Jan Nel­son
Black Riv­er Running

For near­ly two decades Jan Nel­son has metic­u­lous­ly cre­at­ed paint­ings that con­cen­trate deeply on the role of the visu­al in the con­struc­tion and expe­ri­ence of an ado­les­cent self. In con­tem­po­rary times, this con­cern is more rel­e­vant as it has ever been. For her new series Black Riv­er Run­ning, Nel­son splices and cuts from var­i­ous sources to cre­ate a sim­u­la­tion of the real, an exquis­ite corpse upon which our world­ly anx­i­eties are pro­ject­ed: nuclear blasts, the fail­ure of cap­i­tal­ism, cyber attacks, meta­da­ta and the encroach­ment of the online into every­day existence.

In the age of the curat­ed self exem­pli­fied by; self­ies, Insta­gram, Tum­blr and Snapchat, the crit­i­cal devel­op­men­tal phase of ado­les­cent self actu­al­i­sa­tion is now medi­at­ed by smart­phone screens and sub­sumed into the online. Screens play a vital role in the craft­ing of Nelson’s dis­tinc­tive aes­thet­ic. The monitor’s high-def­i­n­i­tion pro­jec­tion of her hybridised por­traits, sets a per­fec­tion­ist bar, which she then sets out to meet through the slow­ly evolv­ing task of paint­ing. This labour of human hand, Nel­son perceives as a per­for­ma­tive act, expos­ing the gap between the con­stant striv­ing towards digi­tised per­fec­tion and the flawed real­i­ty of our idio­syn­crat­ic humanity.

For Jan Nelson, ​“To paint is to place val­ue on the visu­al and to believe that the hand­made holds rel­e­vance as intrin­si­cal­ly human. To paint is to claim a posi­tion that the intu­itive and the dis­cur­sive together con­struct mean­ing. In paint­ing I trans­form my por­trait images as I pass them through con­sec­u­tive process­es until the orig­i­nal is lost to a pul­sat­ing sublime.”

Pho­tog­ra­phy: Mark Ashkanasy