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Making Nonsense
27 April, 2021 - 8 May, 2021
Janno Mclaughlin
Making Nonsense
27 April – 8 May
hours:
Tuesday – Friday 11am to 5pm,
Saturday 11am to 3pm
admission: Free
… an unapologetic, wildly exaggerated, absurdist conflagration of installation, large- and small-scale paintings, paper works, textiles and hand-sewn soft sculptures with bold explosions of colour.
An expanded exploration of the oversized soft-sculpture installations Janno produced during her Masters studies at VCA (2017-18), Making Nonsense is her response to the pandemic of 2020 with all its accompanying crises, upheaval and disorientation. Understandable as a defiant celebration of life, resilience, humour and absurdity, Janno’s enduring preoccupations as an artist encompass ideas about compassion, love and community as the sustaining principles of a kinder world.
The exhibition is an unapologetic, wildly exaggerated, absurdist conflagration of installation, large- and small-scale paintings, paper works, textiles and hand-sewn soft sculptures with bold explosions of colour. Janno has also included the collaborative Corona Girl project with COVID-19 responses from participants around the globe, sewn into the dress of the large-scale female figure, representing togetherness in isolation.
This is a show unafraid to advocate for enduring humanist virtues. Love, dignity, compassion, social justice and and the primacy of human happiness, promise a gentler and less complicated way of being in the midst of a deeply strange, post-truth moment in history.
– Rose Lang
Janno Mclaughlin is an artist with a Masters in Contemporary Art from the Victoria College of the Arts, the University of Melbourne. Her artwork speaks of a celebration of life with acknowledged threads of love, loss, hope, optimism and resilience. Having spent most of her adult life living away from Australia between New York and Buenos Aires, Janno’s artworks seek to sow hope, bravery, resilience and whimsy, anchored by a deliberately ridiculous and unwavering sense of humour.
Her approach is unapologetically bold with a preference for blazing colour and mixed media. Janno deploys paint, thread and richly associative metaphors to portray the most vulnerable, fragile and endangered in society. In her ten solo exhibitions worldwide, Janno has explored the theme of outsider; the foreigner living in a non-English speaking world; the disenfranchised urban poor; and closer to home and as the mother of a child with autism, the isolation of disability and need for safe spaces.