254. Jane Jenevieve | Self-excited circuit

Jane Jenevieve is unusual among the artists who have exhibited in SLOT, in that she was born in Sydney and grew up here, in Darlinghurst. Her lightly sketched biography suggests a tough childhood; she went to High School, liked art, found her way into the music scene, married and became a mother. Then, in her mid-life, during Covid, she found painting.

With unusual clarity, Jane and her husband delivered a library of identically sized pictures to SLOT. Selected 3 before moving with precision to hang them, each from a single screw in a perfect horizontal line. When I commented on their team effort, Jane replied, "It's not our first rodeo".

Indeed, it is not the first outing for these works. They, with many others of their kind, have been shown in quick succession at Gallery Brave in Surrey Hills and Three over Six in Double Bay. The websites displaying these works emphasise the concept of the "observer participator", which Jane discussed in detail with SLOT, "without the observer and their participation in the observable there is no meaning". It left me recalling a truism quoted to me as an art student - "what you see is what you bring to the picture". To which we might add, where you see the picture is how you see the picture.

These effortless abstractions are a delight. They allude to the canon of mid-20th-century abstract painting without stumbling, in a manner probably tutored through ambivalence rather than studious inquiry. We might wonder how a perception of these pictures shifts between the quiet walls of a Double Bay emporium and the traffic-clogged streets of South Sydney, and if it would condition an appreciation of them?

Elsewhere, Jane comments, "Self-Excited Circuit considers the relationship between observation, time and perception, with the viewer taking an active part in how an image acquires meaning". True enough and cruelly, in this way the history of pictures, people, events and actions is obscured in the 21st century behind the glare of newly acquired personal truths.