EXHIBITION ESSAYS & ARTICLES

Exhibition: Nothing lasts forever 2008
John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne

Information versus meaning – catalogue essay by Ulanda Blair 

To imagine the phrase information versus meaning is to take something whole and pronounce a divide within it, to cross a line between the measurable and the measurer.  What we can know and what we can feel do not precisely add up; one does not map onto the other.   

Information is quantifiable, measurable, the scientific characteristic of systems in the world.  By contrast, meaning approaches meaninglessness, relegated to the irrational world of quality, tactility, and the humanistic realms of thought felt.  Meaning cannot be counted, even as it can be counted upon, and yet meaning is all we ever really know, all we have direct experience of.  We can hypothesize all we like on the universe of information, but our being can grasp only the intangibility of meaning.

Janenne Eaton’s most recent series of paintings Nothing Lasts Forever, explores this impasse.   Gathering together some of the key signifiers of our info-centric society – strings of binary code, grids, matrices and pixels – each work is a painterly representation of the visual static that permeates contemporary culture.  Pitching the rational against the intuitive and revealing a complex interplay between them, Nothing Lasts Forever highlights how awkwardly and precariously meaning is ascribed to the man-made sign systems that mediate our day-to-day experiences of the world.  

Take Untitled 2008, a multi-panelled enamel painting, whose glossy patina is the result of a slow and laborious process of layering and accrual.  With its signature mesh underlay – a black stencilled grid that wraps around eight individual panels, each grid sitting in jarring co-habitation with its neighbour – Eaton’s Untitled 2008 depicts a torrent of shimmering, graphic droplets that could just as easily represent tears, as acid rain, oil or blood.  Penetrating the underlying grid and thus revealing that system’s paradoxically vapid and mercurial framework, Eaton frees the grid of its Modernist shackles, permitting an infiltration of narrative, discourse and history.  From mass media communications, to online news feeds, to computer games, manga, global satellite footage, cyber-architecture and Hollywood film, Untitled 2008 triggers a range of capricious associations, but surrenders to none.     

Further fields of meaning are summoned in Beep code 2008 and SIM 2007, two paintings that outwardly reference the bugs and bit errors that our computer and mobile networks strive to eradicate.  With delicate dot-screen overlays punctuated by a smattering of elliptical ‘blind spots’, both Beep code and SIM express a tension between their flat physical surfaces and the seemingly infinite forms that they describe: littered shrapnel, refracted light from a disco ball, a constellation of stars, an asteroid belt, confetti, television snow.  Letters, numbers and shapes overlap and integrate, whilst blurred abstract elements hover on the edge of representation, traversing the slippery slopes of reality and illusion.

In Red zone/green zone: the principles of colour 2007, Eaton calls upon military designations to interrogate the arbitrariness of colour systems – Red Zones are the war zones and Green Zones are the secured, ‘safe’ zones in the current war in Iraq. Using a stencilled grid of pixels as scaffolding, Eaton’s shadowy backdrop slithers back and forth between two- and three-dimensional realms, at times appearing like mountainous geographical terrain captured in the viewfinder of an aerial surveillance system.  Strewn with bullet-hole decals that ooze coloured streams of paint, these stickers resemble portals into another dimension; a pre-Euclidean or virtual world where colour bears little relation to the systems we know and use today. Likewise illustrative of our society’s immersion in violence and materialism, the bullet-hole decals appear in the remaining three paintings in the series, Illusions - hardly dangerous 2008, Nothing Lasts Forever 2008, Way Home 2007 and Deadhead Glitterati 2008; the latter two honouring that most universal symbol of finiteness, the human skull. 

And indeed, as Eaton’s latest exhibition reminds us, nothing lasts forever.  Nothing.  No thing.  Nothingness.  Time and space are unbounded and impervious to the awkward logic of the man-made frame, and its grids, and codes, and symbols, and languages.  All we can do in the face of such uncertainty is hurtle through time and space, relying on art like Eaton’s to cross the gap between body, being and expression; to find a flickering light of connection between the self and the world beyond the skin.   

Information versus meaning – catalogue essay by Ulanda Blair  2008