Shannon Smiley
Biography
With meticulous paint work and intricate detail, Shannon Smiley looks to the Australian suburban environment for inspiration, finding pockets of un-noticed and undefined spaces that are characterised and overgrown with a wild urge to live. Smiley’s works are romantic depictions of contemporary landscape.
Smiley captures the beauty in unkept urban environments where nature creates its own path among sprawling suburban and city landscapes. These paintings are picturesque impressions of lush over-grown vegetation, rocky creek beds, dense foliage and undergrowth, which shine the spotlight on a world where nature reigns supreme, despite humanity’s best efforts to keep it under control. The artist often connects these untamed habitats to human existence with the hint of a fence or build-ing in the background, bricks or concrete.
Smiley states ‘as an artist who deals with the landscape as a subject for paintings, I see my practice as a response to both a predilection for the tradition of landscape painting and a questioning of the inherent values within it. In my work I depict specifically the neglected and overgrown niches found in the urban environment and am looking for, via lived experience the sentiment of the idyll’.
Shannon is a graduate of VCA. His practice has been acknowledged through a number of significant awards including the John Leslie Art Prize (winner, 2014). In 2015, Shannon won the People´s Choice Award for the inaugural Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize.
EDUCATION
2007 Bachelor Fine Arts (Honours) Victorian College of the Arts
2002 Diploma of Visual Art, Victoria University TAFE
AWARDS
2015 Finalist, John Glover Art Prize
2015 Finalist, Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize
2015 Winner, Peoples choice, Bayside acquisitive Art Prize
2014 Winner, John Leslie Art Prize
2012 Finalist, Metro Art Prize
2010 Finalist, John Leslie Art Prize
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2017 Out Of Order, Bayside Arts and Cultural Centre
2012 Across From the Path, Hill Smith Gallery, Adelaide
2011 New Paintings, Hill Smith Gallery, Adelaide
2010 Wilderlust, Level 17 Art space, Victoria University, Melbourne
2010 Ordinary World, Lindberg Galleries, Melbourne
GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2018
A Fine Romance, Realism in Australian Art, Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale
Focal Point, New Realist Painting, Hill Smith Gallery, Adelaide
Accession, Bundoora Homestead Arts Centre
2017
Uneasy Idyll, Art Central, Hong Kong
2016
From the Studio – Bayside Artists In Residence Exhibition, Bayside Arts and Cultural Centre
2015
Lay of the land, Hill Smith Gallery, Adelaide
Somewhere in the city, Arts Projects, Melbourne
Tattersall’s Club Landscape Art Prize, Brisbane
Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize, Melbourne
Salon des Refuses exhibition, National Trust S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney
Salon des Refuses exhibition, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery
John Glover Prize, Evandale, Tasmania
2014
John Leslie Art Prize, Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale
2013
We Are Here, Chapman & Bailey Gallery, Melbourne
The Sixth Sense, West Space, Melbourne
2012
Melbourne Art Fair, Hill Smith Gallery
High Definition, Paradise Hills Gallery Melbourne
