Milli Jannides Eyelash Gnawing

Milli Jannides
Eyelash Gnawing
09 Aug – 08 Sep 2012
Auckland

Hopkinson Cundy is pleased to present Eyelash Gnawing, a solo exhibition of new painting by Milli Jannides.

Milli Jannides’ painting practice can be seen as an ongoing exploration into the ways in which the ephemeral nature of visual experience can be translated into a picture. Jannides’ scenes are always fictional, with no external reference point outside the artist’s imagination. Informed in part by literary sources (often passages that address how the emotional landscape of a character affects their perception of physical surroundings, and vice versa) Jannides’ paintings combine illustionistic forms in complex, at times disorienting, spatial configurations.

The works in Eyelash Gnawing can be characterised as interiors, or views from the inside looking out. Each scene appears to be framed by interior details; in several works you can discern a window frame, whereas in Untitled (2012) light cuts across a curtain obscuring any further view entirely. Despite their seemingly diverse subject matter and complex use of colour, Jannides’ paintings share a secretive quality that ensnares the viewer, inviting them to look closer and for longer. The paintings in Eyelash Gnawing collectively evince a tonality marked by a restless movement between form and formlessness. Space is built up and disrupted and figures are revealed and concealed to form dense, and appealingly awkward, paintings that look like nothing but themselves.

There is a sense of anxiety over the visual in this show, evoked in the quiet surrealism of the title, Eyelash Gnawing, and in the paintings themselves that bear evidence of the artist’s changes of course, decision-making and doubt. Taken together, Jannides’ paintings conceive of vision as necessarily mediated and utterly subjective, and explore how this condition can be communicated in paint through a sense of touch.

Milli Jannides (born Auckland, 1986) graduated from the Elam School of Fine Arts in 2009. She has studied at Glasgow School of Art (2007), Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (2010), and is currently completing her MFA at Royal College of the Arts, London. Recent exhibitions include: David Hofer & Milli Jannides, Hopkinson Cundy, Auckland (2011); Milli Jannides and Sam Rountree Williams, Victor and Hester, Glasgow (2010); and Keeping Still, A Centre for Art, Auckland (2009).