Tell Me Everything You Saw And What You Think It Means
Tell Me Everything You Saw And What You Think It Means is the result of Alice Instone’s art-residency at legendary hotel Chateau Marmont.
Depicting classic Hollywood screen sirens and hypnagogic landscapes of LA, her paintings employ the language of cinema and inhabit a world somewhere between film and reality.
Instone translates her vision of Hollywood into lush, intense paint, the Technicolor tropical beauty counterbalancing the weight of history contained in the layered images and ‘multiple exposures’ typical of her work. These psychologically-charged paintings express the conviction that painting and making marks on a surface can achieve an intensity of experience like no other medium – even film.
Tell Me Everything You Saw And What You Think It Means presents a series of kaleidoscopic visions in which images from the cinematic past are layered palimpsest-like to create luminous works that aspire to the timelessness and enduring potency of the world they represent. The accompanying book is a mental travelogue through a landscape of beautiful lies, an intimate portrait of a culture whose only reference point is itself.
The landscapes reference streets such as Mulholland Drive, Sunset Boulevard and the Walk of Fame and screen sirens from Hollywood’s Golden Age to the present day, including Elizabeth Taylor, Natalie Wood, Clara Bow, Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, Gina Lollobrigida, Ava Gardener, Angelica Huston, Scarlett Johansson, Isabella Rosssellini and Kristen Stewart appear in paintings entitled ‘It’s Not The Having It’s the Getting’, ‘Don’t Ask Me What I Think Until I Hear What I Say’ and ‘Hollywood Kiss’.