Ambera Wellmann

The artist destroys her artworks as she creates them. "We learn about ourselves through what we are not, rather than what we are.”

This story is printed in GAYLETTER issue 19, to purchase the issue click here.

 “To a Girl in a Garden” (2023).

PAINTINGS BY AMBERA WELLMANN 

TEXT BY TYLER AKERS

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In Ambera Wellmann’s paintings, figures are as much subject as they are object, “surrogates” for her to act out phantasmagoric mutilation and jouissance. “If they were people,” she explains of the bodies in her distorted and uncanny compositions, “what I do could just be considered gore — too explicit or grotesque — but with a surrogate, or substitute, it becomes an aesthetic event.”

The paintings are apocalyptic in tone; she “destroys them as she creates them,” erasing content and grinding the surfaces down until there are holes or their crossbars are revealed. Figure and ground are often blurred in anti-gravitational floatation — existing in kinetic and liminal dissonance. A splotch of black and a dab of white may become a gleam — a shiny, wet eye that makes splashily contemporary the 19th-century parlor portrait that eerily watches its viewer as they pass through the room.

This anachronistic, even sometimes atemporal, quality pervades her approach; the entire so-called “Western canon” of painting is put into a blender and flung back onto linen to be scrubbed off again and again. “I’m looking for the moment in a painting when it performs its own history,” Wellmann says, “either through historical references themselves or through erasure. I want them to harness potentiality — to exist in unfinishedness and anchor the viewer in several moments simultaneously, so they wonder what the paintings once were, are now, and might become.”

She is fascinated by painting’s ability to constantly rejuvenate itself, constantly cannibalize other artforms, and threaten to die — to kill itself and be killed but always manage to somehow survive.

 “Séance Etiquette” (2020).

“UnGodly” (2021).

 “Impossession” (2022).

Wellmann’s paintings do not illustrate —  they probe. She is resistant to the type of figuration that has saturated much of the art world post-pandemic, finding more respect for painters who have figured out how to develop a pictorial logic that speaks to queer experience or to an idea of “queer futurity,” rather than those who paint their friends and lovers as queer subjects. By contrast, Wellmann doesn’t want her subjects to be relatable. The repulsion or confusion viewers might experience when viewing her chimeric and contorted figures swimming in oblivion is intentional. 

“Rather than appealing to someone’s relatability, alienation is a more interesting way to engage with the feeling of intimacy and self-realization, so that we may learn about ourselves through what we are not, rather than what we are.” It is perhaps due to this grounding in negativity — that which isn’t, rather than what is — that Wellmann turns to painting dogs and human hybrids.

Wellmann recently read a study that used carbon dating to theorize that the original wolf ancestors of dogs were domesticated around the same time as the earliest cave paintings some 30,000 years ago. She was struck by that historical coincidence. “Our relationship to dogs — to an Other that is also an extension of ourselves — helped us give birth to our own self-consciousness and an understanding of ourselves as a species,” she contends.

By exploring the limits and boundaries of what makes us human (or not), Wellmann finds in the wildness of the Other a fitting metaphor for the queer condition.

 “Leo” (2023).