely faithful depiction, exposing the construction and artifice concealed within realistic images.

Collecting image material from primarily her own extensive archive of film photography, Debono extends a discerning lens to sites of construction and transport, commercial displays, museological displays, apertures, and detritus. In doing so, her painting transmits an image of the world as a field of infinite regression; images behind images through which some spectral ‘real’ is evacuating.

Born in Maitland, NSW in 1989, Debono lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne. In 2015 the artist received a BFA from the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), University of Melbourne, where she is currently a PhD candidate in Fine Art (2023-present). In recent years, Debono has undertaken several prestigious residencies including the Cranbourne Fellowship at the British School of Rome in 2018 and the Gertrude Contemporary Studio Residency from 2019 to 2021.

Ann Debono has exhibited extensively throughout Australia for over a decade, presenting work in significant museums and exhibition spaces including Geelong Gallery, Geelong; The British School at Rome, IT; Hellenic Museum, Melbourne; Metro Arts, Brisbane; Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, among others. Her work is included in important public and private collections throughout Australia and Asia including Artbank, Sydney; Monash University Art Collection, Melbourne; Joyce Nissan Collection, Melbourne, among others.

Artist’s profile