Opening Wednesday 9th March , 6.30 - 8.30pm
Wilder Gallery introduces Pleasure Zones, a solo presentation by painter Anne Carney Raines. Drawing on her background as a scenic painter, Raines constructs complex environments that expose the artifice of painting through the visual language of theatre and set design. Her paintings investigate the relationship between interior and exterior spaces; mountains, gardens, and trees give way to each other in a series of painted panels, curtains, and openings, evoking collective memories of landscapes.
Raines’ latest body of work is inspired by a recent visit to Las Vegas and the architecture of casinos, designed as mazes to keep consumers inside with a sense of limitless time and space. Las Vegas is a place of replications and caricature-like copies, from the first-floor canals of ‘Venice’ to the cutesy cobbled streets of ‘Paris’, all temperature-controlled and illuminated by unchanging levels of artificial light. Raines explores this notion of fictionalised space to evoke simultaneous feelings of entrapment and seduction.
