San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
‘HAPPY ACCIDENTS’
Experimentation has been key for San Carlos artist Amel Janae, who explores the body in works that are beyond her years
When it comes to art, Amel Janae considers herself to be a late bloomer. “I always liked to draw a lot, but I didn’t really think about it that much or take it seriously until college,” says Janae from her home in the San Carlos neighborhood of San Diego. “I did do an art elective in high school, but even then, I didn’t think I’d pursue it.”
Still, this is a bit misleading in more ways than one. First, she’s only 24 years old, in what many would consider to be the infancy of a visual art practice. Second, and perhaps even more surprising to those who have viewed Janae’s work at trendsetting art spaces such as Bread & Salt and Weird Hues, her work seems fully actualized and beyond her years.
Words like “prodigy” and “wunderkind” are capriciously thrown around in artistic circles such as music, writing, film, etc. Still, a city’s visual art scene both prizes and resents young talent, and while an entire story could be devoted to the difficulties facing young artists as they attempt to navigate the journey of becoming a working artist, the fact that Janae has come so far and so quickly is not easy to overlook.
That is, until you see her work. “I would say a lot of my work are happy accidents,” Janae says.
Take, for example, “Like Honey,” Janae’s most recent show at the North Park space Swish Projects. Made up of delicately suspended photographic works printed onto mesh chiffon fabric, the result is both ethereal and intoxicating. Looking at it from one angle, the drapes appear translucent. Look at it up close and upward, and the mesh material becomes more apparent, but depending on how the light hits, it can have almost a plastic sheen to it. Look through it and into the two drapes behind, and is as if the viewer’s vision is being filtered three times over resulting in an abyssal, polychromatic illusion.
“I knew that I wanted to experiment with another medium. I just didn’t know what specifically that would be,” Janae says. She adds that a photo shoot she was originally intending to use for her painted works resulted in the photos she used for “Like Honey.”
“I liked the way they looked on their own, but I didn’t know what I wanted to print them on. So I was into sewing at the time and had the idea of putting them on some kind of translucent fabric.”
On the surface, displaying photography on mesh tapestries doesn’t seem like it would be an innate fit, but there’s a sense of naturalness in the “Like Honey” pieces. This was also the case with Janae’s previous work, which saw her painting atop mirrored canvases. And while the transition from painting to fabric art seems like a 180-degree turn, both practices incorporate distorted and disjointed images of the human body. It is a subject that has always fascinated her.
“I was already doing things with anatomy and these paintings of arms within the mirror,” says Janae, who originally began doing the mirror paintings in black and white. “But that was when I figured out that I could paint realistically. I found a different painting technique that worked.”
She continued to experiment with the technique and soon found herself using more of the mirror as a canvas, diluting the reflective negative space with intertwined, ambiguous and hyper-realistic body parts.
“When I began to do things in color, I was drawn to the overlapping, the light and shadow and the shapes that the bodies made,” Janae says.
In many ways, the body parts represented in her work, angular and perplexing as they are, serve as reflective, subconscious channels, inviting the viewer to explore their own notions of the human form. When viewing the mirror pieces, for example, there’s a feeling of togetherness because the viewer’s own visage is incorporated within the piece. Conversely, we’re meant to look both at and through the new pieces in “Like Honey,” and into what’s beyond them.
“I’m drawn to the ambiguity of a zoomed-in image,” Janae says. “I like looking at something and not knowing exactly what I’m looking at, and trying to figure out what it is and what it’s doing.”
The work has garnered accolades from a variety of voices within the local arts community. Dinah Poellnitz, the art curator and development director of the Oceanside gallery Hill Street Country Club, recently said on her Instagram that “Amel is an artist to watch grow in front of your eyes through her art” and that she “appreciates every shade of Black beauty.” Chantel Paul, the galleries and exhibitions coordinator for SDSU Art Galleries, and for whom Janae worked for as an intern in 2017, recently said, “I’m so in awe of her work.”
Given the rapidity of her ascent, it’s interesting to learn that Janae spent a lot of her college years unclear as to whether art was really what she wanted to do, much less major in. She’s humble, almost pensive when recounting her early years growing up in an artistic family near Cowles Mountain. She says she’d always liked drawing her family and TV show characters, but stops short of declaring that there was always an artist inside her.
Her outlook changed while attending San Diego State University when she began watercolor painting and rediscovered drawing. She says she still had a hard time finding her niche until she randomly began painting on mirrors. Since then, her work has appeared in a number of group and solo exhibitions. She will be returning to the mirrored pieces for a solo show at the Leiminspace gallery in Los Angeles, which was postponed from last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“In a way, the pandemic had me explore different mediums,” Janae says. “I feel like I would still be doing the same kinds of work if it hadn’t happened because I wouldn’t have been at home as much. Being isolated with it made me want to expand on different things.”