Rebecca Wallis, ‘Lost Parts’, 2024, acrylic on silk, 165 x 130 x 7cm

‘Without, who I am’ is Rebecca Wallis’s first major solo exhibition in Melbourne. It consists of a body of paintings that are concerned with absence. There is little superficial painterly noise or drama to these works. Instead the artist unsteadies the familiar and the quotidian to suggest what is dismissed or misunderstood – the otherness of a painting, that is the void.

Wallis plays with our expectations of artistic satiation. She opens spaces up to suggest the unfathomable. There is no immediate satisfaction of aesthetic hunger here – no quick gulp of a milky opaque one dimensional surface. The works seek to question our desires to hold, to fix and our want for more. We are unmoored by the artist’s loosening of the constructed painting object.

Surface, sides and supports are conflated. There’s a vulnerability to this untethered transparency. Wallis – in taking away the familiar – leaves us with a vacuum and the unseen becomes seen. Through this absence they question the illusion of separation between viewer and viewed, between subject and object, self and other.