Black River Running #16
Black River Running #16 is the latest body of work by acclaimed multidisciplinary artist Jan Nelson. Known for her technical dexterity and ability to cultivate a conceptual mediation between hyperreality and human vulnerability, these new paintings further extend her inquiry into media culture and ‘optical consciousness’, asking important questions about the inordinate power of mass images to threaten the authenticity of the real and to distort history.
Often depicting social and political crises: immigration and asylum seeking, Nelson examines notions of subjectivity, representation and verisimilitude. She primarily questions how these mass images, which become a sublimation for the real, permeate a type of paralysis or de-sensitivity to the original content. “It’s in this moment,” Nelson explains, where history and time become distorted. How do images travel through time? What traces of the original sentiment remain?”
Acting simultaneously between the registers of painting and photography, Nelson’s new evocative depictions of the social crisis of refugees occupy a momentary psychological space of stillness and reflexivity between self and other. Recalling her work International Behaviour, 2000, now in the collection of the NGV, where she appropriated a photograph of Vietnamese refugees on Australian waters from the 1980s, in these silver metallic paintings of the same subject, Nelson’s chromatic intensity conceives both a menacing contemplation of salvation as well as a transcendental divination. “I’m trying to convey the point where the image itself disappears and reappears, oscillating between concealing and revealing.”
Equally resonant with melancholic despair are Nelson’s painterly sculptures, porous objects made from linen, foam and epoxy paint, that articulate a tension between creation and death.
Nelson’s experimentations with cadences of both black and white, which function as transpositions
of each other, are symbolic of her ongoing research into human consciousness and states of change.
Notably influenced by psychoanalytic theory, in particular, Jacques Lacan’s writing on ‘the real,’ as well as Jean Baudrillard’s concepts of ‘simulacra’, Nelson describes her intertextual practice as “a lasagne compost” or “a non-linear structure of oscillating elemental propositions that create a series of signs for the viewer to use as a trace of resemblances.” In this space, she delves deeper into human perception, encompassing human collective memory and the role that our visual culture plays in constructing or manipulating these memories.
Nelson’s layered practice represents fragments or composites of the shape of human thought. For over two decades, she has explored how the digital world reshapes the human subject. Quasi-performative in nature, Black River Running #16 restages human recollections into suspended moments, moments that cultivate distance from the subject and, conversely, meditate a new intimacy. These works confront human darkness with continuing mystery while effectively orientating the viewer into a transitional state, one between belief and reality.
Jan Nelson Black River Running #16 at Anna Schwartz Gallery from 14 September – 26 October, 2024
Melissa Bianca Amore, 2024