Exhibited at Five Walls Projects in Melbourne from 19 September to 6 October 2018.

Naomi Nicholls’ installations go where paint is not meant to be. Her temporary vinyl artworks are paintings that have escaped the canvas and bound themselves to the walls directly. In To Cut and Run, Nicholls collages bright painted vinyl onto the gallery walls and contrasts them with aluminium shapes, pitting the impermanent against the permanent.

The vinyl installation pieces have multiple vantage points because the artwork wraps around the corners of the viewing space. We can stand in their space. But they don’t live long. They are gone at the end of the exhibition. Their short lifespans undermine the traditional idea of the rectangular painting hanging on a wall, kept forever. In this way, the aluminium cutouts are more like typical paintings. Yet even here the aluminium subverts conventional painting by abandoning the square canvas in favour of silhouettes from earlier vinyl forms. They bear the same gestural, abstract mark-making used on the super glossy vinyl works.

Watch the exhibition walk-thru