Tell Me A Story

From Isobel Johnston…

‘Open narrative’ is a phrase used by Nana Ohnesorge to describe her desire for her audiences to make their own interpretation of her works. I had asked if the small boy in 18th century costume was wearing a croquembouche (cake) on his head and that was what obscured his eyes as above him swoop two birds of prey – one of which is wearing a human skull. This was just one of the works that makes up her current exhibition, ‘Les Mysteres de Paris’ at James Dorahy’s Project Space.

Ohnesorge’s exhibition was in response to her recent stay in Paris – she had won a National Art School scholarship. Paris is not just the name on the perfume bottle – it offers up all sorts of possibilities: the history, the art, the decadence, all kinds of the historical referents and the kitsch souvenir, to name just a few. These are just some of the elements that meld in this show of paintings, drawings and mostly painted works which even includes a huge dangling chandelier made up of eighty pairs of pensioner style glasses each bearing the trace of an other image on the lens and interspersed with mini skeletons and Christmas baubles.

Ohnesorge’s painting seems located in the tradition of great children’s stories – they draw you in with their detail, focus your attention where the action is, there is violence, there is something more going on in the other parts of the work that you had initially overlooked something which both holds your attention and at the same time makes you want to turn away, just like the scary bits of film. To pull off this kind of broken narrative in paint requires technical skill as well as conceptual input and one could also argue tapping into the vein of the cultural consciousness.

Guo Jian, New Paradise, 2008.
Oil on canvas, 153 x 212 cm.
Courtesy Michael Reid.

Guo Jian’s work at Michael Reid Gallery (although more indebted to pop than gothic) also triggers some of the same said qualities of multiple narratives and desires. As the Beijing Olympics and issues of policing/ control and global access drift off our TV screens Jian’s work have an even more a prophetic quality: summing up all the paradox of contemporary China and most of the rest of the world too. Life is becoming too much like an old TV commercial that promises unfillable dreams and embodies all that is wrong with late capitalism. Simulacra and reality are now indistinguishable and we all are suckled on designer brands and material goods.

Christine Johnson, Hadiqah III, 2008.
Oil on linen, 80 x 70 cm.
Courtesy Martin Browne Fine Art.

So it’s no wonder there exists such huge gaps and dislocations in the story for anyone seeking something more. A little further down the road at Martin Browne Fine Art in Macleay Street, Christine Johnson is having an exhibition of paintings, Arabesque. Her lusciously rendered paintings of almost out of focus details of Islamic tiles and motifs shift away from their original source to occupy another kind of space. Originally they occupied a space of contemplation and arguably still do but it is as if some of them have shifted from pattern to flesh. Two particular works look as though they have been tattooed on someone’s chest and that these are details from a larger tattoo on flesh that seems tinted with life. In other works, a shadow passes over the forms creating a fleeting feeling of mortality.

These are three shows worth seeing and these three artists whose work allows us the opportunity to consider the ‘open narratives’ of our own experiences.

*(Also watch out for Beastly, a curated show by Ohnesorge at MOP later this month)