Jen­ny Wat­son: Chronicles

Grif­fith Uni­ver­si­ty, Brisbane

Jen­ny Wat­son: Chron­i­cles
2016, Eng­lish
Soft­cov­er, 48 pages, 42 x 30 cm
Pub­lished by Grif­fith Uni­ver­si­ty, Brisbane

Pub­lished to accom­pa­ny the exhi­bi­tion Jen­ny Wat­son: Chron­i­cles, 14 July – 3 Sep­tem­ber 2016, Grif­fith Uni­ver­si­ty Art Muse­um, the exhi­bi­tion and cat­a­logue take a the­mat­ic approach to Watson’s work, focus­ing on the preva­lence of text through­out her career, and the pow­er­ful role it has played in con­struct­ing her high­ly per­son­al nar­ra­tives. The works includ­ed in the exhi­bi­tion track Watson’s career tra­jec­to­ry from the ear­li­est appear­ance of text in the 1970s, through the delib­er­ate deskilling of her painter­ly style, to a new suite of works where text, paint­ing and objects inter­act. Sem­i­nal works include the sub­ur­ban house ​‘dou­ble paint­ings’, the news­pa­per and mag­a­zine pages, and the An Orig­i­nal Oil Paint­ing duo of works, which took Watson’s con­cep­tu­al project to its most reduc­tive point. The inclu­sion of text and the paint­ed image has formed a cru­cial dual­i­ty in Watson’s prac­tice and its var­i­ous man­i­fes­ta­tions pro­vides the thread con­nect­ing the works in the exhi­bi­tion. While the images in Watson’s more recent paint­ings have sim­pli­fied, the rela­tion­ship between the ele­ments has become more complex.

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