Also at PICA, filling the entire ground floor in fact, is ‘Walking in Tall Grass’ a truckload of paintings and photographs by Jan Nelson. Nearly all of them look like this although the photo-prints can get a little more dynamic, a bit like this
Unlike the abysmal Haig, Nelson can paint, well enough indeed to have maintained a high profile professional career in Melbourne. The PICA exhibition looks more like a commercial show than the carefully presented analytical or experimental work that we should expect from Perth’s premier alternative space. Rather like, indeed, the recent dismal Piccinini show at Curtin, the Nelson show has the air of attempt to manage local taste and behaviour in line with the Eastern States’ career structure. In fact Nelson’s imagery would not have looked out of place in our Venice laureate’s lobotomised photo reality.
This Melbourne sensibility - a mind numbing one-dimensional digital cool with added promotional copy seems to have the inside track with our art bureaucrats and with good reason. For this is an empty art, an art of despair which represents the introspection and play of children and teenagers as little more than the gate way to a lifetime of quiet consumption – life as an open prison. Easy to sell as authentic, easy to justify with a few words of bad faith about life as it really is and the artist’s apparently arbitrary choice of subject - as if there was no relationship between images of human beings and the still life with old fashioned record player which was recently touted at AGWA.
I miss wit, bravado, conviction and joy - all of which, I suspect, Nelson is technically able to provide. For some reason she stays within the rule of the cool while her high style surfaces and faceless late baroque style portraits scream out for relief.