New paintings from Brisbane-born, Berlin-based artist Karla Marchesi (previously featured here). “Sugar Fever Dream” is a collection of hyper-natural, Post-Humanist landscapes that offer an enticing sense of abundance coupled with the lingering threat of over-indulgence if consumed all at once. Here Marchesi’s penchant for the still life genre runs up against the violence and vulnerability of our modern age as her work attempts to address what it means to be human at this present moment of late capitalism and existential climate crisis:

“With an air of affirmative nihilism and a playful aesthetic of excess, Sugar Fever Dream is a counter vision to Western thought at the height of anthropocentrism. In a waking nightmare of interspecies revenge, this collection draws 17th century Still Life and Vanitas traditions into a Contemporary post-internet landscape. Employing Ecohorror tropes, Art Historical references, semiotic and autobiographical elements, Marchesi delivers a variety of Still Lifes that pulse with life. Nonhuman entities are protagonists embodied with agency, movement, menace and desire: from the skies of the heavens to the depths of the ocean floor.”

See more images from “Sugar Fever Dream” below or on display at Nicholas Thompson Gallery in Melbourne until May 15th.