‘‘The Absurds’’, Hannah Joynt
(Olga)
ABSURDITY is most certainly evident in Hannah Joynt’s suite of paintings at Olga, as Rebecca Fox notes in her feature article. Joynt’s oil on board paintings includes SUP
Venus (2020), which hauls Botticelli’s Venus (from The Birth of Venus, c148486) out of the Renaissance into the present day. Her scallop
shell has become a paddleboard and her entourage of goddesses and god have transmuted into individualistic yoga practitioners undertaking advanced asanas on paddleboards of their own. The challenges of tackling the theme of the absurd in the era of late capitalism are however manifold as there is little in life that is able to resist neither commodification nor becoming a visual spectacle. To take a recent example, the footage of Bernie Sanders wearing homespunstyle mittens at Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration quickly went viral with Sanders turning up in wildly disparate digitally manipulated scenarios and memes shared on multiple social media platforms. The absurdity of real life is hard to beat.
Two works in Joynt’s exhibition courted the absurd while simultaneously engaging with less sensationalised scenarios: Self Contained
(2020) and Car Bed (2020). Both paintings depict vehicles packed with belongings and stacked with furniture on top. While these modes of living are arguably absurd, what is truly absurd is the vast disparity of wealth accumulation and distribution that continues to force people into situations of extreme precarity and vulnerability. Here, the trickle down effect has struck a drought.