“ it is the artifice of the pose and the act of looking that
interests me”
Janet Werner
Canadian artist Janet Werner
predominately paints the feminine; utilizing the genre of portraiture she
presents a cast of characters that are all fictional. Using fashion magazines, popular culture, naive paintings and
photography as source material, Werner’s women appear to be in a state of
transition. “Something is happening. Or something is appearing to them or they
look like they’re seeing something,” she has said.
Werner’s paintings are constructed
images, a head from here, a dress from there; these mixtures from her sources
are to a degree selfies. “I believe the work has a lot to do with my
subjectivity because it’s the one that I understand the most and it’s also the
one that I see reflected in culture the most. Images of women are everywhere,”
she says.
From magazines
to billboards the desire these images project informs her painting. Although
presented as portraits they are not intended to convey an individual’s likeness.
Writing about her work, Werner said, “The paintings reframe the problematics of
desire, using the mechanisms of melodrama, recontextualization, scale change,
and shifts of color to pose questions about these images and to test the limits
of their intended meanings.”
As James Patten, the director and chief curator of Western Univerity's McIntosh
Gallery, which hosted Werner's touring exhibition Another Perfect Day during October, says, “That’s where art is
really successful. It’s not a polemic telling you what is right or wrong but
getting you to consider the issues and to think about your own life in
relationship to them.”
Werner’s next exhibition Drop, Drop Slow Tears will be on show at
Montréal’s Parisian Laundry Gallery from the 15th of January
to the 14th of February next year.
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