Liquid Dreams | Jumaadi

Liquid Dreams | Jumaadi

1 - 23 December, 2021

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Liquid Dreams by Jumaadi on show between 1 - 23 December 2021. Liquid Dreams continues the artists’ exploration of watercolour and gouache on paper and delves into the artists' portrayal of isolation through a series of bare horizons. Jumaadi’s new works acknowledge the landscape’s continuity and finds solace in feelings of loneliness.

Catalogue essay writer Taylor Hall states: Painted with gouache and watercolour on paper, Jumaadi creates each work with a sense of intuition, fuelled by daydreams which flow, like paint, through the brush and onto paper. In describing his works, Jumaadi says they, “accommodate my thoughts and feelings... before forming their compositions intuitively; flowing through the grass in some meadow... they become the answers, and at the same time they also become the questions. They are a record of my liquid dreams.”

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Photograph of Jumaadi taken by Matt Chun.

From the Studio

Jan Manton Gallery caught up with Jumaadi to learn more about his upcoming solo exhibition Liquid Dreams on show between 1 - 23 December 2021. 

Gallery Intern Embie Tan Aren talked on the phone with Jumaadi to hear more...

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Resolution | Joseph Daws

Resolution | Joseph Daws

10 - 28 November, 2021

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Joseph Daws’ exhibition Resolution on show from 10 - 28 November 2021.

Joseph Daws describes the effect of these seemingly pixelated paintings, stating:

Allowing the works to have the openness to connect with a wider discourse is an important aspect. I'm not going to say what it is or isn't. And if you look at the works, they're not trying to represent an object in pictorial space. So it's the structure of the work itself that does the referencing.

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From the Studio

Jan Manton Gallery rang Joseph Daws in the lead up to his upcoming solo exhibition Resolution, 10 - 28 November 2021. During our conversation, Daws spoke about his latest series of works, including his newfound use of heavily pixelated imagery and their obscured relationship between seeing and understanding images in the digital age.

Gallery Assistant Zali Matthews sat on the phone with Daws to learn more…

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Room with a View | Dylan Jones

Room with a View | Dylan Jones

6 October - 24 October

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Dylan Jones’s exhibition Room with a View, on show from 6 October - 24 October 2021.

Room with a View presents Jones’ first series of works painted with gouache, a significant departure from his typical oil paintings. Depicting the iconic landscape of Sydney Harbour, Jones looks away from its most famous sights and towards its ubiquitous coastlines. In these works, Jones creates soft, ephemeral scenes which invite the viewer to lull in their spacious compositions.

Jones states: As an artist, I believe it is imperative to push towards a new challenge rather than staying static. With this in mind, during early 2021 I deliberately placed myself amongst the iconic landscape of Sydney Harbour. An environment I previously would have deemed too beautiful to paint.

Throughout time, artists have been drawn to this site as a source of inspiration. Masters such as Arthur Streeton, Margaret Preston and Brett Whiteley all depicted their unique vision and response to this place and reveal the harbour with a certain unimaginable brilliance. Room With A View offers a fresh take on the subject and allows me to make my own mark in this lineage. Each work portrays the harbour in a humbler light, granting me the tranquilly to digest the environment’s overwhelming beauty on my own terms.

Instead of seeking out the conventional ‘postcard vistas’ we are accustomed to seeing, I positioned my entire focus through the East facing window of my accommodation when painting each work. The physical act of distancing myself from the landscape allowed my viewpoint to become less site specific. I was able to respond to the immediacy of my surroundings in order to reimagine structures and scenes of the everyday in a new, ubiquitous setting. The paintings do not settle on an exact moment in time, but instead have an ephemeral quality. The approach is one of subtlety and softness, inviting the viewer to lull in each spacious composition.

— Dylan Jones, 2021

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Echoes of Process | Joachim Froese

Echoes of Process | Joachim Froese

September 15 - 3 October, 2021

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Joachim Froese’s exhibition Echoes of Process on show from 15 September - 3 October 2021.

Echoes of Process will present a variety of salt prints as a part of Froese’s Entangled series as well as two large scale works (both consisting of 56 individual prints) from his Wollemi Giants series; a green tea toned cyanotype print and a waxed inkjet printed paper negative. Through using historical and contemporary processes, Froese illustrates the oscillation between science and art and our own rational and emotional ambiguous relationship with the non-human world.

Froese states, ‘With Echoes of Process, I am returning to analogue black/white photography but this time it means a completely new mode of working as most of the beautiful black/white papers and developers I used before 2000 aren’t around anymore – at least not in Australia. I now make everything myself from scratch and I am returning right to the beginnings of photography. Salt prints and cyanotypes are handmade: a sheet of paper is coated with one or more chemical solutions which I mix up to create a light sensitive emulsion. My darkroom has transformed into a small chemistry lab.’

Catalogue Essay Writer Adam Monohon writes ‘Froese’s extensive investigations into process (whether photographic, botanic, or climatic) collapses rigid distinctions (between historic and contemporary, analogue and digital, art and science) and invites sustained engagement and careful contemplation on behalf of the viewer. These works act as a call to attention, as well, subtle reminders of the complexity and entanglement of an increasingly fragile world.’

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Bourgeois Spoon | Jonathan Kopinski

Bourgeois Spoon | Jonathan Kopinski

August 25 - September 12, 2021

Jan Manton Gallery is proud to present Bourgeois Spoon by Jonathan Kopinski. In line with previous efforts, Kopinski’s latest series of work has 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. 

Exhibition essay writer Zali Matthews state, ‘Architecture, world politics, economics, the human body and Renaissance art – Kopinski’s interests stretch far and wide. In Bourgeois Spoon, these themes and references are heavily peppered across a series of works painted on canvas boards, arranged by the artist into various polyptychs. Muted colours and simplified compositions dominate, painted alternately with thick, steady layers of paint and explosive streaks of dry colour.’ 

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Pneumatophores | Aaron Butt

Pneumatophores | Aaron Butt

4 - 22 August, 2021

Following his previous exhibition Foreign Language at Jan Manton Gallery in 2020, Aaron Butt’s latest exhibition Pneumatophores chronicles the moment Australian artist Ian Fairweather (1891-1974) landed on Rote Island, Indonesia, after his 16-day raft journey in 1952. Fairweather was held by the Indonesian authorities under suspicion of being a spy, but was permitted to walk the island under supervision. In response to this event, Butt has painted a series of works which give images to this imageless experience. Through these works, viewers have the opportunity to explore this beautiful yet isolating landscape as Fairweather once might have done. 

Accompanying this series is a group of works depicting views from Butt’s local area, including Bribie Island, Sandstone Point and Mulgumpin (Moreton Island), as well as Northern New South Wales. These scenes as well as the surfaces they are painted on were collected during walks and short trips in the area, many due to travel restrictions. The use of found objects alludes to Fairweather’s use of humble materials as well as Butt’s investment in both the image and the object, therefore expanding the way in which the artwork can be engaged with.

In undertaking these explorations, Butt also acts as a witness to the beauty and diversity of Australia’s east coast, while intimately exploring themes of isolation which hold particular poignancy during this time. Current restrictions have afforded Butt the unique opportunity to look more intimately at his surrounding environment and appreciate the timelessness of these local landscapes. 

The artist respectfully acknowledges the Djindubari, Gubbi Gubbi, Ningy Ningy, Ngugi and Bundjalung people as the Traditional Owners of the land on which the works in the exhibition were made and depict.

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Recent Works | Dai Li

Recent Works | Dai Li

July 14 - 1 August, 2021

Dai’s artworks are drawn from everyday life and the art and culture of the world at large. Her work focuses on people’s emotional states, how these manifest externally, and the mystery of how they arrived at this point. It is this same quality of intrigue that she seeks to engender in the experience of her own artwork, for the viewers of her work to relate to and reflect upon their own experiences. The characters often seem quirky, humorous, childish but thought-provoking.

 The characters and names in the exhibition are all fictitious, any similarity is purely coincidental.

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Fleeting | Jacinta Giles

Fleeting | Jacinta Giles

14 July - 1 August, 2021

the fragment and miniature encourage each other—evoking the singular, and rare, the fragile, the ephemeral, and the compressed as materially and poetically valuable.[1]

Fleeting is literally things in motion. Things that are defined by their capacity to affect and that can only be seen obtusely in the haptic space in the middle of things—a space that exists between the representational and the abstract. In slowing our quick jump to representational thinking the photographs in this series question our well-known picture of the world; provoking attention to those somethings (things that happen) that throw themselves together as an immanent force. Through movement, materiality, and a texturing of sensation, the artworks in Fleeting bring into sight the intensities of the ordinary via compositions of disparate scenes and transient fragments. Located between displaced perception and hesitant action, Fleeting facilitates an awareness and responsiveness to what Kathleen Stewart describes as:

matter in an unfinished world…a not yet that fringes every determinate context of normativity with a margin of something deferred or something that failed pressing to arrive, or has been lost, or is waiting in the wings, nascent perhaps.[2]

[1] Vivian Carol Sobchack, "Nostalgia for a Digital Object," in Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film, ed. Peter Weibel and Jeffrey Shaw (London;Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2003), 71.

[2] Stewart, "Weak Theory In An Unfinished World," 80.July 14 - 1 August, 2021

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Vanity Fair: Select Works | Karla Marchesi

Vanity Fair: Select Works | Karla Marchesi

23 June - 11 July, 2021

Jan Manton Gallery is excited to announce the recent representation of Karla Marchesi in her latest exhibition of select works. Brisbane-born and Berlin based, Marchesi has Bachelor of Fine Art (2004) and Honours in Fine Art (2007) degrees from the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, where she received the University Medal for academic excellence and the Honours Thesis Prize. Marchesi received the Philip Bacon Galleries Prize for Excellence in Drawing in 2003, enabling her to study for a semester at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, US.

Marchesi has held solo exhibitions in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, and internationally in Singapore, Luxembourg and Germany. In 2012 she undertook a studio residency at Atelierhaus Mengerzeile, Berlin that preceded her first international solo exhibition at Kunsthalle M3, Berlin. Marchesi is a recipient of the 1st Prize in the Redland Art Awards (2010), the Wilson Visual Arts Award (2012) and an Australia Council for the Arts Early Career New Work Grant (2013). Her work is included in a number of public collections including the Museum of Brisbane, Queensland University of Technology, the University of Queensland Art Museum, the Australian Catholic University and several regional galleries.

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Pronounced Á-Nem-Oy | Aaron Perkins

Pronounced á-nem-oy | Aaron Perkins

2 June - 20 June 2021

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Aaron Perkins in his latest exhibition Pronounced á-nem-oy, exhibiting from 2-20 June 2021. Perkins writes:

To sail is to read the wind. However, despite a recent residency atop the Maroochy Sailing Club on Chambers Island, I have no experience on rafts, yachts, catamarans or any other masted what-nots. The points of sail are unintelligible to me and my movements over the water are illiterate.

Despite this inexperience, in Pronounced á-nem-oy Perkins nevertheless attempts to harness the wind to continue his exploration of language through abstraction. In a suite of paintings, works on paper, and video that hitch the literature of Ancient Greece to the telegraphic system of flag semaphore, Perkins orients himself within space and language, likening seeds blown by the wind to units of speech, and playfully exploring the evolution of language — albeit sometimes along failed routes…

In the catalogue essay by Jude Anderson, Perkins’ skill as an “Anemoi Purveyor” – that is, as someone promoting the wind – is said to lay in “his deliberate, deeply considered visual techniques, and his delight in offering the ancient languages of winds and sailing to speak playfully with us”. This we recognise and extend as an invitation to all to join us in Perkins’ play at Jan Manton Gallery.

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i have had the privilege of seeing dawn and dusk bite through daylight hours | Arryn Snowball

I have had the Privilege of seeing dawn and dusk bite through daylight hours

| Arryn Snowball

12 May - 30 May 2021

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to debut Arryn Snowball in his latest exhibition i have had the privilege of seeing dawn and dusk bite through daylight hours on show from May 12 - 30 2021. Driven by a constant ‘open process’, his new works are injected with effervescent colour. Each piece is drenched in the ambiguity of both shared and personal nostalgia, of the fluidity of light and water and the elasticity of form and text. 

This suite of paintings is an extension of his Slack Water series which began in 2017. The project emerged as a response to an abstract and visceral body of poems by Australian writer Nathan Shepherdson who reimagined pages found in the book Grant’s Guide to Fishes by Ern Grant. 

Snowball paints with an open process, like a loose grid reminiscent of his net-like structures and elements which weave throughout the exhibition. The paintings are washed over in colours reflective of the ocean which produce undetermined images. For Snowball, they become an entanglement of memories reminiscent from his time spent as a kid fishing on the coast, on beaches and headlands. 

“I paint simply, layering line over colour, colour over line, colour over colour. At some point, the painting becomes its own thing, able to hold itself up, something more than lines and colour,” writes Snowball. “When it starts to breathe, I stop. The finished paintings are rarely what I expect. It’s an open process, and can change at any point. If I get stuck, I look for more clues in the poem.” 

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Opening event photography: Cian Sanders.

Rekindle | Natalie Lavelle

Rekindle | Natalie Lavelle

21 April - 9 May 2021

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Natalie Lavelle in her latest exhibition Rekindle, on show from 21 April – 9 May 2021. This exhibition explores the luminosity and weight of colour in a ‘rekindling’ of the mid-century art movements of colour field abstraction and minimalism.

Rekindle demonstrates Lavelle’s playful edge as an artist through her minimalist aesthetic, attention to detail, and love for colour, which she washes over or stains onto the canvas in thin, successive layers. Her washes create bleeds which, against the overtly rectangular compositions of her works, revel in the uninformed movement of colour.

“At the centre of Lavelle’s work lies a simple delight in the very substance of paint. Washes of colour are pulled across her works to create thin layers of pigment, which she gradually layers on top of one another. Each semi-translucent layer forms new formal relationships, blends, and associations with the next,” writes curator Zali Matthews. “Throughout this process, Lavelle openly acknowledges the space occupied by each layer and the innate bodily weight of paint.”

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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.

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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.’

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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