Flatland Figure, 12a &12b
Joanna Lamb
2007 | acrylic on canvas | 120 x 85cm each panel | accession #'s 780 & 781
purchased by the Art Board 2007 - Murdoch University Art Collection

Joanna LAMB

born 1972 Perth, WA
lives and works Perth, WA

Joanna Lamb’s series of paintings titled Flatland investigate our contemporary urban existence.

These paintings depict generic images of suburban homes, freeways, sporting grounds, transport hubs, airports and other social centres. Lamb may be considered as a photorealist painter, but first appearances can be deceptive. Lamb flattens out both the colour palette and perspective of her paintings as well as their surfaces, offering a subtle and subversive commentary on the bland, emotionally flat terrain of the Australian suburb.

Lamb regularly creates paintings in sets of two or more. Each painting in the set share the same image, but that image is modulated to include corresponding tonal variations in each painting.

Warholian in nature, these multiple images suggest that the suburban scenes depicted are bland, repetitive and completely interchangeable. The multiple images therefore reinforce the artist’s vision of her home town of Perth, which is tirelessly dubbed "dullsville".

Flatland was the name of a classic 19th Century novella by Edwin Abbott that was, in its investigation of dimensionality, a satire of the social hierarchy of Victorian society. It’s not hard to read Lamb’s work as a satire of our contemporary times.

Rather than connecting with the urban landscape, most people experience disconnectedness. It seems contemporary urban space is designed to filter people through with maximum speed and minimum fuss, leaving places psychologically empty and anonymous.

On a larger scale one place resembles many places and the global landscape becomes more and more the same. Detail and individuality are lost to a manufactured generic sterility. This can be at once alluring and disturbing.

Joanna Lamb, 2007

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