Nosegay Tornado is Ambera Wellmann’s first exhibition at Company Gallery and presents a body of paint- ings produced during the last six months. Inspired by William Blake’s apocalyptic works, Wellmann distorts perspective through a constellation of objects that reference interior spaces, yet squarely place the pictures within the universal realm of the elements. In these familiar, yet unrecognizable scenes, the inside-outside landscape becomes an extension for the body and its psyche.

Multiple bodies, animals and flowers extend suddenly into landscapes that offer up a thawing mise-en-scene within which a queered pictorial logic appears. In this new body of work, a dramatic want for thecatastrophic coexists with an expectation of possibility; in Wellmann’s work an alternative landscape with-in which to form relations is almost within reach. Refusing placement in terms of perspective, site or time,the paintings sit on the precipice of a dream-state and alternative future, collapsing time through theavoidance of clear signifiers in the backgrounds of the work. The hollowness of the present, as cited byJose Muñoz, is what defines queerness as a potential yet to be reached. The emptied-out landscapes ofWellmann - in complete refusal of straight time - are demonstrative of this hollowed-out state of yearningto become outstretched toward the potentials that exist on Muñoz’s horizon.

The figures in these works are allowed to operate in the vacuums created by Wellmann, their engage-ment with each other emphasized in the amalgamation of bodies. Here, their small-scaled confinement isan always-unfolding universe; Wellmann’s figures reach for a dynamic of non-hierarchal horizontality, theirheaving oscillation into one another tests out power arrangements in a new landscape of potentiality.

- Rozsa Farkas