EXHIBITION ESSAYS & ARTICLES

Exhibition: 2009 Clemenger Contemporary Art Award
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Exert:  Janenne Eaton, Kelly Gellatly, catalogue essay, 2009.

Janenne Eaton’s background and ongoing interest in archaeology continues to have a profound influence on her work.[1] Each meticulously constructed and crafted canvas reflects the sustained appeal of accumulation – of time and event, of visual evidence, and perhaps most importantly, of human agency. Eaton’s paintings are shimmering meditations on the complex and deeply embedded structures of power and control that have shaped our histories and corral our present. While undeniably and almost defiantly ‘now’[2], these works bloom from, contain, and somehow seem to also strangely compress, the intersections and differences between the personal and social; the impact of the past, and the overwhelming responsibilities of today (for tomorrow). Yet despite the fact that Eaton’s canvases provide identifiable reference or entry points that enhance connection, their iconography deliberately resists the satisfaction of a neat resolution. On studying these works we are captured in and reflected back from their highly glossy surfaces; suspended within beautiful paintings inspired by ugly things. ‘Where we stand’ determines just what we see within their carefully layered imagery, and there is no doubt that Eaton wants, indeed insists, that we are put to work – made to consider just how our own ghostly presence sits in relation to the various issues – ignorant, confused, powerless, implicated, complicit? – that circulate at their surface.

Much of Eaton’s visual influence comes from the flattened space of the screen – from the mediated worlds of film, television and the computer. The bitmap symbols of OUTGO, 2009 for example, are based upon the corrupted code of Eaton’s work; code created when one of the artist’s paintings was fed into the computer and it tried to read it as a text file, rather than that of an image. The fact that the work begins at a point of miscommunication is significant. Eaton consciously attempts to create a kind of digital space in OUTGO; a deeply layered rather than perspectival environment built upon a foundation of dot-screen spray-painted grids. Capturing a sense of a loss of information and the breakdown of communication in its floating, pixelated forms, the painting’s blinking characters also tellingly mimic (in this time of the big GFC [Global Financial Crisis]), the red and green LED feeds of the global stock exchange – abstract information that can nevertheless determine prosperity or poverty, and the power or downfall of nations. Fascinated by the schism between our human (analogue) relationships and an increasingly technological existence, Eaton is interested in the manner in which these changes to communication and our way of being in the world impact upon our empirical reality; how we reconcile our everyday, physical lives with the demands (and potential disappointments) of our new, and supposedly-improved, digital selves……

- Exert:  Janenne Eaton, Kelly Gellatly, catalogue essay, 2009 Clemenger Contemporary Art Award, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2009 
 
[1] Eaton completed a Bachelor of Arts (Prehistory and Art History) at the Australian National University, Canberra.
[2] This has been aptly described by David Hansen as “a frame of presentness”. See David Hansen, “Bedrock principles” in Angle of Head, exh. cat., Helen Maxwell Gallery at Silvershot, Melbourne, 2006, n.p.