EXHIBITION ESSAYS & ARTICLES

Exhibition: Bella vista  2009
John Buckley Gallery, Melbourne

Imitation of Life – memory and mimicry in Canberra region art
Deborah Clark, catalogue essay, Canberra Museum and Gallery 2011

Janenne Eaton’s painting Creek runner – Hume and Barton Highways 2009 represents an unfolding landscape, a journey through the country between Canberra and Melbourne envisioned through the filters of memory and personal experience, and the visual language of maps and road signs.  To look at this painting is to read its litany of names, which is both the subject and the formal structure of the work.  The names are those of creeks the artist has regularly crossed in the thirty years of driving between her two homes in Melbourne and Canberra.

Eaton’s painted gazetteer mimics digitally produced roadside imagery in its black and yellow palette and flickering stenciled underlay, a trompe l’oeil effect achieved through the meticulous application of many layers of high gloss enamel paint.  Creek runner’s glow and sparkle evokes the sensation of driving through the gold and straw- coloured pastures of south-eastern Australia, sun and headlights bouncing off reflective road signs.  Its tonality, lyrical use of the repetitions of language and grid format link it with the work of Rosalie Gascoigne, many of whose inventive assemblages of the Canberra region landscape utilized discarded traffic signs, and Tillers.  In its impeccably illusionistic surface the painting suggests how humans imagine and construct our everyday world through contemporary technology.

 - exert:  Imitation of Life – memory and mimicry in Canberra region art, Debra Clark, catalogue essay, Canberra Museum and Gallery 2011