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

Holdings | Group Show

 

Holdings | Group Show

6 - 21 December, 2022

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Holdings 2022, a group exhibition curated by Gallery Assistant, Sarah Meehan. Holdings is informed by the spectrum and relationships of colours commonly identified in the colour wheel. Featured works by our represented artists have been thoughtfully selected from the stockroom. Through a kaleidoscopic display of artworks, The exhibition highlights and celebrates the diversity of our artists and their practice. 

Featured artists include Adriane Strampp, Arryn Snowball, Carl Warner, Dai Li, Denise Green, Dylan Jones, Ian Friend, Jacinta Giles, Joachim Froese, Joseph Daws, Judith Wright, Karla Marchesi, Miles Hall, Natalie Lavelle, Robyn Stacey and Saffron Newey.  

 
 

Rising Tide | Dylan Jones

 

Rising Tide | Dylan Jones

8 November - 3 December, 2022

Jan Manton Gallery is proud to present Rising Tide by Dylan Jones showing between 8 November - 3 December, 2022. Rising Tide revisits Jones’ fondness for Moreton Island (Mulgumpin); a place that is home to many childhood memories. In his youth, Moreton Island was a frequent camping spot for Jones and his family. The minimal and subdued gouache paintings reference the more dismal days where dark clouds loomed over the island.

Portraying Moreton Island from the perspectives of both sea and land, Jones captures the vastness and ruggedness of landscape whilst inducing a sense of calm and stillness.

“The island itself is dense in vegetation yet the ocean is so vast. I wanted to capture this juxtaposition and contrast. The paintings are constructed from re-imaginings of my childhood years visiting the island by boat or standing on the island looking out to the endless horizon.” — Dylan Jones

Video Documentary

 
 

Simultaneous Disguise | Simon Degroot

 

Simultaneous Disguise | Simon Degroot

28 September - 15 October, 2022

“In Simultaneous Disguise, all the works reveal evidence of their history through close examination of the painted surface. I’m fascinated by the possibilities of a flat surface. How can we use layering to better understand ideas of concealing and revealing? What happens when the most visible, anterior, or frontal form is hiding something that is behind? What does this tell us about visibility and appearances? How can painting help us understand more about the politics of seeing versus not seeing?”

— Simon Degroot

Studio photo by Charlie Hillhouse.

In our latest From the Studio interview, Jan Manton Gallery visited Simon Degroot’s studio to learn more about the references, influences, and layers embedded within the artists’ paintings for his new exhibition Simultaneous Disguise.

 

Moon Spill | Arryn Snowball

 

Moon Spill | Arryn Snowball

7 - 25 September, 2022

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Arryn Snowball's latest exhibition Moon Spill showing between the 7 to 25 September, 2022. While firmly committed to abstract painting, Snowball seeks an open practice, where process is fluid and visible, embodied and reciprocal. Exploring line, colour, shape, and how they create rhythm, the artist uses simple formal structures that open onto complexity, intimacy and vulnerability.

“I’m interested in movement and light, structure and change, uncertainty and ambiguity. I’m into the basics: triangles, circles, lines, colour. I try to keep things simple, yet complexity naturally builds up. I don’t want to disguise any aspect of the process. I prefer a hand painted edge. If a line is awkward, it is my awkwardness. If a line is wobbly, it is more alive." — Arryn Snowball

 

If I were taller | Aaron Perkins

 

If I were taller | Aaron Perkins

29 August - 4 September, 2022

Reflecting the persistent engagement with literature throughout his painting practice, Aaron’s PhD defines criteria for the classification of a painting as fiction. Drawing upon the literary autofiction of Ben Lerner and Rachel Cusk, Aaron argues that this shift away from painting’s art-historical preoccupation with ‘truth’, through the explicit use of fiction as a method, allows a visual knowledge of the fictions woven throughout everyday reality to be gained through painting. If I were taller exhibition is the final outcome of Aaron’s PhD research.

 

Just Light | Robyn Stacey

 

Just Light | Robyn Stacey

10 - 28 August, 2022

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Just Light by Robyn Stacey on show between 10 to 28 August, 2022. In the new photographic series Just Light, Stacey focuses on the elemental qualities of photography - light, colour and shadow to create luminous photographs.

“Luminosity in images suggests the infinite and for Byzantine and Classical spectators, the foremost aspect of colour to be appreciated was its value as light. Colour and light are suggestive and sensual, they stir emotions and associations, making the perception of both subjective and irrational, something whose effect cannot be grasped intellectually.” — Robyn Stacey

 

GRAPHEMISM | Miles Hall

 

GRAPHEMISM | Miles Hall

20 July - 7 August, 2022


Graphemism (neologism): originating from the greek GRAPHIA (γραφία) “to draw, write, describe, record” and PHEME  (ϕάναι) "to speak".

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present GRAPHEMISM by Miles Hall on show between 20 July to 7 August, 2022. Using a range of both linen and aluminium supports, Hall's new works evolve from an active dialogue between material, gesture and surface. Paint is not considered as passive matter but an active element – its inherent properties contribute to the development and emergence of both form and content.

"Graphite holds the distinction of being the most stable form of solid carbon ever discovered and forms the basis for these new paintings. Its etymological ties to the history of drawing and writing confer the medium with a cultural significance that I have attempted to celebrate - notably the impulse to trace and elucidate existence through line." — Miles Hall


 

... out of time | Carl Warner

 

… out of time | Carl Warner

29 June - 17 July, 2022

Squares. 
Squares within rectangles. Squares side by side, above and below, forming rectangles. Squares removed from rectangles, from their centres, from their edges, making new shapes, creating distinct patterns. Squares are all that is left from those

Times.
These times. Time seen. Time measured. Time divided.  Time for, time against. Time, apparently. 

Times one.
A thing multiplied by itself is squared.

Times two.
When is the time of a thing? When, is the time of a thing.

Times three
Once upon a …
Taking …
…out of time.

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present … out of time by Carl Warner on show between 29 June to 17 July, 2022. Alongside new works, the exhibition presents a selection of Warner’s archival prints in four genres: Concrete Pasture, Nature, Wood, and Metal. The gallery invites visitors to leaf through Warner’s unseen working photographs spanning back to his first exhibition from 1988. Each of the prints is a vintage, unique, one-off edition.

 

Desire Path | Karla Marchesi

 

Desire Path | Karla Marchesi

8 - 26 June, 2022

Desire Path reflects upon a dissonance between subjective hedonic desire and modalities of pleasure in contemporary social life. The exhibition strides this rocky terrain taking the ancient Greek goddess of mirth, Baubo, as a guide, tragicomically exploring the pitfalls of modern dating and relationships.

Known for her liberated sexuality and bawdy humour, the Baubo empowers female agency, the ability of the vagina to critique power, identity and relationships. Marchesi employs the ‘impossible bouquet’ as a genre through which to theatrically critique the complexity of human experience and deconstruct ideological systems which envelope this contemporaneity.

Within a playground of Rococo excess, arrangements of succulents and flora colourfully brim with innuendo. Situated atop pastoral landscapes and set inside modern heterotopic interiors, the exhibition stages anthropomorphised cacti and flora as vessels for psycho-sexual projection.

Symbolic of violence, danger, and self-protective vulnerability, these great asinine masses of succulents drive Marchesi’s post-modern collage using autobiographical references, ancient myth, folklore, art history, sci-fi landscapes and cyber aesthetics, in a spirited Baroque-punk upending of Romanticism.

 

False Continuity | Jacinta Giles

 

False Continuity | Jacinta Giles

18 May - 5 June, 2022

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present False Continuity by Jacinta Giles on show in the gallery between 18 May to 5 June 2022. The photographic works in False Continuity are a continuation of Jacinta’s ongoing interest in questioning our understanding of our contemporary visual world, particularly our experience of the moving-image.

In seeking to expose the temporal pulse, shifting velocities, and gestures of women across different genres of cinema, False Continuity materialises the language systems used by film to mediate ideas of womanhood. Through disrupting our narrative experience of films from the genres of Hollywood Cinema, Romantic Comedy, Dystopian Science Fiction, Superhero, and Horror (Vampire), this project reveals the seductive agency of cinematic images and the coding they contain regarding ‘being a woman’.

By using the cinematic process of false continuity editing—putting two or more non-chronological images together to create a new narrative—each work in the exhibition makes visible the repetitions of movement, tonality, and form used in cinema to construct filmic femininity.

 

Intimate Dialogues | Judith Wright

 

Intimate Dialogues | Judith Wright

30 March - 24 April, 2022

In Intimate Dialogues, I’ve come back to my earlier interests. I’ve always been interested in the vulnerability of the human condition in times of love and loss. Communication and dialogue are necessary tools for trying to heal from, and come to terms with, those situations. These works have various reference points to ‘carnival’ and myth. They also introduce animal imagery as a way of connecting with the animal world, beyond our established human connections with each other, our families, and our friends. It’s a new metaphor in my work simply because I’m becoming more conscious of our deteriorating natural environments, and the role that humans have had in this. By embracing the animal world, I hope to broaden our human-to-human dialogue to a wider sphere of knowing and being.

— Judith Wright

 

Ways of Being | Natalie Lavelle

 

Ways of Being| Natalie Lavelle

9 - 27 March, 2022

Jan Manton Gallery is proud to show Natalie Lavelle in her latest solo exhibition Ways of Being on display from 9 - 27 March, 2022. Lavelle's recent work shifts its gaze to the natural world by evoking both curiosity and nostalgia in layers, bleeds and sweeps of white, brown and blue. Each work expands beyond the canvas to suggest a vista of colour, light and material — seemingly both contained and spacious.

Exhibition essay writer Louise Mayhew states, “Thinking of these paintings as transformations of nature operates in two spatial directions: as an endless spilling out and an almighty gathering in. If you stand close to Lavelle’s larger canvases, so they fill your field of vision, you might imagine their washes of colour stretching forever, echoing the vastness as the Earth.”

Natalie Lavelle is an artist whose practice wavers between human and material concerns where abstraction and monochrome paintings have become the foundation of a personal pursuit to re-blur the limitations and boundaries of the traditional easel painting. Natalie has completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours Class I) from the Queensland College of Art (QCA) in 2020, and a Diploma of Visual Art from Southbank Institute of Technology (SBIT) in 2016.

 

Medicine Clay | Simone Arnol & Bernard Singleton

 

Medicine Clay | Simone Arnol & Bernard Singleton

9 February - 6 March, 2022

For their first exhibition at Jan Manton Gallery, Simone Arnol (Gunggandji) and Bernard Singleton Jnr (Umpila/Djabugay/Yirrgay) present Medicine Clay (2019-20). This collaborative photographic series presents intimate portraits of three generations of Bernard Singleton Jnr’s family—his father, his niece and himself—each coated in a layer of coarse white clay. Known as medicine clay, this revered material is often used by members of Bernard’s family for the treatment of sore bellies, women’s business, and general wellbeing.

Over this medicine clay, a rich, red ochre has been painted onto each figure in heavy, oily streaks. This ochre is used by Simone and Bernard to represent ancestral connections to Country, and the transfer of knowledge between generations. Its placement is significant to each bearer. Bernard’s father wears a thick layer of ochre over his left hand in reference to matrilineal lines of knowledge, passed onto family members through his wife and their marriage. Stripes of ochre stretch across Bernard’s and his niece’s foreheads, signifying their own responsibilities to learn and pass on this knowledge.

In these photographs, Simone and Bernard seek to create a record of knowledge, rituals and customs to be passed on to coming generations. Quiet and meditative, they convey a sense of intense presence and magnanimity.

 

The Days Run Away | Ian Friend

 

The Days Run Away | Ian Friend

19 January - 6 February, 2022

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present The Days Run Away by Ian Friend on show at the gallery between 19 January - 6 February 2022. The survey exhibition features works from his earlier practice, as well as very recent creations including a series of sculptures, the first made by Ian in decades. Rather than provide a clear narrative for its audience, The Days Run Away invites the viewer to take pleasure in the abstract and poetic nature of its works. 

Catalogue essay writer Zali Matthews states: 

The songs, poems and stories informing Friend’s works emerge as abstract, rounded forms, sometimes large and elongated, fine and peppery, or translucent and amorphous. They are repeated endlessly, compulsively: in white clumps, like snow; or in groups of fine dots, like small perforations in paper, clustered galaxies or sheets of falling rain. Looking at Friend’s works, the viewer is given the impression of looking both in and out, at atoms and at galaxies. Friend blurs the boundaries between micro- and macrocosms, removing human scale. 

Photograph of Ian Friend taken by Embie Tan Aren.

From the Studio

In anticipation of Ian Friend’s first solo exhibition The Days Run Away, the JMG team recently visited Ian’s studio to learn more about his artistic practice.

In this interview, Ian joins Gallery Assistant Zali Matthews in conversation about his practice and the parcels of history, music and poetry that have inspired it…