Open House is a body of work driven by Imogen Corbett’s 2023 Honours research. Presenting a series of photo paintings - a painting based on a photo reference - these works explore how the interventions of staging and post production photo editing can imbue the photo painting with narrative possibilities. Inspired by tableau vivant and staged photography, the series combines uneasy character relationships, interconnected interior spaces and classical painting iconography to express moments of heightened narrative tension. These strategies undercut the realistic rendering to allude to an ambiguous, fictionalised space.

This body of work is an invitation for the viewers to look for multi-layered meanings, fostering an experience of prolonged imaginative engagement.

Open House

Solo exhibition

Grey Street Gallery, 8th-19th August 2023

Photos courtesy of Andrew Willis.

  • House sitters, oil on canvas, 95cm x 122cm.

  • Two rooms, oil on canvas, 95cm x 122cm (sold)

  • The director, oil on canvas, 155cm x 137.

  • The junction, oil on canvas, 155cm x 137cm (sold)

  • Installation view

  • Installation view

  • Installation view

  • Installation view

  • Red and Blue, oil on canvas, 15cm x 20cm.

  • Installation view

Somatic Algorithms

Pop Gallery, 7th - 17th December 2022

Joseph Botica, Imogen Corbett, Mia Gribbin, Emma Gow, Chloe Healy-Johnson, Liam Johnston, Alisha Kitto, Hye Won Lee, Ava Long, Michael Louttit, Seren Wagstaff, Nadya Wilson

Photos courtesy of Louis Lim.

Somatic Algorithms springs from collaborative discussions encompassing abstraction and the body. These dialogues are made manifest in the works shown, where the body is present both representationally, and through indexical abstraction, in spaces both physical and digital.

Through materiality, process and philosophical enquiry, we explore contemporary notions of the body, felt experience, and what emerges when traditional figuration withdraws.

  • Installation view

  • Installation view

  • Installation view

  • Installation view

  • The Wardrobe, oil on canvas, 30cm x 65cm.

  • Red, oil on canvas, 15cm x 20cm.

  • Boots circa. 2012, oil on canvas, 35cm x 40cm (sold)

The Ordinary Sublime

Queensland College of Art Graduate showcase, Oct 27th - Nov 3rd 2022

Photos courtesy of Louis Lim.

The Ordinary Sublime is a series of paintings completed as part of the 2022 QCA Graduate Exhibition. The works contain portraits set within everyday, familiar spaces and are rendered in intense, realistic detail. The ordinary subject matter is made extraordinary by the careful rendering of the surface, probing our attraction to the painted detail and its psychological hold, an effect we may liken to the ‘sublime’.

  • Rush Hour, oil on canvas, 92cm x 122cm.

  • Caesura, oil on canvas, 92cm x 122cm (sold)

  • Trace of the Artists, oil on canvas, 92cm x 122cm (sold)

  • Installation view

  • Studio Musings, oil on canvas, 137cm x 155cm.