Artist Bio
Amber Tutwiler is an artist from South Florida whose hybrid practice expands on figurative oil painting to describe our relationship to digital spaces. She attended Massachusetts College of Art and Design for Painting, received her BA in Psychology from Florida Atlantic University, and received her MFA in Visual Art from Florida Atlantic University (2017). In 2018, she had her first solo exhibition, Interface, and collaborated with Ballet Florida in an immersive performance, Welcome, at Fritz Gallery in West Palm Beach, FL. In 2019, Ballet Florida and Tutwiler collaborated again with PULSE, which debuted in March 2019 at the Kravis Center in West Palm Beach. She has won various awards, including the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship in 2019, which resulted in an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami. Most recently, she was a resident at IS Projects where she experimented with CMYK lithograph prints. She is currently a Lecturer at Utah Valley University teaching across Foundations, Painting, and Drawing.
Artist Statement
As an interdisciplinary artist, my studio practice spans across oil painting, sculpture, new media, and collaborative performance. The foundation of my research is a meditation on gesture and the phenomenology of digital interfaces. Interfaces are designed to link our corporeal experience with non-physical information, thus creating a very real, lived experience out of an imagined space. Fascinated by the contemporary definition of hyperreality as the “inability to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality,” my paintings are of real places – but have become lost through the translation of Photoshop and other digital manipulations. Using classical approaches to oil painting to make further the photo and painting indistinguishable, my imagery is designed to invoke subtle movement and micro-expressions that allude to intimacy and tension.
010101010 (hiding thoughts in the dark)
Oil on canvas, 2019
Body is an unmade bed
Oil on canvas, wood, 2019
We see the other side of the desert
Oil on panel, 2020
