EXHIBITION ESSAYS & ARTICLES

Exhibition: Deleting the Monarchy
West Space, Melbourne 2005

Melting Monarchs,  Kate Just, West Space, Melbourne 2005

Essay/Review

Janenne Eaton has spent the last decade on the ‘Penal Colony’ series, a project drawing on the social history of Australia from the arrival of the first fleet.  Investigating notions of colonialism and the ‘convict stain’, among other things, through a diverse practice of painting, printmaking, and video, Eaton has worked as historian, archaeologist and artist in an effort to unearth and question dominant social hierarchies.

Eaton’s current show in Gallery 3 ’Deleting the Monarchy’, is her final work in the Penal Colony ‘ series. Her silent video projection in the space is quiet and spare: it features a long line of English monarchs (in no particular order), being put through a process of ‘removal’ or ‘deletion’. The image of each monarch is different as Eaton has dipped into various sources including New Idea paparazzi shots, reworked so as to avoid copyright kafuffle. Others are historical, and appear to be from encyclopedias or textbooks, while others are art-historical, featuring old paintings of monarchs.

The video works like this: the image of the monarch comes up against a black  background, then through a clever use of an analogue titling effect, a colour (vibrant red in one, turquoise, yellow or green in others) fill the black background.  The third step of ‘deleting’ the monarch happens when black seeps into the image of the royal, transforming him/her into a silhouette against a hyper-colour background.  Then the image fades out.

In the silence of the work there is plenty to contemplate.  At the opening, I heard one person mutter, “Royalty tend to look sort of weird “. The bright backgrounds are blasts of modernity against the often highly decorated figures, making them appear uneasy and ‘old hat’. The repetitive process of deletion lends a banality to the figures, rendering them helpless and plain, removing not just their actual presence but also their ‘star quality’. And a strange thing happens when the black fills in the image of the royal.  The picture starts to quiver, as if, in the process of fading, it is melting, the way the bad witch does at the end of the ‘Wizard of Oz’.

Eaton’s work is not unlike the Oz proposition, where the shift of ‘order’ is neither chaotic not disturbing, but rather a natural ‘next step’. And while there is no cacophony of trumpets and munchkins here, there is a slow burning, whisper of a celebration, one you wouldn’t want to miss.

-  Melting Monarchs,  Kate Just, West Space, Melbourne 2005