Mamie Tinkler

December 3-7, 2024

NADA Miami, Booth  C215 

Tops is pleased to present a solo booth of Mamie Tinkler's work at NADA Miami. Tinkler will exhibit a number of new oil paintings – a shift in medium after exhibiting only watercolor and gouache works for the past decade. 

The paintings at NADA consider ‘practical effects,’ the category of illusions that are produced physically, without any digital manipulation or post-production. These simple set-ups incorporate objects that speak to the history of still life painting - a lemon, a candle, a lobster have all been painted countless times. Tinkler brings in new ‘characters’ in this body of work: magnifying glasses that play visual tricks in the still life; lighting gels that reinforce the theatricality of the compositions. The style in the paintings shifts from loosely expressionistic to tightly, naturalistically rendered, but the underlying instability of the compositions calls into questions what is ‘real’ and what’s imagined.

In the painting titled Practical Effects, a lush rose droops under its own weight, clamped in place by a shadowy mechanical device. Standing upright, like sentinels, are two magnifying glasses: a round lens turns into a glowing, eye-like orb, while the other, a rounded rectangle, takes the familiar proportions of an iPhone. This lens distorts a flower just behind it, turning the sharp contours of the petals into a glowing yellow screen. 

In other paintings, Tinkler uses familiar objects but coaxes them to behave in unfamiliar ways - giving them a sort of agency in their object-plays. In this way, she playfully invokes genre history while evading strict symbolist interpretations. Candles - perennially used as a symbol of  time’s passing - are here robbed of their seriousness and made comical by flopping over on themselves or lounging like prone bodies - melting, dripping, smoldering, and signaling. The new paintings consider material fact and behavior, the inexorable nature of materials, and the physical realities of images.