Dis/closures solo exhibition, 2019, Tweed Regional Gallery, Murwillumbah
Sienna van Rossum’s paintings interrogate the practice of looking via her meticulous realism which combines laborious details and effacing abstraction. Observing the familiar and ‘unimportant’ surfaces of her everyday spaces, she attempts to re-configure and liberate the viewer's gaze from hierarchies of representation. Oily fingerprint stains around doorknobs; torn remnants of text; rusty appliances; her paintings of these visible phenomena bear witness to the touch of time, space and matter. However, her fluctuations of detail disrupt the legibility of their textures and codes, evoking reality’s appearances as not of lucidity but of indeterminate probabilities. Through this strange intimacy between the image and “the eye”, van Rossum’s practice examines the act of looking as not one of pure transparency but a site of transformative and poetic interexchange.