SUPERCUT x KAREN STEPHENS
1 August 2022 onwards
Two Horses
Karen STEPHENS / Two Horses 2022 / digital image / photographer: Carl Warner / © Karen Stephens
"It’s typical for me to be wearing black attire and often I’m exploring the desert floors. By taking on the appearance of the grazing horses, I evade the gaze of people going by. With painting I choose to reveal my experience to the spectator and how I am seen.
Since 2015, I’ve often returned to painting these mysterious, shape changing, self-portraits. My contemporary paintings demonstrate how women find freedom from the pursuit of the gaze found throughout ancient myth and storytelling of many cultures."
Bruce Highway
19km west of Bundaberg on the Isis Highway
Inbound Bundaberg Q 4670
(map here)
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Karen Stephens is an Australian artist based in Winton (Qld) whose interdisciplinary practice examines the politics of the gaze and distorted structures of seeing through the mediums of contemporary landscape and portraiture painting. Stephens completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) from Griffith University’s Queensland College of Art (2017).
Stephens’ paintings can be seen on two major interstate billboard projects. In 2016 she won the Flying Arts Alliance’s Queensland Regional Art Awards and in 2022 selected as one in three Central Queensland artists to receive a place making commission at the inaugural opening of the Rockhampton Museum of Art.
Billboard documentation by Sabrina Lauriston
SUPERCUT is supported by the Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE) Fund – an Australian Government Initiative and is presented in partnership with Artspace Mackay and Northsite Contemporary Arts, Cairns.