Jan Manton
... out of time | Carl Warner
... out of time | Carl Warner
Jan Manton
Desire Path | Karla Marchesi
Desire Path | Karla Marchesi
Jan Manton
False Continuity | Jacinta Giles
False Continuity | Jacinta Giles
Jan Manton
Intimate Dialogues | Judith Wright
Intimate Dialogues | Judith Wright

Transfer Echo | Simon Degroot

 

Transfer Echo | Simon Degroot

24 March - 18 April 2021

Jan Manton Gallery is proud to present Brisbane based artist Simon Degroot in the exhibition Transfer Echo showing from 24 March - 18 April 2021. The exhibition features paintings exploring the expanded interaction and interconnections through the use of Degroot's iconic abstract forms.

Transfer Echo investigates transient and layered abstract shapes which are quintessential to Degoot's practice. Each artwork within the show reveals the nature of these playful forms as they are recontextualised through various applications, colours and materials.

Degroot elaborates on the relationships contained within his series, stating: "This process of mediation and transfer between artworks highlights their formal relationship. Each material manifestation creates a new relationship where meaning is created in the space between works. Through these relationships I can connect with other visual ecologies to create new meaning."

Degroot completed his postgraduate studies at the Queensland College of Art where he was awarded his PhD in 2017 with an exhibition titled, Familiar Beyond Recognition: Translation in Contemporary Abstraction. Degroot has also completed a range of works for entities such as The City of South Perth, Bundaberg Regional Galleries, Queensland Rail, Cairns Regional Council, Brisbane City Council and The Brisbane Hilton.

 

Opening event photography: Cian Sanders.

Nothing to see here | Robyn Stacey

 

Nothing To See Here | Robyn Stacey

3 - 21 March 2021

Robyn Stacey’s exhibition ‘Nothing to see here’ opens at Jan Manton Gallery on the 3 March, 2021. The exhibition will present a series of photographs and lenticular images.

Made by projecting film onto a curtain, the works are as much about the curtain as they are about light and colour. ‘To draw a curtain’ can mean two apparently contradictory things: to pull it aside to reveal what it had concealed, and to pull it in front of an object, in order to hide it. A dynamic of concealment and revelation. The curtain is at once what must be withdrawn to see the truth; and what must be looked at to reveal it.

Essay writer Chloé Wolifson states:

‘For photographic artist Robyn Stacey, the curtain is a device designed to impart neutrality, yet nonetheless hangs heavy with resonance. This makes it the ideal subject for a pure exploration of light and colour while opening up possibilities beyond the visual.’

 

Covid Carnivale | Judith Wright

 

Covid Carnivale | Judith Wright

10 February - 28 February 2021

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Judith Wright’s recent exhibition ‘Covid Carnivale’ showing from 10 February – 28 February. Wright’s latest series of works contain a sense of the carnivalesque and chaotic whilst continuing her preoccupation with theatricality, transience, physicality and the macabre. As stated by Michele Helmrich, ‘Covid Carnivale marks these moments of remembrance at a time when each of us must contemplate our mortality’. The exhibition will present installation-style works on wood as well as a series of large-scale paintings on Japanese paper, each work vibrating with tonal tension due to their vibrant stained surfaces.

We welcome you to enter the Covid Carnivale during our gallery hours Wednesday to Saturday 10am - 5pm & 11- 4pm Sunday.

'The works of Judith Wright shape-shift the viewer into a different mindset. A rational view gives way to a landscape of shadows and fledgling dreams, populated by fragments of creatures, human and otherwise...Above and about us, a cast of animals from farm and zoo, nature, home and spirit oscillate in a mobile of many parts, their flipsides revealing human faces. Painted on oddly shaped scraps of wood, faces and body parts are sometimes suspended one under the other in twos or threes, further animating this strangely happy flock. Have they found release from story books and toys?...'

— Michele Helmrich

 

Between Two Views | Carl Warner

 

Between Two Views | Carl Warner

22 January - 7 February 2021

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Carl Warner's latest exhibition Between Two Views, showing from 22 January - 7 February 2021. Please RVSP below to attend the exhibition's opening, Sunday 24th January from 4 - 6 pm. We welcome you to visit the gallery, Wednesday to Saturday 10am - 5pm & 11- 4pm Sunday.

A mirror allows us to see the impossible. The simplest expression of this impossibility is perhaps that with a mirror we can see ourselves and what is behind us, beyond our direct looking, all at once. In eighteenth century Britain, a particular type of compact mirror, the Claude glass, was used by artists and tourists to view and imaginatively shape the landscape into Picturesque talking points. It was such a popular activity that guidebooks advised of sites where the best views of outstanding landscapes were to be seen with the aid of the glass. The way of seeing and shaping landscape enabled by the Claude glass has numerous contemporary parallels. The mobile phone in size, shape and particular functions is the most obvious. Physically so similar, with the darkened face and fit in the hand, often protected by a protective case, today’s mobile technology does all that the original users of the glass desired. Aesthetic images made and shared in an instant through a transparent technology.

To make these works I walked one hundred miles through the Scottish Highlands and also went to the northern most point of the British Isles to the island of Unst. I was a tourist searching for views, as the earlier users of the glass, who made a familiar landscape strange in the views from their Claudes, were. Near the peak of Conic Hill overlooking Loch Lomond, I watched as people turned their back to the view to make pictures of it, unwittingly re-enacting the actions of those earlier tourists in hunt of the picturesque. The works in this series reference that pivot between two views, recto verso images that make the reduction of the real into two dimensions both obvious and problematic. The ellipse references the Claude glass in its most popular shape, a frame within a frame. They highlight a preference of one view over another, aesthetic decisions that obliterate and negate, but also raise the question: Are those views in the ellipse to the front or behind?

— Carl Warner

 

Miles Hall | Petit Pois

 

Petit Pois | Miles Hall

2 - 24 December 2020

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Miles Hall's latest exhibition PETIT POIS.

Hall is an Australian born artist, though currently resides in Montpelier, France. His recent series of work titled 'Petit Pois' translates to 'the little green pea' and makes reference to the fairytale of the Princess and the Pea.

Miles states in an interview with Louis Martin Chew:

“As I started making this work in April 2020, we went into confinement. And the paintings became something very different. At their base is the idea of layering. The image is the result of embedded layering and this is where the story of the princess and the pea – the green pea – comes in. I always loved the Hans Christian Anderson tale of the twenty mattresses with the pea at the bottom because, in a painting, the underpainting, the first few marks and impressions have a way of coming all the way through and manifesting themselves on the surface.”

 

Lost Pastoral | Saffron Newey

 

Lost Pastoral | Saffron Newey

7 October - 1 November 2020

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Saffron Newey's latest exhibition Lost Pastoral showing from 7 October - 1 November, 2020. 

Lost Pastoral features reminiscences of Romantic landscape paintings, hazy and soft focused, devoid of definition and divorced from their original contexts. Painters Louis Buvelot (Swiss-Australian), Hans Güde (Norwegian), Eugene von Guerard (Austrian-Australian) and Albert Bierstadt (German-American) have been appropriated in this series to present a remembrance of Romantic landscape history painting... Within this body of work the Romantic sublime meets its contemporary, online counterpart – the digital sublime. The latter is a space in which time, place and context become miscellaneous and “other” worlds evolve.
— Saffron Newey

 

Together. Alone. | Dylan Jones

 

Together. Alone. | Dylan Jones

9 September - 4 October 2020

Jan Manton Gallery is proud to present Dylan Jones’ latest exhibition ‘Together. Alone.’

Continuing his preoccupation with the figure, Jones uses the human body as a vehicle to explore the collective and the individual response to times of adversity. Using handmade paint applied in gestural and thick brush strokes, each step of Jones’ process is invested with raw emotion. His work points to a universality and relishes in the spontaneity of his artistic medium as well as the human experience.

2020 may be the most transformative and turbulent year of the 21st century. It is redefining the way people live and connect worldwide. Humanity is experiencing a collective grief in which individuals feel both together and alone simultaneously. Despite the ongoing anxiety and disparity, there continues to be countless acts of kindness and courage. The isolated figures in this series of work capture this state of flux. They appear detached and wounded, yet unified by the vacant abyss in which they reside. Contained within this series of works is a sense of hope and expectation for what is to come.

— Dylan Jones, August 2020

 

Foreign Language | Aaron Butt

 

Foreign Language | Aaron Butt

12 August - 6 September 2020

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Aaron Butt’s recent series of work Foreign Language. 

Within the exhibition, Butt navigates three journeys; his residency in The Netherlands in 2019, Ian Fairweather's 1952 raft journey to Indonesia and documentation of remote 1970s Land Art in America. 

Through the medium of paint, Foreign Language explores photography and the written words’ ability to traverse space and time and give affect to place. These images are largely presented on found vintage substrates, combining abstraction and vast images of nature with small constructed objects.

Natalie Lavelle | Deliberate Pictures

 

Deliberate Pictures | Natalie Lavelle

17 July - 9 August, 2020

Deliberate Pictures is part of a continuing inquiry into concepts that explore surface relationships where visual perception prompts a tangible awareness of painting’s object hood in relation to our own body and the natural world.

These works retain a connection to the ‘thereness’ and ‘thingness’ of a painting, instead of contemplating it as ‘neither being nor nothingness’. They request viewers to comprehend the reality of art, the medium, and the materials that is presented to them. Paintings that offer their own medium as subject point, both, inward to themselves and outward to their relationship with other things. In turn, we become conscious of a recognisable common physicality between object and Self and ultimately our space amongst all things.

Working in spontaneous and investigational methodologies, the paintings navigate constructed forms and space through various brushwork and stitching embedded together in abstract and monochromatic compositions.

 

Flux | Jacinta Giles

 

Flux | Jacinta Giles

11 March - 4 April 2020

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Jacinta Giles, a Brisbane-based artist whose conceptually driven photographic practice explores the complex relationship between perception, memory and temporality within contemporary culture.

In using unconventional photographic processes - which take their cues from how memory operates - the images oscillate between the movement and stillness and the seen and unseen. Through the cutting away of images from the flux of everyday visual experience, their elements are intrinsically displaced in the strange and confined space of the photograph.

In this collection of work the photograph becomes a distancing device, challenging us to an awareness of the structures of visual perception that organise memory. These works also reflect the artist’s commitment to contesting the boundaries of traditional notions of lens-based art, blurring the line between painting, photography and the filmic.

 

History of the Landwehr Canal | Jonathan Kopinski

 

History of the Landwehr Canal | Jonathan Kopinski

12 February - 7 March 2020

Jan Manton Art is pleased to present Jonathan Kopinski, a Brisbane-based artist with a focus on psycho-scenographic paintings that capture very particular and often peculiar moments of both personal and collective history.

Each scene is painted from memory (whether experienced firsthand or informed through learned events), without the use of photographic or reference material. This recording occurs sometimes moments after the incident takes place; other times it emerges after decades. This seperation between experience and representation is a vital part of the painting process, whereby the act of remembering allows for an intensified abstraction of character and setting.

In line with previous efforts, this collection has also been produced without a specific underlying narrative or conceptual arc. This allows for unexpected thematic affinities (i.e. places and issues of societal angst, crisis, politics, idealism) to unconsciously emerge between seemingly unrelated and irrational subject matter, blurring any perceived separation between past, present and future.

 

At the still point, there the dance is | Aaron Perkins

 

At the still point, there the dance is | Aaron Perkins

12 February - 7 March, 2019

Jan Manton Art is pleased to present Aaron Perkins’ latest series of work At the still point, there the dance is.

In this series, Perkins continues his exploration of history painting as a means to critically engage with the current affairs of contemporary society.

Using an abstracted combination of text and image obtained from various online news services, the works resist an all-at-once perception to privilege subjective interpretations made in the space between abstraction and figuration, between looking and reading, and between surface and interface.

 

Transient Journals | Adriane Strampp

Transient Journals| Adriane Strampp

5 -25 October, 2019

Adriane Strampp’s new exhibition Transient Journals continues her investigation of memory, connection and deterioration. The landscape has been a recurring subject in Strampp’s paintings, not in the traditional historical sense, but instead as a continuing exploration of landscapes remembered, random moments and quiet views of the ordinary observed. In these new works we see a more intimate view of the artist’s world, of places once familiar reworked through multiple layers, passages edited or dissolved, wiping away portions of the image as if leaving only that portion recalled. Although the human form remains in absentia, as in much of her earlier work, here we see traces of a human presence having been. Simon Schama (1995. pp.6/7) in Landscape and Memory states that:

Before it can ever be the repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from the strata of memory as from layers of rock.

Documenting transient moments and that which is impermanent is for Strampp a key to continuity, a personal archive of the small moments that secures the past. Working with old Polaroid and photographs as a starting point, Strampp edits and layers multiple images, drawing connections to piece together a personal history of a past remembered.