Drips and Thickets

Drips and Thickets features two Brisbane-based female artists, Kirra Jamison and Alice Lang.

Each artist has explored elements of the grotesque within the theory of the decorative and its relationship to femininity.

Lang’s alluring yet repulsive soft sculpture and Jamison’s lyrical paintings create a curiously beautiful scenario reminiscent of a fairytale…

Grotesques as a decorative form are a type of arabesque with interlaced garlands and animal figures. With this in mind, Drips and Thickets transforms Lang’s Ecto-Parasitic Bustle into a perverted Alice in Wonderland-like figure amongst Jamison’s dark menagerie of nocturnal creatures.

As the curator for this exhibition it has been a pleasure to work with these two talented artists. Alice and Kirra have already enjoyed many successes and are sure to make their mark on Australian contemporary art.

Benjamin Milton Hampe

Drips and Thickets offers viewers a pleasurable retreat from the hard-hitting reality of contemporary art: or so it would seem. Alice Lang and Kirra Jamison’s work is pretty and fanciful; alluring and mysterious. But beneath the surface lie unsettling remarks on the role of traditional mediums in fine art. What is so subtly played out in Lang and Jamison’s work is a critical deliberation on the possibility of their art after the end of medium specificity.

In Avant-Garde and Kitsch Clement Greenberg declared that without the logic of medium, high art (or the ‘avant-garde’) was in jeopardy of descending into kitsch (Greenberg 1961). The concept of medium within Modern art provided a system by which art could be measured, compared and evaluated. However with the advent of Jackson Pollock’s all-overs this system began to fail. The end of distinct mediums and the beginning of art without rules ensued. It has since been the arduous task for artists working with traditional mediums to reinstate their work within the contemporary art context.
Through her recent work Lang has expanded upon her earlier involvement with “soft sculpture” to incorporate a range of art historical, social and feminine references. Callouses and Curiosities, Lang’s 2005 solo exhibition, featured “soft sculptures” such as Puggle Puffs and Verte-braid placed in “a world where beauty and revulsion co-exist… amorphous masses and blobs of matter with corporal references hang from the ceiling or are sporadically secreted from the walls” (Knudsen 2005 page 58). Although Lang considers the value of her most recent work to be more invested in its final form rather than the concept of “soft sculpture” she concedes that “given its history and the immense labour involved in making the work, the politics of craft/women’s work etc will always be a part of work, it’s unavoidable” (Lang 2007 pers. comm.).

The original connotations of craft and feminine labour within Lang’s work are now used as a premise from which to push forward in an exploration of her medium’s boundaries and possibilities.

In Eco-parasitic Bustle and Ecto-parasitic Bonnet Lang experiments with the female form and explores the possibility of fashion adornment as a corruptor of feminine strength. In opposition to the view that fashion is a forum for freedom of expression; Lang portrays its oppressive qualities.

Bonnets and bustles mutate, grow tendrils and attach themselves to their host like a strangler fig, overtaking their body to form a new decorative flesh.
(Lang 2007 pers. comm.).

This concept picks up on Roland Barthes’ assertion that consumers of fashion in the modern world never actually encounter the ‘real’ garment but instead receive a ‘fashionable’ garment already transformed by the modern system of signification and firmly grounded in the realm of representation (Carter 2003).

Lang’s original fleshy, nodular and viscous surfaces in grotesquely feminine tones of pink and purple continue to develop in her new work. Lang describes her “fashion” pieces as reminiscent of Victorian period clothing. They stand as mutated souvenirs from a time when dress indicated social class, decadence and frivolity and fashion was a woman’s only form of self-expression and occupation. The irony exposed by Lang being that although a woman’s choice of clothing may have appeared to allow her to construct her own identity, in this same moment her clothing rendered her incapable of more serious pursuits other than “beauty”.

There are two layers of original meaning present within this exhibition. What Lang and Jamison propose through their work goes beyond a simple challenge to the end of medium specificity. Each artist has successfully renewed their base medium by incorporating craft elements not traditionally present within the “fine art” genre. Equally, both artists challenge conventional notions of the decorative and the feminine. For Lang this involves a collaboration of fashion aesthetic and feminine ideals. Combined with social history references the result is a smarting tension between her work’s alluring tactility and clever irony. With Jamison, viewers are quickly drawn into her work via the subtle references to craft and design. Here tensions between what we perceive as original and familiar have been carefully laid.

Jamison’s thesis is that, just as images from mass media trigger memory or emotion, “patterns make people feel” (Jamison 2007 pers. comm.). In Loose Connections Timothy Morrell states that, “she (Jamison) exploits the decorative in art to liberate the imagination of both artist and viewer in ways that are not possible in precise depictions” (2007 page 4). All patterns and sources within Jamison’s work are collected from second hand mass media; found in books, magazines and online.

Engaging with a mixture of references, I gather and reorganise found material to create non-linear narratives that are located within the field of patterning and the imaginative space of the mind.
(Jamison 2006 page 18).

Art Nouveau posters, wallpaper design, Baroque, Rococo and contemporary art, literature, myths and fairytales, are all duly recycled into her work and geared to evoke emotion and inspire imaginings. The intentional paradox is that the result has the look of a mass media print and yet, it is distinctly painterly.

The phenomena of the poster in the late nineteenth century as a signifier of the advent of post-Industrial Revolution consumerism offers a starting point for many of our post-medium concerns. Originally the poster connoted the commercialisation of everyday life; newfound capitalism and bourgeois consumerist lifestyle contributed to a commodification of art. However, what is interesting with Jamison is that she inverts this system and manipulates the detritus of industry into a “work of art”.

The bubbling marrow of the bones in Come on baby light my fire, the tree’s henna tattoo embellishment in My mother was a gypsy, my father was a butcher and the densely delicate layering of patterns in Over the moon demonstrate a newfound confidence of style for Jamison. Her use of colour is bolder, with its night-time hues proving to be more evocative. However, it is Jamison’s use of the decorative that has remained a true and constant strength within her work, her recent paintings especially. When describing her work, Jamison states that it is important to remember “I am not painting bones but a pattern of bones… I am not trying to represent the world, more the way of the world” (Jamison 2007 pers. comm.).

Drips and Thickets marks a shift for these artists as they exhibit work that is both more stylistically advanced and intuitive to broader artistic developments. Together Lang and Jamison’s work can be seen to be representative of the emerging trend that is the Neo Baroque.

Despite postmodernisms inclusive theory, much of its practice is aesthetically minimal. Enter the new Baroque, aglow with brilliant colours, dizzying arabesques and spectacular ornamentation in gold and sparkling crystals. It can also be a bit dark, with provocative narratives and difficult subject matter. The Neo Baroque is evolving radically differently from modernism: as a sensibility rather than a specific style.
(Giovannotti et al 2006 page 8).

Thus, by integrating and manipulating elements of everyday visual culture, Lang and Jamison satisfy ocular desires and confront sensibilities simultaneously. The high brow and the low brow are seamlessly blended and Clement Greenberg’s forewarning of kitsch is brilliantly defied.

Although it would be easy to draw literal comparisons between the artists of Drips and Thickets this would ultimately provide for a reductive reading of their work. It would also fail to recognise the significance of notions of femininity, medium specificity and the decorative at play in this exhibition as well as the artists’ connection to the Neo Baroque.

Zoë De Luca

References
Carter, M. (ed.). 2003, Fashion Classics from Carlyle to Barthes, Berg, New York.
Greenberg, C. 1961, Art and Culture, Beacon Press, Boston.
Giovannotti, M. & Korotkin, J. 2006, Neo Baroque!, Distributed Art Pub Inc., New York.
Jamison, K. 2007, [Personal Communication],
15 March.
Jamison K. Hot Pool: Fine Art and Photography Honours 2006, Queensland College of Art 2006, Griffith University, South Brisbane.
Krauss, R. 1999, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, Thames & Hudson, London.
Knudsen, S. 2005, ‘Alice Lang’, un Magazine, Summer, no. 6, pp. 58-60.
Lang, A. 2007, [Personal Communication], 12 March.
Morrell, T. 2007, Loose Connections, Samstag Program, Adelaide.