Indochine by Samantha Everton
Acclaimed photographer, Samantha Everton presents Indochine – a dynamic new exhibition series which explores the intersection of Western influences and Eastern traditions. Indochine depicts a woman navigating the conflicting cultural pressures of the East and the West. Exuding visual luxury and vivid sensuality, the artworks plunge the viewer into a colour-saturated dreamscape. The series explores the encroachment of Western fashion within Asian cultures and the struggle for authenticity amidst contemporary influences.
Behind the amplified colouration and ornamental intricacies are symbolic elements that offer clues to the underlying stories. Everton's talent is to reveal what lies hidden, and in the portraits can be found fragility and adaptability, vulnerability and resilience, compliance and resolute self-expression. The women captured are torn between the cultural values and expectations of their times and a deep interior struggling towards individuality.
Informed by the artist’s multi-cultural upbringing, with three adopted Asian siblings, Indochine explores identity and how Western influences have intersected with Eastern traditions and values. It also touches on the methods available to women to express a changing cultural identity by altering their appearance. While such shifts are sometimes presumed to be a relatively new phenomenon, the artworks explore how this blending of Eastern and Western cultures has been happening perceptibly for centuries.
About Samantha Everton
Born in Whyalla, South Australia, and raised in central Queensland Samantha Everton credits her unusual childhood as instrumental in fostering a creative mind. Growing up with a biological brother and three adopted Asian siblings, Everton spent hours fossicking for gemstones under the wide blue skies of remote mining towns. Hers was a colour-saturated world. Although not directly referencing her own family experience, multicultural themes and notions of identity continue to influence much of her imagery.
Everton graduated with a Photographic Design Degree, RMIT 2003 and subsequently achieved success in a great number of prestigious awards including Px3 Paris International Photography Awards (2010, 2014), Moran Contemporary Art Prize (Highly Commended 2009), London International Creative Competition (2010), the Photography Master Cup International Colour Awards (2013) and the Head On Photo Awards (2015).
Everton has exhibited widely, with more than twenty solo exhibitions to her name, across Australia and internationally.
