Emily Allchurch solo show: Mirrored Cities
Visual Arts
Description
Description
Two years in the making, ’Mirrored Cities’ draws parallels between the ancient trading port of Venice, Italy with its historical and contemporary counterpart locations such as Xi’an, Shanghai, Suzhou, and Fenghuang in mainland China, the beginning and end points of the ancient Silk Road. In this new series, Allchurch engages with topics such as globalization, mass tourism and trade, searching for synergies and similarities — rather than contrasts and differences — between historically ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ locations.
Allchurch remains true to her signature digital photo collage style, drawing inspiration from Old Master paintings, for this series Venetian Renaissance works by Gentile Bellini (1429-1507) and his scholar Vittorio Carpaccio (c.1465-1526), as well as Chinese court paintings by Song dynasty artist Zhang Zeduan (1085-1145). Allchurch also references literary sources, specifically Italo Calvino’s ‘Invisible Cities’ (1972), a series of fictitious conversations between Marco Polo and the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan.
Info
Indoor
Local