Tammy Salzl
The Cleansing

The Cleansing is an immersive world of contrasts, a lovingly rendered world that captures the viewer with the superficial tranquility of an idyllic suburban home. Transported through an almost cartoonish painted red curtain, we enter another realm filled with sounds of singing birds, children, and church bells where things are strange and unnervingly familiar.

Using visual language familiar to us from fairy tales and fables, Tammy Salzl’s installation blends found and created video elements, audio, painting, drawing, craft techniques, highly worked print on paper and a unique sense of humour. Salzl’s characters’ are human, animal and somewhere-in-between. Simultaneously endearing and monstrous, they elicit a complicated emotional response. Salzl reflects our world with all it’s beauty and rawness back on us, telling stories as a way of asking questions and prompting us to ask questions of ourselves.

Tammy Salzl

To accompany Tammy Salzl’s Artist Project The Cleansing, we are pleased to present a solo exhibition of her work featuring an ongoing series of allegorical meditations on contemporary life through the trope of children’s tales and scavenged images of animals internet famous for their otherness. Lovingly rendered works in collage, gouache, and watercolour appear to offer near saccharine views of childhood but quickly reveal darker sides of human nature as humanized animals fall prey to animalistic children. Large oil on canvas paintings present contemporary fables, beautiful in delivery and haunting in content and image, and Salzl’s newest sculpture created for the fair, Making Ready, will be debuted.