DaDa Flow #3 acrylic & oil on canvas 96”x54”
2006
DaDa Flow #2 acrylic & oil on canvas 96”x54”
2006
Solo #2 oil on canvas 14”x14” 2006
Solo #1 oil on canvas 14”x14” 2006
Solo #4 oil on canvas 14”x14” 2006
DaDa Flow #1 acrylic & oil on canvas 96”x54”
2006
Nowhere, Everywhere #6 acrylic & oil on canvas 30”/120”
2003
Nowhere, Everywhere #4 acrylic & oil on canvas 30”/120”
2006 |
My paintings begin from the black and white photographs I take of the
sterile interiors of such seemingly public spaces as the lobbies' of multinational
corporations or the underground passageways that control the flow of people.
As a woman, my relation to public space has always been problematised
by gender and power relations. The photographs I take in this performative
aspect of my process are psychological impressions, located everywhere
yet nowhere, rather than an attempt at literal documentation. Both the
photographs and the paintings that evolve from them are visualizations
of feminist geography.
One of my major concerns is with the hybrid space of our contemporary
globalized environment. In these spaces, the real and the virtual mingle
becoming immersive, destabilizing and ecstatic. In the spaces through
which I travel, photographing becomes a transgressive act done with the
knowledge that I am under electronic surveillance, surveying the surveyors.
But, I am primarily watched not by the desiring 19th century man,
the flâneur who, in part, once watched women on the streets of
Paris but by the all seeing electronic eye. Panopticonic space has moved
outside of Jeremy Bentham’s prison censoring our actions even
in our blind spots. Extending beyond the urban 'gaze' of the surveillance
camera, now we can all be tracked and positioned even in the wilderness.
Space has collapsed blending the near and the far, the real and the
virtual, the urban and the rural. In my paintings I try to visualize
this new globalized space that is layered and fluid. I merge impressions
of my present urban environment with, for example, those seen on T.V.
of a bomb exploding in a remote village, memories of living for four
months in a tent on Meares Island, B.C., or looking out of a train window
going across Siberia.
I see the surfaces of my paintings as hovering somewhere between
skin and screen caressed by my touch but with no tracking of the hand/brush
visible. The colour is purposely fake. Life has turned into 'still
life' frozen on the screen, reflected in the glass, observed, recorded,
transmitted, digitized. The elongated, panoramic format of the paintings
envelops our gaze and reflects back to the historic panoramic photos
of natural wonders. Translucent shiny layers of colour act as both
barriers and filters that position the viewers or spectators as the
surveyors looking out from the gaps or 'windows' in the imagined viewing
chambers.
The extreme contrasts of light and dark evoke the sublime, but not
the sublime in nature seen in the work of the 19th century painters
such as Friedrich and Turner. Now that nature has been observed, measured,
subjected to experiments and tabulated as part of the Enlightenment
Project, it may retain its beauty but in our arrogance we assume that
it has lost much of its sense of terror intrinsic to the sublime.
In out ability to evoke this emotion 'god' has been replaced by man.
Within the contemporary world, man's technological achievements have
become the new sublime, the techno- sublime. But in assuming this
role of 'god' have we become Mary Shelley's Dr Frankenstein?
Janet Jones
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