Installed at the Oedipus Rex Gallery, Everything You Think is Wrong is Jennifer Mason’s first solo exhibition. For this show, Mason draws on techniques used in film making, commercial photography and narrative painting. The fourteen constructed images are testament to Mason’s ongoing fascination with the unsettling aspects of contemporary suburban life. Rich (2009) is a portrait of a young couple in their living-room. Created through techniques similar to those used on a film set (these are professional actors hired and directed by Mason), this portrait dislocates notions of suburban wealth, comfort and happiness. As the couple gaze into the luminous glow of an unseen television, their individuality is subsumed into tawdry furnishings and routine clothing. The effect is an upsurge of the uncanny; an uncanny laced with fears bounded by the limits of material security.
Commonly associated with domestic dissonance, the uncanny has been used historically to open up problems surrounding the psyche and the dwelling, the body and the house. It can demonstrate the curiously unstable nature of the home and how that which is homely slips so easily into that which is unhomely. Mason employs a great multitude of techniques to demonstrate this slippage (including doublings, dream states, dismembered bodies and plays on fairy-tales).
One key technique is temporal displacement; many of Mason’s images operate like momentary occurrences dislocated from an untold narrative, like stills from a film that has never been shot. In Calamine Lotion (2009) a drone-like figure is seated at the dinner table. She stares dead ahead, hands limp in her lap while a mass of lotion is applied to her shins by a kneeling woman.
The convention of constructing an arrested moment in time is one Mason has adopted from the traditions of narrative painting. Writing to distinguish painting from poetry, G.E. Lessing advised painters to use but a single moment of action and to choose the ‘most pregnant moment’, the one most suggestive of what has gone before and what is to follow. Mason’s arrested moments are most certainly ‘pregnant’ and for those of us who find these settings familiar, who recognize the homogeneous characters portrayed, a fitting narrative seems within our grasp. However, its ultimate construction is forever indeterminate. We return always to the singularity of the scene presented to us.
In Salve (2009) and Precious Drops (2009) Mason’s domestic matter is elevated to a sanctified realm. Using techniques applied in commercial photography and advertising, these images operate to distort symbols of suburban prosperity. The Chihuahua becomes an icon of the middle-class desire for salvation through cultural breeding and status, a desire that is inextricably connected with the appearance of the self.
The technique of distorting domestic objects is found the literary genre of the uncanny tale (another of Mason’s historic sources). In E.T.A Hoffman’s The Story of the Lost Reflection, the central motif of the mirror demonstrates the main character’s divide between his practice as an artist and his life as a civil servant. Mason’s images are equally centered on the interplay between the fantastic world of art and the insipidness of middle-class existence. The weird effects of the combination of these two distinct spheres are a means through which Mason can question the value of suburban existence.
Chante Inglis 2009