EXHIBITION ESSAYS & ARTICLES

Exhibition:  Equidistant – anatomy of a project, 2001
West Space, Melbourne

Essay/Review: Janenne Eaton, West Space, Richard Holt, Review, Like Magazine 15, 2001 

Each evening, as the sun makes it’s smog-stained descent and the lights begin to flicker on the oily surface of Hong Kong harbor, the cardboard collectors emerge. On Po Yan Street and hundreds of others like it – steep, narrow and intimate – the old women drag their sleds of flattened boxes.  It is a detail that passes and dissolves into the life of the place.  It is from such observations of the ordinary that Janenne Eaton’s recent West Space installation was conceived.  The complex tableaux she created reconstructed her experience as an artist engaging briefly but intensely with the city and culture of Hong Kong via her involvement in the Materia Prima exchange between West Space and Para/Site (a project with which I was also involved).

Eaton’s precise sense of place underpinned the exquisite transformation of West Space’s two main galleries during April. Place, for Eaton is a concept that is at once physical, cultural and sensual, and exists not at one moment, but occupies the past, present, and future.

Although establishing a memory of a particular moment (late 19199), the artist also incorporated elements from pop culture tradition. Both personal and historical narratives were woven together.  She included, along with visual mementos, smells and textures from Hong Kong.  High and low technologies were also used together unselfconsciously.  On one wall diagrammatic representations of chopstick techniques were enlarged by an overlay of simple magnifying sheets.  In the next room a large video projection played diarized souvenirs of the artists time in Hong Kong.  The theme of hidden histories, particularly the Chinese experience on the goldfields central to much of Eaton’s recent work, was not forgotten.  But with this piece the artist positioned herself as something more than an observer.  The overlap between contemporary experience as an Australian and the history of an earlier time was paralleled by the artist’s own experience of ’foreignness’ and the desire for a level of understanding through cultural engagement.

Two narrative devices were harnessed in pursuit of this complex undertaking.  Firstly, historical and contemporary documents wallpapered the space.  The effect was not dissimilar to the use of newspaper cuttings as cheap wall covering.  Thus the speculative memory of buildings(inherent in phrases such as ‘if these walls could talk’ or a ‘fly on the wall’) was given voice.  The second narrative element, the video ‘diaries’ fro the original Materia Prima project, represented a different kind of memory:  the collection and distillation of lived experience.  Perhaps it was in the bringing together of personal and collective memory that Eaton’s installation was at its most challenging.

Red dominated this installation, as did particular materials – paper, bamboo, cardboard.  Grids and constructions controlled the space that was, given the scope of the artist’s vision, surprisingly light and uncluttered.  The effect was similar to one’s first impression of arriving on Hong Kong Island.  The city clambers wildly across unlikely terrain, yet remains essentially logical.  As an evocation of place, and much more besides, this work was a startling achievement.  I could almost imagine the clickety – clack of mahjong tablets being shuffled as I climbed the stairs back down to Anthony Street and out into another Melbourne Autumn. 

- Janenne Eaton, West Space, Richard Holt, Review, Like Magazine 15, 2001

[ Further reading go to essay "Learning Chinese" ]