A newly-opened exhibition at The Kube gallery in Gibsons features a combination of earthy touchstones and shadowy portents, all rendered in a subtle palette that reveals while it restrains.
Grey to Be is multimedia artist Janine Dunn’s first solo show on the Sunshine Coast, although the Sunshine Coast resident has exhibited motion picture and performance works in the U.K., the U.S. and western Canada. Dunn is a graduate of the Visual Arts program at Simon Fraser University and studied film in London, England.
The monochromatic ink-and-charcoal works created by Dunn on her Gibsons-area farm are a chronological paradox. Her forms hint at ancient themes painted on cave walls at the dawn of the human age — yet are fixed in the ferment of Picasso’s post-modernity.
“My art has such a rustic texture to it,” said Dunn, “with very simple lines and mark-making. What I’m aiming to do is create something where you can’t really tell if it’s from the past or the future. It could be marks that are left behind, or showing nature’s deterioration [in the present day].”
Dunn is a parent to two young children, whose nurture demands that time allotted to artistic work is compressed and concentrated. “I’m seeking to express the farm/homesteading/homemaking lifestyle through modern art,” she said. “I hope this season of life as a mother of little ones comes through in experiencing the body of work.”
Dunn’s works are also seeded with images of horticulture and cultivation. She takes advantage of her rural setting to add natural elements to her paintings, adding texture by mixing soil, cement, rocks, soot and leaves into her pigments. Her subjects encompass humble, traditional acts — baking bread, manual farm labour — rendered in a dreamlike style that elevates domesticity into mythology.
“It’s not so representative,” Dunn acknowledged. “It’s where I find the magical balance of floating between abstraction and realism.”
Occasionally, Dunn will bury an incomplete work in the earth. Interment allows it to absorb humus and inorganic matter before resurfacing. The act links the fecundity of the soil with the artist’s creative drive.
“When I bury it underground, it’s left to weather and deteriorate before I dig it up,” Dunn said. “Then I’ll work on it some more or I’ll work on something else while I leave it outside. As someone who lives on a farm, where basically our sustenance comes directly out of the ground, there are parallels to planting a seed and watching it grow. I like to put nature right into the fibre and the texture of these things.”
For Dunn, the forward-looking title of her exhibition is an acknowledgement that the traditional disciplines she depicts may help sustain a future in turmoil. “With the state of the world right now, a lot of people are finding importance in moving towards growing food and preserving things, doing things more self-sufficiently,” she observed.
Grey to Be remains on display at The Kube gallery until the end of October. Details are available by browsing to thekube.ca.
