- Venue
- Bracknell Gallery, South Hill Park
- Location
- South East England
The main gallery of Janet Curley Cannon’s South Hill Park exhibition is dedicated to her 20-strong print series entitled ‘the Bracknell Regeneration Project’, a group of works that are, in many ways, portraits of Bracknell’s seemingly unprepossessing architecture. The images range from open aspects of the town, to intricate patterning on an individual building. The broadly uniform size and format of the works, each framed in a utilitarian grey frame, open themselves up to the viewer like peepholes in street hoarding. One catches glimpse after glimpse of layered architectural vision, in which view and reflection, façade and mirror, become confused in exuberant complexity. The depth of detail is matched by Janet’s technical mastery of the digital print medium.
There are paradoxes to these images. Where the title to Janet’s exhibition, Observations on a Town, suggests a degree of dispassionate detachment, this artist is deeply involved in the construction and manipulation of her vision. Subtle reflections reveal political slogans, tired buildings are transformed through a riot of excited colour and line, and the artist herself makes an appearance in at least one of her works (sitting outside ‘Janet’s Top Brands’ shop in Bloomin Bracknell, BRP No. 19). Even in the bleak waste of Bracknell’s brutalist 50s architecture, with its centre still awaiting its long-promised regeneration, there is an energy and buoyancy to Janet’s work that brings beauty firmly back into the frame. At times, as with her Dine and Dash, BRP No. 17, there is a lyrical, almost fairytale quality evoked through the purity of colour and simplicity of line. Bracknell Bus Cafe becomes an appealing place to retreat from the vagaries of an ugly world!
In Janet’s video piece, The End, documenting in moving stills the demise of one of Bracknell’s landmark buildings, there is a further paradox. Demolition equals destruction, yet in the tearing down of this building, the camera seductively draws us in to dwell on the beauty of a canary-yellow wall, the rhythmic form of a corrugated iron panel, the exposed ribs of a once-intact internal framework. The grit, dirt, neglect and urban deterioration apparent in many of her subjects (a walk around Bracknell suggests a town in abeyance, awaiting a new lease of life) is magicked, in these works, into appealing turns of colour, line and dynamic zest. Janet, as an American emigrée, perhaps exhibits an affection for her new hometown that eludes most native citizens of the place.
This ambivalence runs too through the more overtly political work located in the side gallery, such as the collages (Refreshing) and Daylight Robbery, Janet’s major sculptural piece. The collages draw on the multi-layered posting of anarchic flyers, corporate advertising, event bills, and political slogans that form the haphazard, democratic ‘noticeboards’ of urban centres. Daylight Robbery is a polemical work drawing contemporary parallels with the 17th-century window tax, which became an ostentatious social tool for separating the haves from the have-nots. Where these works owe their lives to historically potent realities, time has robbed the texts of their vitality, and often of their meaning. Old political slogans have become torn, or partially obscured by a cultural event long since gone, angry graffiti is replaced by tantalising fragments of text shorn of its full meaning. It is significantly the global commercial brandings that remain most readable in the current layer of time in which we view the exhibition. Although Daylight Robbery in particular, reading Janet’s accompanying text, deals with issues of injustice and personal outrage, there persists that quality of beauty that draws irresistibly on pattern, form and colour, and defuses the social angst of the work.
Perhaps, despite herself, there exists a Zen quality in Janet’s work, wherein the turbulence, turmoil and preoccupations of past lives and past issues, and the coming and going of buildings, structures, and inhabitants – the ephemerality of urban living – carries no element of lament. It just is. Janet’s vision of urban life, centred on her chosen town of Bracknell – carries with it an optimism and positivity that those Bracknell New Town post-War planners would most certainly have shared.
