ARTFORUM | Toni Ross on Amber Boardman
Toni Ross
October 2023
Amber Boardman’s exhibition “Dude” assembled twenty-two slyly funny oil paintings with the fluent paint handling and cartoonish figuration we’ve come to expect from her work. One of my favorites was Baggage Competition, 2023, which gave me a rueful reminder of the outlandish amount of time and money I had recently spent sourcing trekking gear for a vacation. The canvas depicts a row of five blockish figures from behind, exaggerating their bulging backpacks and dangling hiking paraphernalia. Overburdened with adventure-travel consumables, these nature tourists appear poised to assault a snowcapped peak rising timidly before them—as if getting ready to crack a nut with a sledgehammer.
MEMO REVIEW | Amber Boardman: Dude
Toyah Webb
1 July 2023
I get the feeling that the paintings know something I don’t. It’s their world, and the critic is just living in it.
ART MONTHLY AUSTRALASIA | Decisions, Decisions, Decisions: Amber Boardman's Cartoon Worlds
Wes Hill
Autumn 2021
How to represent neoliberal disenchantment without opting for frictionless connectivity or one-dimensional cynicism? This is a question repeatedly posed in the work of the Sydney-based artist Amber Boardman, a painter who renders the anguished expectations of our algorithmic times in cartoonish un-reality. Born and raised in the United States before relocating to Australia in 2012, Boardman makes figurative paintings attuned to the contemporary splintering of the universal into a multiplicity of differences.
ART MONTHLY AUSTRALASIA | Be Well, Or Else!
Toni Ross
Autumn 2021
In a 2018 exhibition of her paintings at Kudos Gallery, Sydney, Amber Boardman tackled the all-pervasive self-optimising regimes sold to and performed by girls and women on social media. Called ‘@jadefad: a social media feed in paint’, the show, and a companion Instagram feed, told the story of Jade – a fictional social media influencer closing on middle age – and her desperate pursuit of self-improvement based on contemporary beauty and self-care fads. Jade’s ever-hopeful makeover aspirations and their woeful results are depicted in Boardman’s idiom of messy, thickly layered, expressionist brushwork, garish
colour and cartoonish figuration.
TIMEOUT SYDNEY | The best art exhibitions in Sydney this month
Stephen A Russell
07 January 2021
If your prime position is perched on the fence with a severe aversion to choosing one way or the other, then you’ll probably vibe with Sydney-based American artist Amber Boardman’s latest show at Darlinghurst’s Chalk Horse gallery.
Decision Fatigue, opening January 28 and running for a month, is all about the inexorably crushing anxiety sparked by all the little Y/N’s that accrue throughout our days, weeks and months. She was fascinated researching the phenomena where all the mundane stuff just piles up and up on our shoulders, exacerbated by our oft-online digital lives, corralled by algorithms and turbo-boosted during lockdown boredom.
ART GUIDE AUSTRALIA | Painting Decision Fatigue
Tiarney Miekus
27 January 2021
A few years ago, Amber Boardman came across a New York Times article that described an emerging phenomenon many of us are now familiar with: decision fatigue. For Boardman, it acutely described “how all the decisions we make sap our willpower and we can only make a certain number of decisions in a day.” Contemporary, digital life bombards us with decisions, to the point where the insignificant seems overwhelming.
ARTLINK MAGAZINE | Bodywork
Gemma Weston
05 November 2020
Bodywork curated by Erin Coates for Fremantle Arts Centre offers a loose take on the subject of human plasticity. It presents works by Amber Boardman, Tarryn Gill and Kaylene Whiskey in which bodies are shaped by internal and external forces in curious ways. Refreshingly, it’s an exhibition without an overt manifesto that reserves moral judgements, allowing for flights of speculative fancy, multifaceted interpretations and moments of frisson between the artists’ works.
SEE SAW MAGAZINE | Fremantle Double Feature Delights
14 October 2020
“Bodywork”, curated by Erin Coates, features the works of three mid-career female artists whose practices range across soft sculpture, painting, and video works. Their three different practices intersect when considering the public nature of women’s bodies, whether by consent or enforced through social codes. Women’s bodies are variously objectified and glamourised – presented as beautiful objects, grotesque lumps of flesh, or figures of idolatry and public adoration – but they cannot escape public scrutiny.
ART ALMANAC | Q&A with Northern Beaches' Artist, Amber Boardman
Emma-Kate Wilson
28 August 2020
Amber Boardman is an American-Australian artist currently working and living in Sydney’s Northern Beaches. The worldwide interest in beauty and self feeds through her artworks, and she invites an inflated sense of self through her paintings that hover between abstraction and realism. Her artworks have recently begun to examine crowds, and the role we play as local and global communities.
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