May 9

Tania Mason

Tania Mason is a contemporary painter who focuses on presentations of nature and has exhibited extensively in Australia and infrequently internationally in France. Notable solo exhibitions include venues such as Liverpool Gallery, Gallery Smith, STACKS Projects, Tin Sheds Gallery, all located in Australia, as well as multiple features at Australian Galleries in Sydney. Tania has won recognition for her work with notable and repeated awards from Cowra Regional Gallery and Cambeltown Gallery. Her work remains in collections at the Victorian Arts Center and she has participated in many residencies, especially at Bundanon Trust in New South Wales.

The paintings are depictions of imaginative observations of plants, perhaps distorted based on references. Alien in appearance, the glowing foliage convey a display of otherworldly or fantasy undertones, like the landscapes in a Jules Verne novel or the magical extraterrestrial tropical plants located on the planet of Pandora in the film Avatar. Many people may not remember but when the first Avatar film displayed in movie theaters for the first time there were news reports of scores of audiences feeling massively depressed being away from the visuals of glowing luminescent nature, which resulted in many repeat ticket sales. Or perhaps we may allude to the huge popularity of glowing flower furnishings in the Elder Scrolls Online video game. There remains observable sociological evidence of people being heavily influenced and drawn to glowing plants or magical foliage. In such a regard, Tania Mason’s paintings of luminescent and exotic plants contrasted against dark or light monotone backgrounds automatically draw an instinctive quality which naturally draws the viewer to accentuations of unfamiliar nature. With precise detail and rich neon greens the paintings seem almost real until further inspection.

Ove Here (pictured above) remains one of Tania’s most compositionally fascinating paintings. The imaginative plant appears to be attempting to grasp at any surface, with limbs reaching out towards any tree close by. Clearly the painting does not represent a landscape but rather a design as twigs of bamboo-like stumps lay across the composition in a human-created structural pattern of a horizontal slant moving upwards. The painting can best be described as orderly chaos, chaotic in the representation of angled forms stretching across the plane while orderly in careful placement in design.

Tania Mason creates bold, exotic paintings of reinterpretations and deconstructions of nature. With a specific focus on plants, she creates intimate cropped landscape designs with intricate detail, fluorescent tones, and flat compositions. There remains a juxtaposition between the three dimensionality and illusory qualities of the plants with the leveled monotone surface of background emphasizing a sense of contemporary design elements. With an organic standard and a unique display of nature, Tania Mason takes us on a journey through her unusual imagination.