Tamera Avery

Liminal Landscapes, Ambivalent Futures

As if plucked from a folk carnival or political protest, Tamera Avery’s masked and costumed protagonists reappear in curiously liminal spaces: on the edge of a glacier, in a post-nuclear bunker, in a forest gloaming. Each surreal environment is rich with possibility and wrought by uncertainty. Within them, young wayfinders forge unlikely paths, transforming ordinary things – plastic gloves, an upturned handbag, abandoned toys, an old scarf – into extraordinary armor for selfhood.  

Basing her protagonists on her children and their peers (who collaborate in costuming and choreography for the photographic collages that form her referents), Avery is deeply invested in the power of young people to champion change, flouting convention in the face of flawed social and political landscapes, economic and environmental crisis. Yet she is also aware of the enormous burden placed on the young to face up to previous generations’ contributions to climate change and inequality, leading many to a profound sense of disidentification with the world around them. 

Avery’s monumental oils on canvas, often triptychs, draw simultaneously on genres of history painting, religious altarpieces, and portraiture, yet produce a wholly new psychological effect. In their uncanny aura lies something of the duality of despair and hope – of ambivalent futures – at play in the contemporary moment. In part, this effect emerges from her construction of liminal environments from fragments culled and combined from the internet and social media, from personal photographs and found materials. 

Derived from the Latin limen, meaning threshold, liminality refers to a sense or space of transition between states or places. In social anthropology, many social rituals – including those associated with coming of age – are understood according to a threefold process: physical separation or geographic seclusion from the wider community; liminality, during which new identifications are forged; and reintegration or re-assimilation within a new paradigm, such as adulthood. 

Avery’s adolescent subjects find themselves perched at the precipice of this in-between, in geographies simultaneously seductive and unknown. In Borderline, two carnivalesque creatures – sneakered feet struggling to gain purchase on a melting glacier – face off in the shadow of their retreating childhood selves. Meanwhile in Evergreen and Slipstream, forests and waterways appear places of refuge, of potential encounter with the numinous; they also harbor shadowy depths. Their subjects look out beyond the edge of the picture plan, navigating by an unseen horizon. Cold-war era bunkers and shuttered amusement parks may offer cold comfort, yet hold out possibilities for tenderness (a cradled baby panda), for play (a tambourine about to be struck), for (re)imagining. And therein lies power. 

What does the future hold? If the threshold is the space between states of being, ways of knowing, it is also the point of intensity or magnitude that must be reached for a certain result, reaction, or change to occur. Tamera Avery paints an unsettling portrait of this critical juncture, and an incisive study of coming of age in a time of crisis.

Written by Amy Halliday

Biography

Tamera Avery is a painter living and working in San Francisco who has exhibited widely across California, including solo shows at Triton Museum of Arts and Morris Graves Museum of Arts, and group shows at the de Young Museum. After an early career at the intersection of business and fashion, she turned to painting full-time, working with key artist-mentors at the San Francisco Art Institute and UC Berkeley Extension School. She is represented by Andra Norris Gallery in Burlingame, California. (1107 Burlingame Ave, Burlingame, California: 650-235-9775).