Amber Tutwiler

Artist Statement

As an interdisciplinary artist working within the expanded field of painting, I research fractured experiences of intimacy through socio-digital spaces. I create highly rendered oil paintings that resemble digitally manipulated photographs of the body and fabric to articulate these incomplete narratives. From a phenomenological perspective, these images evoke a range of clashing sensations – intimacy, desire, distance, abjection, compulsion, restraint – all of which can be felt in my work. What the imagery conceals lingers just out of reach, leaving the viewer to wonder if their own looking is permissible, or if it is an act of voyeurism, desire, or projection. This is an effort to both reclaim and deflect, heightening the agency of the body while reinforcing that looking is not neutral: touch always touches back.

Bio

Amber Tutwiler is an artist originally 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 (2006-08), received her BA in Psychology from Florida Atlantic University (2012), and received her MFA in Visual Art from Florida Atlantic University (2017). Her work has been featured in Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City, Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, Florida, Paradice Palase in Brooklyn, New York, Kravis Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, and at the Women Cinemaker’s 2018 Biennale in Berlin, Germany. Prestigious awards include the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship in 2019 and Women in Visual Arts Fellowship in 2017. In 2021, her work was acquired in the permanent collection for the state of Utah, the Alice Merrill Horne Collection. Tutwiler currently lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, where she is an Assistant Professor at Utah Valley University teaching across foundations, painting, and drawing.