EXHIBITIONS 2019
In an unexpected coincidence, I’m happy to see some of my works included in concurrent exhibitions from the collections of five museums: The National Gallery of Victoria; Housemuseum Galleries; Art Gallery of Ballarat; Geelong Art Gallery and Bendigo Art Gallery
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IN FULL VIEW - WORKS FROM THE LYON COLLECTION
HOUSEMUSEUM GALLERIES 7 September – 26 JANUARY 2020 Attention wanders across the picture plane and back into space rather like the warp and woof of woven fabric; the eye is never forced into the predictable straitjacket of architectonic form. Eaton is interested in the experience implied in the shallow pictorial space she creates in the same way a portraitist is interested in the character of a face. Her walls of light suggest that there is more to her paintings than simpleminded form or equally obvious metaphysics. Her abstraction scrupulously respects its limits, foregoing both expressive rhetoric and the knowing stance of style revisited. Charles Green, International Art Forum February 1991 Left: Sing the sailors 1990 Oil on canvas 230 x 178 cm |
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NGV COLLECTION – AUSTRALIAN ART
Ian Potter Centre: – NGV Australia The epitome of the subterranean banal, Canberra II is yet wreathed vaguely in hope. Tinged intentionally with atomic overtones, Eaton’s ominous space proffers nuclear shelter for a chosen few – and the drawing’s cavernous gloom thus seems more inviting on reflection. A morbid irony lurks in the fact that Eaton should use such modern materials – photocopy paper, photocopy toner – for a drawing that looks to the oppressive enclosure of a post-holocaust survival centre; for total destruction, after all, is the ultimate purificatory libation of the ‘progressive’ modern technological push. Eat, draw and be merry, for tomorrow we live in Canberra II – and already its door is closing on us. Ted Gott, ’ Backlash – The Australian Drawing Revival 1976 – 1986’. Cat. NGV |
Canberra II, 1982
Graphite and carbon on paper on canvas 161 x226 cm |
ART GALLERY OF BALLARAT
Left:
Terra Australis (1996) Diptych - from the Penal Colony Series. Acrylic, oil, sand, on canvas 183 X 134cm (each panel) |
Right:
Someday maybe (2006) Enamel on canvas 183 x 134cm |
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Geelong Art Gallery
Termoil & Tranquility Recent aquisitions 2018/19 Right:
REEF 2015 (Diptych) 185 x 260cm enamel, mixed media on canvas. |
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Bendigo Art Gallery
The Paul Guest Collection 2019/20 Right:
OK Yellow enamel, mixed media on canvas. 2008 |
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FROM THE COLLECTION:
NATIONAL ANTHEM & A NEW ORDER Buxton Contemporary University of Melbourne 2019 National Anthem – curated by Kate Just See EXHIBITIONS link for details and images. |
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EXHIBITIONS 2017 -2018
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Two exhibitions of Janenne's work have been shown in Canberra September-November 2018:
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Janenne Eaton FENCES B/ORDERS WALLS - KEEP CLEAR, 2018, Acrylic on Hip Impact Styrene, wood, metal, 122 x 1384 cm
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Exhibition dates 10 March – 1 April 2018:
The Yellow Brick Wall The Back Room at Kim’s Corner Food, Chicago, USA DOWNLOAD: Exhibition Press Release Exhibition Link >> |
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The Back Room at Kim’s Corner Food
open to visitors from
8am–8pm daily at 1371 W Estes
Ave, Chicago, IL, 60626, USA
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Installation detail: The Yellow Brick Wall 2017/18 (Vinyl wallpaper, 40cm x 100cm)
24 march – 17 June 2018:
Celebration: 20 years of collecting visual art
Canberra Museum and Gallery, Canberra ACT
Celebration: 20 years of collecting visual art
Canberra Museum and Gallery, Canberra ACT
Creek runner – Hume & Barton Highways, 168 X 375 cm, Enamel on canvas. Collection of Canberra Museum and Gallery.
Wagga Wagga Art Gallery 4 February – 23 April 2017
Mars Gallery, Melbourne, 13 May – 3 June 2017
Exhibition - As Long As The Night Is Dark
Curator Simon Perichic
Mars Gallery, Melbourne, 13 May – 3 June 2017
Exhibition - As Long As The Night Is Dark
Curator Simon Perichic
Pool of worries 2015, 112 x 132cm Enamel, mirror, Femo, on canvas
Exhibition Review: Ashley Crawford, April 2017 – The Article
… As Long as the Night is Dark is an exhibition “that muses on the doomed nature of humanity with playful nihilism and prophetic vision,” Pericich and Gallery Manager Stephen Payne wrote in a statement for the show. “Attuned to the darker sides of the mind and the spirit, ten contemporary Australian artists have offered up works that sit between the anxiety of the future and the melancholy of the past. This multifarious showcase is gathered together in joyous celebration of the dark night of the soul.”
The paintings of the eminent Janenne Eaton question the role of visual arts in the processes of social change, social justice and empowerment. Here in ‘As Long as the Night is Dark,’ Eaton’s dark yet glittering works mingle enamel and mirrors.
READ MORE: http://thearticle.com.au/2017/04/as-long-as-the-night-is-dark-hysteria-and-apocalypse/
… As Long as the Night is Dark is an exhibition “that muses on the doomed nature of humanity with playful nihilism and prophetic vision,” Pericich and Gallery Manager Stephen Payne wrote in a statement for the show. “Attuned to the darker sides of the mind and the spirit, ten contemporary Australian artists have offered up works that sit between the anxiety of the future and the melancholy of the past. This multifarious showcase is gathered together in joyous celebration of the dark night of the soul.”
The paintings of the eminent Janenne Eaton question the role of visual arts in the processes of social change, social justice and empowerment. Here in ‘As Long as the Night is Dark,’ Eaton’s dark yet glittering works mingle enamel and mirrors.
READ MORE: http://thearticle.com.au/2017/04/as-long-as-the-night-is-dark-hysteria-and-apocalypse/
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March/April 2016:
All the things you see now will soon be gone and all the things we can’t see will last forever - Simon Pericich, Art + Australia. 2017. Issue Two (54.1): The Plague p52 – 85 |
Deadhead Glitterati (2008 150 x 130cm enamel, fake diamonds on canvas) |
EXHIBITIONS 2016
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March 2016:
“priNT@CDU” Charles Darwin University, NT 2016
This exhibition is in celebration of 50 years of the Print Council of Australia.
CDU Art Gallery explores the diverse printmaking techniques used by artists and printmakers in the creation of limited edition prints. Download the priNT@CDU room brochure (pdf 923KB).
http://www.cdu.edu.au/artcollection-gallery/artgallery
“priNT@CDU” Charles Darwin University, NT 2016
This exhibition is in celebration of 50 years of the Print Council of Australia.
CDU Art Gallery explores the diverse printmaking techniques used by artists and printmakers in the creation of limited edition prints. Download the priNT@CDU room brochure (pdf 923KB).
http://www.cdu.edu.au/artcollection-gallery/artgallery
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Janenne’s painting: LAT 35:17, LONG 149:09 1991 2016 at the National Gallery of Australia, Level 1; the exhibition Black, draws on works from the Gallery’s collection |
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November - 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, QAGOMA, Brisbane.
Road to the Hills - a text for everything and nothing. 2015/16
https://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/whats-on/exhibitions/apt8/artists/janenne-eaton |
Road to the hills — a text for everything and nothing 2014 is an eerie and expansive work that draws together historical and contemporary threads to reflect on racial intolerance. Eaton's large-scale assemblage combines black modular, reflective panels with a convex mirror and text. Printed on the mirror is a photograph by John B Eaton (the artist's Great uncle) of a lonely country road from which the work derives its title. Contrasting with the peaceful, historical landscape, the reflective panels resemble the view from a surveillance camera and are scattered with symbols of skulls, bullet-holes and text. Dominating the mirrored black panels of the work is the reflected text 'THESE PEOPLE', a recognisable and dismissive reference to asylum seekers in the vernacular of Australian politicians. Eaton combines domestic and local historical references to confront an issue of global significance; the fear and prejudice against communities and individuals who are made to represent a set of abstract principles, their identities constructed in advance with little knowledge or understanding.
QAGOMA - 2015/16 |
Sasha Grishin - Canberra Times October 15th, 2015
Read more: Canberra Times article: LINK
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With the closure of the Helen Maxwell Gallery in 2009, Canberra largely lost sight of Janenne Eaton's work, an artist who had been a regular in the Canberra art scene. In the 1980s she taught at the Canberra School of Art for more than a decade and then went on to teach at the Victorian College of the Arts for another couple of decades. Now she has returned with a major new show at the Nancy Sever Gallery.
In some ways it is difficult to characterise Eaton's art. It is tough, cerebral and prickly. Immaculate in its surfaces, intricate and painstakingly exact in its execution and, despite all of its associations with new technologies, also quite human and somewhat subversive. There is a tension created between the optic effects of the mirrors, patterns, painted bullet holes, the bight neon range of colours and the modernist grid that disciplines and binds the surface together. 
A very attractive small painting is Beautiful fragrant eucalypts, 2015, executed in shiny enamels and in a style which could be described as a white person's geometric dot painting. The title of the work is superimposed in white dots to give the surface an active kinetic quality and there is a play with sharp focus and soft focus elements that enhances the dynamism of the surface.
A land of multiple horizons, 2014, is a large enamel canvas where many of the elements of her art making have been brought together. There is a mesmerising complexity of dots, arranged in several layers, which in the catalogue note is described as a "visual static that permeates contemporary culture". It appears like a highly patterned surface, somewhat mechanical and bursting at its seams. Superimposed on this is lettering which may be deciphered as a somewhat enigmatic inscription "No where's ville". It is this constantly pulsating surface and mixture of cerebral and lyrical elements that runs throughout the exhibition.
I think of Eaton as a modern-day archaeologist who collects data on how we live together in tight urban units and communicate through modern technologies and the power structures that this establishes. Although at first glance her art is cool and detached, below the surface lurks a subversive humour as well as a slightly alarmist and questioning intellect that is trying to make sense of all that is observed. I am reminded of a famous aphorism of French philosopher Michel Foucault when he wrote, "I try to carry out the most precise and discriminative analyses I can in order to show in what ways things change, are transformed, are displaced ... my entire research rests upon the postulate of an absolute optimism. I do not undertake my analyses to say: look how things are, you are all trapped." In Eaton's canvases we appear trapped, but also capable of finding a way out. Sasha Grishin - Canberra Times October 15th, 2015 |
PUBLICATIONS
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Janet McKenzie interview with Janenne Eaton:
Road to the hills – a text for everything and nothing : in Studio International CLICK: Online interview @ Studio International |
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Janenne Eaton - Memory and archive in:
Buffet – a new Melbourne-based publication edited by Isabelle Sully and Simon McGlinn CLICK : www.buffetpublication.com |
PROJECTS 2013
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Pictures at an Exhibition , curated by Rohan Schwartz, with participating artists; commemorating the life and oeuvre of the late French artist and filmmaker Chris Marker, at West Space, Melbourne, September/October 2013
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Reading the Space; Contemporary Australian Drawing #4, 92 drawings at the New York Studio School, during August and September 2013, curated by Dr Irene Barberis.
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In Line, a group exhibition of works curated by Dr Wilma Tobacco at Langford 120, Melbourne, opened in July 2013.
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In Line
Abstract works composed of sequences of seemingly similar repetitive lines, visible either as marks, voids or structural components aggregated in grids or networks evoke deliberation of patterns of recognition, regularity and order, likeness and recurrence.
In her publication, The Infinite Line, Briony Fer notes that repetition is fundamentally a fragmentary condition of perception commanding attention through reiteration and it is through apparent similarity that nuanced differences are exacerbated. She posits that variation inevitably occurs when repetition is generated.
For this exhibition, In Line, I have selected artists whose practices can be categorised as abstract and who tend to organise a variety of pictorial or sculptural elements schematically ‘in line’. Although the modes and intentions of these artists are disparate the works, when placed in proximity, manifest the capacity for diversity, inventiveness and individual expression within linear compositions.
Wilma Tabacco
June 2013
Abstract works composed of sequences of seemingly similar repetitive lines, visible either as marks, voids or structural components aggregated in grids or networks evoke deliberation of patterns of recognition, regularity and order, likeness and recurrence.
In her publication, The Infinite Line, Briony Fer notes that repetition is fundamentally a fragmentary condition of perception commanding attention through reiteration and it is through apparent similarity that nuanced differences are exacerbated. She posits that variation inevitably occurs when repetition is generated.
For this exhibition, In Line, I have selected artists whose practices can be categorised as abstract and who tend to organise a variety of pictorial or sculptural elements schematically ‘in line’. Although the modes and intentions of these artists are disparate the works, when placed in proximity, manifest the capacity for diversity, inventiveness and individual expression within linear compositions.
Wilma Tabacco
June 2013
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In March 2013 Jenny Zhe Chang included reference to my painting Meanwhile – everything hinges on everything else, in an article for the Taiwanese arts and cultural journal, Meimen Bimonthly No 7.
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