Fallen
The Top Floor, COCA Christchurch 13th October–7th November 2010 .
Artist's Statement
This series of paintings follows a simple idea in a simple way. It involves a process of appropriating images of people from populist media, and copying them as paintings in a benign and straightforward manner.
The people are ‘fallen’- their purpose is to illustrate a narrative of failure, surrender or fall from grace. They move from being real people, to a photographic illustration, then to becoming a painting.
I am interested in the way the conflation of these elements invites us to ‘see what there is see’, and ‘know what there is to know’, about not being command of your own destiny.
Name: Fallen 1- Wounded Man
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Price: $2.500
Fallen 2- Sleeping Woman
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Price: $2.000
Fallen 3- Cowboy
Medium: Acrylic oil on canvas
Price: $2.500
Fallen 4- Child Survivor
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Price: $2.500
Fallen 5- Dead Man
Medium Acrylic on canvas
Price: $2.500
Fallen 6- Dead Relative
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Price: $ $2.500
Fallen 7- In Love
Medium: Acrylic oil on canvas
Price: $2.000
Fallen 8- Protestor
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Price: $2.500
Fallen 9- Unconscious Boy
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Price: $2.500
Fallen 10- Kiss
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Price: $2.000
Fallen 11- Sick Woman
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Price: $2.500
Fallen 12- Bombed
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Price: $2.500
Fallen 13- Injured
Medium: Acrylic on canvas
Price: $2.500
Fallen 14- Hostage
Medium: Acrylic on canvas Price: $400.00 | Fallen 15- Wanted
Medium: Acrylic on canvas Price: $400.00 | Fallen 16- Thief
Medium: Acrylic on canvas Price: $400.00 | Fallen 17- Sad Girl
Medium: Acrylic on canvas Price: $400.00 |
Fallen 18- Politician
Medium: Acrylic on canvas Price: $400.00 | Fallen 19- Charged
Medium: Acrylic on canvas Price: $400.00 | Fallen 20- Enron Wife
Medium: Acrylic on canvas Price: $400.00 | Fallen 21- Sentenced
Medium: Acrylic on canvas Price: $400.00 |
Exhibition Notes
Linda James has worked as a full-time artist since 1980. Since
graduating from the Canterbury School of Fine Arts in 1983, she has
received several awards, including the Olivia Spencer Bower Award in
1989 and a Creative New Zealand grant in 2003. Fallen is the latest of
many shows James has held at COCA since her gallery debut Discord/Out
of the Chaos in 1998.
James' formal strategy involves appropriating images from Western art
history and the contemporary media. Whilst such borrowings are,
arguably, intrinsic to art-making, James follows 1980s pioneers of
so-called 'Appropriation Art' (i.e., Sherrie Levine - and perhaps, in a
New Zealand context, Ian Scott) in self-consciously foregrounding this
aspect of her practice. In a manner similar to these earlier artists,
James explores how traditional notions of identity and authenticity are
destabilized and trivialized in an environment where the commerce in
images (via television, the internet, advertising) has reached
saturation point.
This was a primary concern of James' last COCA show, Love Story,
Precious Lives II (2009) where the artist took the two-second
sound-bite media detritus of buildings destroyed in bombing incidents
and translated these images into large-scale paintings. James'
observation that 'These real and... catastrophic events move via the
camera and cyberspace to re-emerge into the smallness of everyday life
as illustrations for political events,'1 exemplifies her concern with
the distorting, trivializing media lens. Addressing the works created
for her current show, James describes her desire to 'illustrate a
narrative of failure, surrender or fall from grace' whereby her
subjects 'move from being real people, to a photographic illustration,
then... a painting.'2 This statement both reiterates James'
preoccupation with our experience of reality as a media construct and
presents her 'solution': to re-present these fleeting news fragments as
carefully considered (and, at times, monumental) paintings in the
reflective space of the art gallery.
In the process, James ironically perpetrates yet another distortion of
reality, as all such re-makings of pre-existing images and prior events
inevitably must be. However, she does so quite knowingly in order to
explore the nature of 'representation' and to assert her own political
agency. Hence James' comment that 'interrogating images... can show the
ways in which structures carry within themselves the nature of their
own collapse.'3 In this way, she reminds the spectator that even if
all presentations of reality (whether in paint or on TV) are
constructions, not all constructions are created equal. Moreover, as an
artist actively re-making her world, James rejects slavish acceptance
of media-created reality, and sets an example we all might
follow.
David Khan
1 Linda James, artist comment for 'Love Story, Precious Lives II,' COCA online, c.2009 <02.10.10>
2 Linda James, unpublished artist notes for 'Fallen,' c.2010.3 Linda James, 'Out of the Chaos III,' artist notes online, c.2003 <02.10.10>