Exhibitions
Jessica Geron - Patterns of Behaviour
3 - 21 August , 2010
We live in a particularly unique moment in time in which people are not only able, but are actively encouraged to participate in a popular culture that in itself has become a sometimes-confusing (yet importantly: desirable) array of patterns and patinas of photomontaged and photoshopped references to past, present and future narratives, re-configured for the purposes of consumer advertising and entertainment. In the 90s, astute subscribers to such notions would be called "ironic consumers". By the turn of the century, however, the provisions of such irony had long since proved themselves limiting, and have gradually been replaced with something much more genuine. Today, these popular tendencies and patterns of behaviour are simply earnest.
Jessica Geron is an earnest lover of popular culture.
Since 2005, Geron's painting practice has sampled an excitingly diverse variety of both fictional and factual people, places and events, sourced from yet more variety of user-generated Google-images, personal photographs, as well as classic/contemporary, mainstream/art house cinema.
Geron sensitively and meticulously layers these various examples into snapshots of frozen film-time, in which the various delineated fields are rendered not simply in colour, but in patterns alternating between vintage-Victoriana, and 1960-70s Florence-Broadhurst-esque botanical prints and retro-glam. Her aesthetic, however, does not languish in the sepia stain of disingenuous faux-nostalgia, but the bold, bright and somewhat-alien colours endemic to 1950s Pop art. It may seem like a lot to divulge, but the main kindness offered to us by popular culture and its contents is that we are not obligated to consume it all at once, but simply at our leisure.
The thick application of paint, interrupted in its various elevations by images, lines and pattern, holds together these references like super strength glue. But rather than a stoic and invisible binder, its sits boldly atop the surface of the canvas - an exterior scaffold rather than an interior framework.
Through the lush vegetation of painted and patterned foliage, the audience is almost encouraged to play a game of eye-spy, in which characters and places of popular and art-house cinema alternately emerge and withdraw into the background, which was once a foreground, or could be the middle ground. The flattening of perspective that occurs within each freeze-frame allows the patterns to emerge amongst the paintings and their various subjects, whether these are people, motor vehicles, or houses.
Through her conscientious interpretation of the now-ubiquitous tools of cyber cut-n-paste, she allows each work to unfold autonomously as she takes us on a personal (and psychedelic!) pseudo-photo-shopping-spree through the limitless and patterned non-space inhabited by the mythologies and morphologies of contemporary popular culture. Whether its Victorian wallpaper patterns, big budget films featuring Brad Pitt as the doomed protagonist, or the art-house offerings of Pedro Almodovar - Jessica Geron's allow such anomalies to cross-pollinate within the fertile three dimensional spaces that she conjures upon her two dimensional surfaces.
JD Reforma