EXHIBITION ESSAYS & ARTICLES

Exhibition: Negotiating This World: Contemporary Australian Art
National Gallery of Victoria 2013

- exert: Janenne Eaton, Kelly Gellatly,
101 Contemporary Australian Artists, National Gallery of Victoria, 2012

Like many of the artist’s recent paintings, These people, 2004–06, is built entirely in black and white, alluding to the past and to memory (and the distortion of ‘the truth’ that can occur across time) through its connection to newspaper print, old photographs, and the fuzzy-edged images of pre-colour television. However, any possible sense of nostalgia, safety or closure in this evocation of the past is immediately undercut by the deadpan text that sits at the work’s centre; calling to mind contemporaneous issues such as illegal immigration and border security, population control and racism that continue to trouble Australia and the international community. Contained and framed within a white gridded structure executed in spray paint over the work’s otherwise pristine surface, the ‘sign post’ nature of the text is also reinforced by two red blinking LED lights centred at the top and bottom of the canvas. As David Hansen has commented:

Finally, there are the words: ‘these people’, ‘heart and soul’, ‘nevertheless’, ‘pissing in the river’ … Such partial utterances run across and through and under the paintings’ crossword boxes, their brevity and disconnectedness making them neither slogans nor aphorisms, but more like stifled complaints or muffled threats. The curt phrases balance meaning and emptiness, passion and platitude. In pictorial terms, it is testimony to Eaton’s highly-tuned visual and conceptual sensitivities (and technical virtuosity) that she is able to hold the linguistic-textual content in humming tension with the abstract-formal surface. Neither element obtrudes. Neither side wins.3

3 David Hansen in ‘Bedrock principles’ in Angle of Head, Helen Maxwell gallery at Silvershot, Melbourne, 2006

Some of the ideas expressed in this piece first occurred in Kelly Gellatly, ‘Janenne Eaton’, in Alex Baker, Kelly Gellatly & Jane Devery, 2009 Clemenger Contemporary Art Award (exh. cat.), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2009, pp. 28–29.

- exert: Janenne Eaton, Kelly Gellatly, 101 Contemporary Australian Artists, National Gallery of Victoria, 2012