JANENNE EATON / KATE STEVENS / JESS HIGGINS

JANENNE EATON

FENCES B/ORDERS WALLS - Keep Clear

KATE STEVENS DRONES OVER ALEPPO

JESS HIGGINS BLACK ELEPHANT

COVER ABOVE: JANENNE EATON KEEP CLEAR (detail), 2018, Acrylic on Hi Impact Styrene, wood, metal, 122cm x 530cm (photograph by Mark Ashkanasy) COVER MIDDLE:

KATE STEVENS

East Aleppo 2:32 (detail), 2018, Oil on canvas, 100cm x 125cm

COVER BELOW:

JESS HIGGINS

The Known Knowns #1(detail), 2018, Soft pastels on Wenzhou paper, 244cm x 98cm

JANENNE EATON FENCES B/ORDERS WALLS - Keep Clear

…while every wall fails to accomplish what it was erected to achieve – the walls are never solutions – each wall succeeds at something else. Some walls define Us from Them with medieval clarity. Some walls encourage fear or feed hate.

And every wall inspires its own subversion, either by the infiltrators, who dare to go over, under, or around them, or by the artists who transform them. 1 “We consider the border not to be a purely physical barrier separating nation states, but a complex continuum stretching offshore and onshore, including the overseas, maritime, physical border and domestic dimensions of the border.”2 The painting/installation, FENCES B/ORDERS WALLS – Keep Clear, (2018), is the most recent of three ‘fences’ I have constructed. The first, FENCES B/ORDERS WALLS, opened at TCB Art Inc., in Melbourne in 2016. In 2017, The Yellow Brick Wall was installed in The Back Room at Kim’s Corner Food, Chicago, USA. As with the two earlier works, FENCES B/ORDERS WALLS – Keep Clear, offers a further symbolic image for a tangible ‘border style’ wall. My aim for each of these works has been to conjure something of the ‘sensation’ of confronting the real thing – “the brutality of fact”. “The brutality of fact” is Francis Bacon’s phrase for what he was looking for in his paintings. By “facts” he doesn’t mean to make a copy of the subject…but rather to create a sensible form that will translate directly to your nervous system the same sensation as the subject.3 FENCES B/ORDERS WALLS – Keep Clear, presented at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space, combines the original FENCES B/ORDERS WALLS (2016) installation, with a new section positioned at the heart of it. Similar to a road sign billboard, the text ‘KEEP CLEAR’ appears. A ‘split skull’ image takes up position between the two words. In contrast to the formal and material characteristics of the original FENCE, the text and image of this new central section is inscribed onto a black, highly reflective surface. With its mirror-like quality, the sign presents the illusion of a potential rupture, a ‘space’, capturing the image of the audience as it merges with the work’s central narrative. In this way the illusion of an imaginable space directly challenges the visual illusion of impenetrability created by the flanking FENCE sections as they stretch out to the left and right of it.

1 2 3

Marcello Di Cintio, Walls – Travels along the barricades, Soft Skull Press, Berkeley, CA 94710 2013 Department of Home Affairs, ‘Australian Border Force: Who we are.’ https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/australian-border-force-abf/who-we-are Anne Carson, Float - Variations on the Right to Remain Silent, Jonathan Cape 2016

ABOVE: FENCES B/ORDERS WALLS - Keep Clear, 2018, Painting installation, enamel, acrylic, Xanita Board, Hi Impact Styrene, wood, metal, 120cm x 1830cm (Installation view, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, photography by Brenton McGeachie)

Much that influences my work is found in the visual vernacular of the streets and highways that animate the dense urban environment in which I live and work. Inspiration often arrives where walls and spaces imaginatively intersect with influences from intangible forces and the textured terrain of a tangible world. Fences B/orders Walls – Keep Clear draws on the qualities of various types of signage and temporary constructions of timber hoardings and other types of safety and security fences built around construction sites. They are a common type of street architecture I regularly encounter on my travels. Fitted with “anti-climbing devices” which claim to provide an “air-tight” perimeter, these fences, are most commonly painted black. In pristine condition they provoke urges towards ‘active intervention’. Over time they gradually accumulate graffiti and advertising posters.

Despite the plain, matter-of-fact purpose and diversity of barriers to be encountered in the landscape, their fortresslike impenetrability constantly reminds me, metaphorically, of other types of constructed façades we also regularly encounter: the smokescreen, the cover-up, censorship and the muting of political opposition. A silence ‘erected’ for what it might hide as for what it might stop.

The grid screen has long been a reoccurring character in my practice. For the first FENCES B/ORDERS WALLS work (2016), I turned it 45 degrees to make it appear like a cyclone wire fence. Analogous to the structural architecture of that universally recognized barrier, the text itself forms the physical ‘anatomy’ of the work - the bones of it. The legible spelling of the word FENCE appears, and is then ‘flipped’ into reverse to form an alternating pattern along its extension.

In this way the word, despite its deadpan posture, is written to suggest conflicting and contested realities, metaphorically trapping the audience on both sides of the fence simultaneously: inside and outside its confines. Depending on where you’re standing, (and/or your point of view), determines what might be interpreted within the enigmatic forms suggested within the shadowy shifts of light and shade that lie behind the mesh. Running corner to corner along the length of the gallery space, the work’s visual dynamic sets up a rhythmic density that distorts easy legibility, metaphorically constricting both accessibility and meaning. What I was attempting to conjure through its formal qualities was a sense of a palpably rigid and unyielding physicality; a hard-faced sign for the ‘end of the road’; passage denied.

In FENCES B/ORDERS WALLS – Keep Clear, (2018), as her vantage point shifts, the viewer acquires a more performative and significant role in the way the essential subject of the work is experienced. In the highly reflective panels of the KEEP CLEAR sign the viewer is drawn in as active participant, becoming part of what she sees. Disturbingly we look at ourselves ‘looking’; the ‘screen’ looks back at us; a ‘lens’ of cyber surveillance - on ‘every move we make’.

In contrast to the visually flattened, deadpan character of the word FENCE, the text, KEEP CLEAR, inscribed across the sign’s highly reflective surface, seems to shift, almost simultaneously, back and forth between solid form and open portal into another, shadowy world that lies behind. This sense of spatial ambiguity where that which appears open is also closed, is intensified by the duo phantom-like aspect of the memento mori images that appear between KEEP and CLEAR. Possibly emblematic of a sign for ‘double danger’, in the context of this work it appears as reference to the Roman god Janus. In classical Roman mythology Janus is the god of beginnings and transitions; of gates, doors, doorways, endings and time. He is a ‘two-faced’ god as he is usually depicted with two faces looking in opposite directions towards the future and to the past.

Any optimism that might attach to Janus as a symbol of change and transition; of a progression from past to future, of one condition to another, of one vision to another, and of one universe to another, is belied here, by the stygian depths of the larger sign itself. The constant, shifting reflections across the figure’s surface renders it elusive, denying a clear reading. This is not a sign for optimism. The way is not lit. The god is ‘two-faced’. Janus appears and disappears as

one’s vantage point shifts. A trick of the light. This is a negative space in all sense of the word, all tending towards the conditional, or beyond, to the totally obliterating.4 Hollowed out and imbued with deeper meaning, the street sign becomes a digging site that allows us to reflect on broader national, social and political implications of language that are all around us, and therefore invisible…taken for granted, on the street. The words take on a deeper meaning which is troubling, to ‘keep and ‘clear’ separately and together, the first word is possessive, and the other de-possessive, keeping empty, a permanent terra nullius or tabula rasa of the mind.

Forgetting. Making space for the future by forgetting the past. The words take a ubiquitous street sign and transform it into a symbol of national mentality.5 As I left the show, I was pervaded by a sense of the fragile aching beauty of the everyday, the precarious nature and contingency of our lives and of the world around us. I thought about freedom, desire, intimacy, community and the value of our permeability to one another, which we must uphold. And I thought about how all of that seems increasingly at risk thanks to the borders, walls and checkpoints we insist on building around us.6

Janenne Eaton 2018

Janenne Eaton is represented by Nancy Sever Gallery, Canberra

FENCES B/ORDERS WALLS - Keep Clear is presented in collaboration with Nancy Sever Gallery, Gorman Arts Centre where Janenne Eaton’s exhibition SHADOWLANDS is on show from 21st September - 21st October 2018.

4 5 6

David Hansen , Through a glass but even more darkly, Catalogue essay, Janenne Eaton Road to the Hills, 2014 Georgina Criddle, reflections on Janenne Eaton’s FENCES B/ORDERS WALLS – Keep Clear 2018 Joe Florencio, University of Exeter, on exiting an exhibition by Wolfgang Tillmans, 2005, The Conversation, 2017

ABOVE:

FENCES B/ORDERS WALLS - Keep Clear, 2018, Painting installation, Xanita Board, Hi Impact Styrene, wood, metal, 120cm x 1830cm (Installation view, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, photography by Rohan Schwartz)

FOLLOWING PAGES:

Fence, 2016, Acrylic on Xanita Board, 120cm x 1384cm (Installation view, TCB Art Inc, 2016, photography by Andrew Curtis)

Changing Sides Janenne Eaton’s art is full of rabbit holes, blind corridors and illusive tricks. It’s the kind of art that lures you into thinking you’ve understood it, that it’s somehow obvious, until suddenly all clarity disintegrates and you find yourself back where you started. Hitting walls.

Before Janenne asked me to write this text, I’d already seen the exhibition at various stages of completion. I’m on the board of TCB and I do their mail-outs. I discovered Janenne’s ‘wall of text’ when I was putting together the media release for her exhibition FENCES B/ORDERS WALLS. In the description of her show, Janenne constructed a text formatted like a wall made up of facts about walls and fences. A couple of days later I visited the gallery and saw Janenne and Simon McGlinn installing the physical work, a painting titled FENCE. I saw the calculation and precision with which they installed the first ten panels and it made my white skin crawl. I thought about the bureaucracy behind the Australian Government’s Operation Sovereign Borders, the clean administration of it all. I was also reminded of ‘The News of the Building of the Wall: A Fragment’ a text by Franz Kafka, how it described in detail the moments before and after an anonymous character learned that a wall would be built nearby their village.1 What was remarkable about the text was that Kafka left his reader uncertain as to what side of the wall the character is speaking from. A similarly ambiguous question is asked in Janenne’s exhibition: ‘which side of the fence am I on?’

Sitting the gallery some days after the opening of the exhibition, I experienced the full brunt of FENCE. It was fully erect and ran the entire length of the gallery wall. I walked along it, letting the sharp black lines and the blotchy grey tones build up in my peripheral vision. When I turned to face the work I saw the grid — a reoccurring character in Janenne’s practice, only this time it was turned 45 degrees to look like a wire fence. It was black like a silhouette and it hovered in front of what looked like cloud coverage or liquid metal. Painted over the top of the grid in giant black letters as tall as each individual panel was the word FENCE. The word was painted in a way that was disinterested and banal and it was repeated seven times across the gallery wall. First the front of the word was painted, and then the back of the word.

On the opposite wall to FENCE, in both the Front and Back gallery, were two identical small paintings that reminded me of the long narrow slots in the great-fortified walls of medieval cities, the kind of slots that castle guards would look through to control who came in and out. Visible inside each slot-shaped canvas were two ‘eyes’. The left eye doubled as a bullet hole that from some distance looked as if it had punctured the canvas. The right eye was made out of a reflective surface, a circular mirror with a rubbery rim protruding out from a black painted background. The two eyes were separated by a silver slither — the nosepiece of medieval helmet? I found out later that both paintings reference the evil eyes of the warlord in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s 1339 fresco Allegory of the Effects of Bad Government. The warlord was the personification of Tyranny.

After seeing the exhibition I thought I had understood what side of the fence I was on. I thought it was obvious. In response I wanted to write a text that performed the control of the Deadeye and the containment of FENCE, and the unnerving feeling of being trapped and monitored. I fell into an Orwellian rabbit hole, turning the TCB gallery into a totalitarian space where free-speech was forbidden and where board members and volunteers were restricted to using specific language and only speaking about selected topics. Soon volunteers would start to go missing and there would 1

I came across this short story by Franz Kafka after taking part in a work by Jacqui Shelton, also called The News of the Building of the Wall, a one-on-one storytelling and learning session, Testing Grounds, 2016.

be rumours that surveillance cameras and microphones were installed in the Deadeye paintings and around FENCE. In this version of the text I not only assumed that the viewer in Janenne’s exhibition was on the wrong side of the fence, I also committed myself to making sure that the authorial control of the artist and the artist-run gallery was like a ruthless dictatorship.

It turns out that in my insistence to know for certain what side of the fence I was standing on I had misread the function of the work entirely. How sure was I that I was on the wrong side of the fence — a victim of some oppressive force that contained my body and monitored my movements around the gallery? I went back again to look at the work. This time when I see the word FENCE I see it flip to reveal its other side. The meaning of the word FENCE vanishes and is replaced by a thought ‘double sidedness’. Hollowed out, the word FENCE becomes an object, or an architectural structure with a front side and a backside. Then the object disintegrates in front of my eyes and all I see is a cloud-like blur coming through and pulling back behind black mesh. My pupils expand and contract like a camera lens unable to focus. Finally my gaze fixes again on the word FENCE and as the word flips so do I. I’m on the other side of the word and I begin to understand something that feels embarrassingly obvious to me. The viewer is unable to choose sides because the work itself is two-sided. It is the work’s refusal to position the viewer, its refusal to let the viewer position themselves, that makes this exhibition so nightmarish and impossible. Somewhere in all this I learn that there is absolutely nothing obvious about fences, borders or walls. In fact everything around me now has the capacity to be a fence, a border and a wall, because as far as I can see, everything, including me, has two sides. Perhaps I’m confused and I’ve got it all wrong. But am I? I turn around to the other side of the wall and I look again at the Deadeye painting — bullet hole decal on one side, my own eye reflected in the other.

Georgina Criddle Melbourne 2016 Georgina Criddle is an artist and writer based in Melbourne. She has served on the board of TCB since 2015 and teaches at Monash University in the Faculty of Art Design & Architecture. Georgina has exhibited in artist-run spaces in Melbourne and internationally.

Janenne Eaton CV Janenne Eaton’s practice incorporates painting, photography, installation and video. Through solo and group exhibitions, her works have been exhibited extensively in ARI’s, museums, institutions and commercial galleries nationally and internationally.

Studies and fieldwork in archaeology have been a significant influence in the direction Janenne Eaton’s artwork has taken since the mid 1980’s. Researching the archaeological and historical record the artist explores how we record and reconnect with a sense of the past to understand something of the movement of peoples across time and space, and the ‘traces’ of human agency that record social, cultural and material change.

A discernable and significant thread that links Eaton’s works through time and ‘times’, arises from the value the artist places on bringing voice to address social concerns. Through her works the artist explores the effects of local and global political forces that impact on people and the environment. Critically, her work also seeks to focus a lens on the visual static that permeates contemporary life within today’s mesh of globalizing forces. Through the use of historical markers, textual symbols and digitalized elements embedded in cyber screen-based imaging, Janenne’s works highlight how a virtual language of sign systems mediate our day-to-day experience of the world. Gathering together some of the key visual signifiers of our consumer-led, info-centric society, her works explore how we live within this new globalizing, digital ‘ecology’, the way the ICT revolution impacts on our daily lives, and the challenges inherent in our changing relationship to time, space and place.

Janenne’s work is represented in numerous public and private collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; The National Portrait Gallery, Canberra.

Recent exhibition highlights include: The Yellow Brick Wall, Thomas Kong’s Back Room, Chicago, USA, (2017); Fences B/orders Walls, TCB art inc. Melbourne (2016); Road to the hills – a text for everything and nothing, The 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery /Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2015 - 2016); Black, works from the National Gallery of Australia Collection (2016); PRINT @ CDU, Charles Darwin University, NT (2016); Black to Blacker, Geelong Art Gallery (2016); * For a detailed biography go to janenneeaton.com.au

KATE STEVENS Drones Over Aleppo

Imagine: images of screaming children burned by Naplam, street executions, the My Lai massacre and American

soldiers dying in the swamps of Vietnam beamed into your home around dinner time every evening. Once television and the uncompromising photo-journalism of magazines such as Life did much to turn the tide of public opinion against war. Governments involved in dubious foreign adventures have learned from this and thus today our news (while still disturbing) is censored in accordance with levels of public sensitivity. We are warned, for instance, in advance of troubling material concerning even when horrific scenes have been modified for public consumption. When whistle blower and intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning released classified footage of a Baghdad airstrike there was outrage

and she was consequently court martialed and recently banned from speaking in Australia. Kate Stevens’ Drones over Aleppo reflects her interest in how we process images of war from the domesticity of our homes today.

Drones over Aleppo, as the title suggests, is a series of paintings that capture surveys of the systematic devastation created by airstrikes in 2015 and 2106 in which air forces including Syria, Australia, The United States and later Russia laid the city to waste. Stevens’ source material comes from what is frequently described as “shocking footage” on Youtube, uploaded by Russian TV. Once Syria’s largest city with a population of 4.6 million Aleppo, one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world (6th millennium BC) and often described and Syria’s most beautiful is now testimony to humanity’s curious propensity for destruction. There are parallels with images of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb, and German cities such as Berlin and Dresden after World War Two. What Stevens is presenting is not new, however, her work is a chilling reminder that the annihilation of previous conflicts is scarcely a thing of the past.

ABOVE:

East Aleppo 2:32, 2018, Oil on canvas, 100cm x 125cm

ABOVE:

East Aleppo 2:51, 2018, Oil on canvas, 100cm x 125cm

Drones deliver weapons as well as recording their damage. Developed by the military during the First World War they divorce the attacker from the attacked, simultaneously minimising and maximising casualties depending on which side

one happens to be on. Stevens exploits the impersonal nature of the drone, a dispassionate flying machine that records the aftermath of crimes against humanity without humanity. The drone is neutral, non-partisan and non-discriminatory leaving those who engage with its documentation to imagine what horrors lay in its path and the human suffering that

lead to this point. Painting ‘stills’ from drone footage Stevens generates a pictographic tension between the subjectivity

of her medium and the calculated distance of a flying robot. Asking, “What is an appropriate response to this information, beamed into our lounge rooms here in Australia?, Stevens’ paintings become rhetorical, in themselves producing an effect and making a clear statement. The ruins are but traces of humanity, places once inhabited. As we, the audience are confronted with a highly accomplished poetry of destruction we can but ask what has been achieved, and for whom … and retreat to consider both the power and powerlessness.

David Broker 2018 Kate Stevens is represented by Nancy Sever Gallery, Canberra

ABOVE:

East Aleppo 18:02, 2018, Oil on canvas, 80cm x 100cm

FOLLOWING PAGE:

The Known Knowns #1 - #3, 2018, Soft pastels on Wenzhou paper, 244cm x 98cm each (Installation photograph)

JESS HIGGINS Black Elephant The hard graphic edge and high contrast of woodcarving, much used in expressionist practices, provides an ideal vehicle for Jess Higgins Black Elephant. This exhibition consisting of three floor-to-ceiling works which pulls no punches in its uncompromising critique of international inaction and attitudes to the rights of strife-torn peoples. Distorted human forms hang in a black space reflecting a common method of torture where the victim’s hands are shackled behind the back, toes touching the ground – disabling the arms and cutting the circulation. Higgins’s chilling life size images, sourced from a wealth of abject material on the internet, are enlarged in labour intensive carvings, ‘frottaged’ or rubbed onto pristine white, almost transparent rice paper to reveal the positive image. The intense relationship between graphic imagery, physical action (making) and appropriate materials are central to her oeuvre.

Higgins’ concern in this series is what she describes as the “loss of human life at the hands of unethical practices of war” with a particular focus in the ongoing crises that plague the Middle East. Her work highlights a shift in attitudes towards conflict from, for instance, the violent global opposition to the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 70s to the apathy, denial and ignorance that has defined the wars in Syria, Iraq and Palestine. There is perhaps an underlying comparison with horrific images of war transmitted via electronic media into suburban homes of the 60s and today’s diluted news with admonitions, that ‘some people may find the (already censored) images in this report disturbing’. Thus, early warnings of an unprecedented refugee crisis fell upon deaf ears until millions of displaced people were literally upon Europe’s doorstep and bodies littered the Agean and Mediterranean seas.

Throughout this exhibition Higgins invokes the hybrid concept of the ‘Black Elephant’ – a cross between a ‘black swan’ (an improbable, unexpected event with devastating ramifications) and ‘the elephant in the room’ (a problem that is obvious to everyone and yet no one is interested in acknowledging it). Climate change is an excellent example, where many people remain in denial while they experience its increasingly devastating effects; droughts, cyclones and heatwaves.

The three works are a timely response to the ‘black elephant’ and designed to create discomfort in her audiences.

Imagine oneself inside the belly of the beast, a black room that is itself the elephant and the works representative of waves of catastrophic events. In a darkened space with fragile semi-transparent materials, the visitor becomes acutely aware of their body and how it is guided throughout the gallery by the positioning of each work. Pain fills the room. The mind is not focused on specific incidents or issues but rather on the many ‘elephants’ that provide context for a global malaise in which we have become inured to streams of devastating disasters paradoxically until they actually happen.

David Broker, 2018

JANENNE EATON FENCES B/ORDERS WALLS - Keep Clear KATE STEVENS DRONES OVER ALEPPO JESS HIGGINS BLACK ELEPHANT

CATALOGUE BY ALEXANDER BOYNES

FRIDAY 21ST SEPTEMBER SATURDAY 17TH SEPTEMBER 2018 CANBERRA CONTEMPORARY ART SPACE GORMAN ARTS CENTRE, 55 AINSLIE AVENUE BRADDON, CANBERRA ACT 2612 TUESDAY - SATURDAY, 11am - 5pm

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