Loralee Newitt

Shelter Chooses You

Loralee Newitt’s paintings evoke her thoughts, memories, and relationships. Her canvases forever shift through visual ambiguities – their starting points often triggered by way of Newitt stumbling upon reminiscent smells or other sensations that induce remembered places, faces, and her relationships with specific sites and people.

Her new body of work entitled Shelter Chooses You sees Newitt working with a colour palette of umbers and reds, yellows and greens, and painted forms that reference physical structures of houses; fenced-like areas, and obstinate wall-like solid shapes. Unlike previous bodies of work where she draws the viewer into her paintings, in these works Newitt leads us in so far and then denies us a fully immersive experience by depicting layers of sharper, more geometric forms that operate as barriers we do not overcome. Instead, in her new work, Newitt in resolutely visual ways ‘talks’ to us about the similarities between shelter and memory; but never allows us her proclaimation of either – asserting the entire series as a form of shelter in and of itself.

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Loralee graduated with a BFA from Victorian College of the Arts in 2014. Recent group exhibitions include VCA Graduate Show 14, VCA, 2014: 3D Painting, VCA Gallery, Melbourne, 2014; New Acquisitions Vol.III, Fort Delta, Melbourne, 2013; Dead Rubber, Harmsworth Street Collingwood, Melbourne, 2013; Co-ed, VCA Gallery, Melbourne, 2013.