DaDa Flow | September 01 - September 23, 2006

Janet Jones
Peak Gallery | Canadian Art | Spring 2007, Volume 24 Number 1
by Nell Tenhaaf

These paintings are a sensory delight.  At first they appear to be composed of forms that are tightly held in place, constrained and delimited, but they expand far beyond this immediate experience and offer much more. Their full visual effect is very physical, in that volumes push out into the viewer’s space from the dark linear shapes that seem to hold them, and these volumes move both in depth and laterally across the canvases. There is an almost magical optical effect generated by the paintings: their visual field oscillates between two kinds of spaces, one geometrical and the other soft, and these can be held simultaneously in view in a gorgeous interplay of deep blacks and mostly muted colours, in meticulous striations of matte and glossy finish. This happens in different ways in the various works. The DaDa Flow series of three large paintings employs a vertical geometry that suggests the intimidating positive and negative spaces of skyscraper arrays, while the two works Nowhere, Everywhere #4 and #6 are in panoramic format, like very unreal landscapes. The edges of all of these canvases are painted in bold colours, so that looking at them from either side, or from above when possible, again radically alters what is seen. A series of four smaller works called Solo are a more atmospheric exploration of the same interests.

The small crosshairs, ellipses, circles, and stepped lines that float on top of the forms in the large paintings are puzzling at first. They don’t seem integrated with the apparent structure in the works because they seem to be above their surfaces. They are almost irritating because one has to look either at them or past them. That turns out to be what these works ask for: pattern and form are revealed in the process of concentrating on these seemingly extraneous details, a steadied gaze that leads to a “looking askance.” The strategy is reminiscent of other optical tactics such as anamorphosis or trompe l’oeil, but because of the suggestion of targets and diagrams in her small marks, Jones’ optics make more reference to surveillance than to the curiosities of perspective.

GALLERY GOING
Janet Jones at Peak Gallery
GARY MICHAEL DAULT
$2,300-$9,500. Until September 23,
23 Morrow Ave., Toronto;
416-537-8108

Much of the difficulty arising from the paintings of Janet Jones is traceable to the peculiar and almost touching way in which her considerable critical intelligence (she teaches at York University) tends to formulize and otherwise throttle her expressiveness. The paintings she makes -- of which these new ones, gathered under the rubric DaDa Flow, are exemplary -- tend to bend, bathetically, beneath the impress of her own (highly informed) programmatic ambitions for them.

The paintings begin, she tells us in her weighty artist's statement, as black-and-white photographs taken in such sterile spaces as the "lobbies of multinational corporations or the underground passageways that control the flow of people." As a woman, she claims to feel vulnerable in these spaces (spaces "problematized by gender and power relations"), a condition that somehow transforms the photos and the paintings that result from them into "visualizations of feminist geography."

Jones's painted spaces are thus surveillance spaces. And they are different, she points out needlessly and indeed inexplicably, from the spaces of the flâneur -- whose nature she gets quite grievously wrong ("the desiring 19th-century man who, in part, once watched women on the streets of Paris. . .").

Well, yes, they would be. Then, after a useless but hip little dithyramb about "panopticonic space," Jones comes to a point where she offers the smooth, dark surfaces of her paintings as evocations of the sublime. But not the sublime generated from grandiose and humbling nature. Jones's is a technologically born sublime, the new "techno-sublime." She thus eats her art history and has it too.

Fine, fine. But what are the paintings like? Well, they do have a certain "newness" about them (and this is something Jones manages well). They are sleek, bloodless and clever. They are either vertical sets of illusionistically painted black "columns," enlivened with little, severe, deco-like speed and direction marks, or they are clenched, horizontal artificial vistas (Nowhere, Everywhere) that look like expansive diagrams from Scientific American.

Their surfaces are immaculate, their event horizons bleak and mechanically performative. And they might have passed for despairing and even elegiac if they didn't seem so aloof and so solipsistically pleased with their own immaculateness. Can this really be the space of "feminist geography"?

about the exhibition