Tonee Messiah’s work captures poetic and fleeting moments – a quiet gesture, a knowing smile, or a lonely instant. While Baudelaire’s flaneur traverses the city streets via it’s rhythms and flows, Messiah wanders through the landscapes of human relationships, making gentle observations on her way.
The works in Society of Island Universes contain intimate glimpses of the idiosyncratic relationships between humans that fill and decorate our lives. Messiah's subjects reveal the human yearning for communion and connection while ultimately suggesting that our experiences and memories are our alone, and to share them is both a struggle and feat.
In The Way You Think It Is, How You Wish It Could Be, two figures have been divorces from one another by a flood of memories. Trees on a geometric landscape, a pig, wires and a reclining ghost seem to forge a gulf between the subjects, who gaze at each other longingly, but ultimately stand alone.
Society of Island Universes includes both mixed media drawings on paper and acrylic works on canvas.
This is Tonee Messiah's third solo show at Gallery 9. Her works are held in a number of public and private collections.