HOME transcends the notion of location and place; it alludes to a sense of permanence inhabited by the familiar. A home is defined as such when is filled with memories, with traces of our past, faded reminders of what was lived. Joanna Lamb’s exhibition invokes nostalgic remembrances of her life in the suburbs. She creates eerily beautiful images that are familiar enough to remind us of a place, but sufficiently detached to expose the sameness and superficiality of suburbia.

Home, Joanna Lamb’s first exhibition at Sullivan+Strumpf Singapore, will comprise a selection of works in different forms of media such as collage, installation, neon works and painting. Lamb constructs Laminex collages, like precise puzzles where any traces of the manual process are removed to create a sense of perfection and reproducibility. Her use of Laminex is intentional as she considers it lends itself effectively to the recreation of domestic vignettes. Its luminosity and limited colour palette brings dimension to the deliberate flatness of her depictions. Lamb’s still-lifes portray quotidian objects that are stripped of labels or names, and are to be recognised by their forms and brand identifiers. They are ubiquitous and common, much like the interiors she rigorously portrays in the exhibition.

There is a visual rhythm dictated by repetition and reiteration in Lamb’s compositions. In her Laminex collages, identical scenes are reinterpreted by changing the chromatic spectrum; objects are rearranged to be perceived from different angles, details emerge within the cleanness of the forms. When creating her installations, the artist plays with the malleability and hues of neon, and translates it into luminous planters altering the space with their physicality. Home evokes the tension of location and place, of inside and outside. The spectator’s curiosity is incited and welcomed. Her images present all the possible vantage points of home, from its nameless architectural exteriors, to its trite interiors and even the everyday sustenance and personal effects of its inhabitants.
Joanna Lamb’s work speaks of places where we can feel both familiar and lost, where complexity is stripped to its simplest form, removed of any lines or perspective. They evoke places we once belonged to, places where the details have been lost through time, yet a lingering sense of home remains.