VISUAL ART
SHOTGUN 6: MOCK SUN Nadege Philippe-Janon Contemporary Art Tasmania 27 Tasma St, North Hobart Until tomorrow
There’s a fantastic video projection in Mock Sun, which made me laugh while my stomach tied itself in knots. It shows the artist, Nadege PhilippeJanon, interacting with some pigeon feathers, and is one of those rare works that has a visceral impact that is also loaded with intellectual and emotional content, and laced with a perverse eroticism. It is as if we’re intruding into a private world where a longstanding ritual that only the artist really understands is being performed.
I’ve seen quite a bit of art by PhilippeJanon in recent years and I’d found her work interesting enough, but there was a notable shift in her practice in a show earlier this year, the Victor Medrano-curated Crossroads. Here, Philippe-Janon pared things back and increased the impact and clarity of her work. In Mock Sun, she uses even fewer actual objects but with more psychological impact.
The work is installation-based and uses found objects, although this is a limiting description. Her objects can be physical, such as the beautiful light fitting she has fashioned into a pendulum, which slowly inscribes mathematical arcs into sand on the gallery floor, but they can also be objects of memory, such as the terrifyingly abject pigeon feather work she projects on the gallery wall. One work is a playful interaction between coloured light and video projection. Invisible until the audience interacts with it, a beautiful psychedelic image is created, throbbing on the gallery wall. There’s also a collection of rocks on the gallery floor, decorated with metal melted by the sun through a refracted lens. The oozing shapes are like secretions, which, like the pigeon feathers, hover between beauty and abjection.
Philippe-Janon uses light in multiple forms. She mixes the glow of electricity with found objects, sculpture and lenses. She uses projection in one work and creates long shadows in another.
Much of the work is sifted through her memory, which is as vital an ingredient of her complicated palette as her use of controlled light. Everything is smeared with her memories, which she innocently presents, almost oblivious to our reactions.
But this is a trick, too; we are required to be caught in her refracting light.