JODIE WHALEN
’DON’T THINK OF ME AS GONE’
12 APRIL – 19 MAY, 2018
Jodie Whalen, (detail), Don’t think of me as gone, installation view, Verge Gallery, 2018. Photography by Document Photography.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Don’t think of me as gone is a new installation that asks the viewer to question ideas of love and devotion, grief, obsessions and belief, beauty and fantasy. Employing experiences, routines and rituals of the everyday. Repeated experiences that are designed to take us from one state into another and that marks the progression of time.
This new body of multisensory work is the artist’s response to ideas surrounding the limitations, frustrations and despair inherent in the pursuit of fantasy and beauty. The response will be elicited in relation to the emotions of love and grief.
Using video, assemblages, collage/photomontage, and scent, Whalen’s practice of site-specific installation envelops the audience through its relational harmony/balance to image, material and site. Pushing the audience to respond to the site as a place of reflection, meditation and ritual.
This new site specific installation will follow on from earlier explorations by the artist that include the exhibitions; This love is Huge Campbelltown Arts Centre, Declaration of Love Firstdraft, Major Tender Contemporary Arts Centre South Australia and Dead before it Began Wellington Street projects.
BETWIXT AND BETWEEN: JODIE WHALEN’S ‘DON’T THINK OF ME AS GONE’
How does it feel to be stuck in a perpetual sunset? We initially feel soothed and awed drenched in the fading blush of a day, but as this moment is stretches out forever, a growing unnerving horror takes over – as a transitory instant transforms into an eternity. As humans we don’t enjoy ‘in-betweenness’ we seek clarity, comfort and closure. Imagine living in this untethered state, as Jodie Whalen does everyday…
Don’t think of me as gone is a continuation of Jodie Whalen’s interest in excavating the everyday and appropriating her own personal history into symbolically-dense immersive environments combining, live acts, documented performance and sculptural installation. Her previous series of exhibitions looked at the artist’s lived experience of her marriage and its complex connections to the rituals and clichés of romantic love. Her durational performance Between husband and wife, launched this investigation as part of exhibition Enduring Parallels at The Lock Up curated by Lottie Consalvo and Ineke Dane (2015). In this performance Whalen and her partner (artist Heath Franco), penned love letters to one another and performed them aloud each quarter-hour across the three-day exhibition period examining the performative notions of love and courtship. This Love is Huge at Campbelltown Arts Centre followed in 2015 – a performance where Whalen sang seven songs, each representing a particular moment in her relationship spanning heartbreak to joy. The series concluded with Declaration of love at Firstdraft (2016), an installation incorporating video from the 2015 performance as the focus of a saccharine red room that drew on the kitsch ‘confetti and tinsel’ aesthetic of Valentine’s Day, articulating the insurmountable gap between emotion and expression.
Jodie Whalen, Don’t think of me as gone, installation view, Verge Gallery, 2018. Photography by Document Photography.
Jodie Whalen’s interest in creating these emotionally fraught environments draws from her studio practice and her interest in ritual as a signifier of the art making process. In a conversation together we discussed her turn away from live performance as stemming from a frustration with the medium’s ability to evidence the processes of studio practice. However, I believe Whalen’s particular approach to performance takes the tools that she finds so essential in art making – process, ritual and repetition – and gives them temporal form. Whalen’s performance practice is durational, engaging with physical challenge and emotional exertion; From the obsessions of Positive/Negative where Whalen would consume a particular number of calories and exercise until they had been exactly negated, to Day Job where the artist would take up residence in the gallery space and engage visitors in conversation about her practice (and only her practice) over the length of a working day. In Don’t think of me as gone she unites the ritual processes that characterise both her studio-based practice and her performance works for the first time.
Jodie Whalen, Don’t think of me as gone, installation view, Verge Gallery, 2018. Photography by Document Photography.
Don’t think of me as gone broadens Whalen’s lens to address her relationship to family and the complexities of her own filiality which stem from her experience of finding out she was an adopted in late-adolescence. The multisensory environment that she has created is designed to envelop the viewer, engaging them visually, somatically and olfactorily. Encompassing video documentation of performance, collages, sculpture and scent, the space becomes a symbolic analogue of the artist’s own emotional relationship to her family lineages. Don’t think of me as gone implicates the viewer deeply in the emotional space Whalen is conjuring – we aren’t just witnessing her experience, we are thrust into its tumult alongside her through her deft manipulation of space, colour and media.
Jodie Whalen, Don’t think of me as gone, installation view, Verge Gallery, 2018. Photography by Document Photography.
Each element of the exhibition is laden with symbology and the sunset lighting encourages reflection and attunes us to the ritual encompassed in each work. The series of collages This long reflection, Even as a shadow and We’re all ghosts are allegoric, each representing the relationship Whalen has with her biological mother, biological father and adoptive parents. Hydrangeas and white roses have been used to signify each individual, with the size and number of blooms indicating the emotional qualities of these relationships. In floral languages hydrangeas are emblems of persistence, while white roses indicate sorrow, loss or endings. The shape of the semicircles that enclose these blossoms are also significant; cleft and geometrically mismatched they can never form a whole. The use of a tombstone-shaped field adds to their funereal quality – these works on paper are each redolent with sublimated grief.
Jodie Whalen, Don’t think of me as gone, installation view, Verge Gallery, 2018. Photography by Document Photography.
The motif of sky and water echoes through the exhibition and the horizon line at sunset has become a preoccupation for Whalen, evident in her video works. This footage documents a series of performances the artist undertook, where she waded or faced out east at sunset and waited until the light faded from the day. Whalen links her fascination with the vast fields of sea and sky to the sublime; Humanity is awed by their majesty and simultaneously terrified by their indifference to us. The sea and sky provide the shocking reminder that we are inconsequential to the powers of nature. The lighting of Don’t think of me as gone emulates the sea and sky at the technicolor height of a transitory sunset moment and I would argue that by physically inserting herself into these unresolved spaces, Whalen is attempting to force a resolution to her own trauma.
Jodie Whalen, Don’t think of me as gone, installation view, Verge Gallery, 2018. Photography by Document Photography.
Don’t think of me as gone is filled with liminal spaces – unresolved relationships, broken geometry, personal ritual and transitory moments. Liminality as an anthropological condition denotes a ‘rite of passage’ and is understood practically as a set of rituals that move us from one life stage into another. Arnold Van Gennep identified the experience in 1906 and divided liminality into three phases, ‘rites of separation’, ‘rites of transition’, and ‘rites of incorporation’. Whalen imbues personal rituals into her works and in doing so creates her own ceremonies to mark her separation from a previous understanding of self. She has created her own transitory period where her identity is rapidly being reformulated. Don’t think of me as gone examines the emotional contours of this in-between time, as “liminality serves not only to identify the importance of in-between periods, but also to understand human reactions to liminal experiences”[1].
Whalen’s eagerness to resolve her filial relationships can also be read into the layout of the exhibition space and her intention to envelope the viewer in a multisensory experience, making them implicit in the process of emotional healing that Whalen is attempting to induce. The scent that subtly impregnates the air is an aromatic concoction of cypress, helichrysum, frankincense and bergamot, a combination of essential oils designed to assist the grieving process. While observing her work the viewer will inhale and literally internalize this emotional space. Despite the imperfect geometry within her works on paper, Whalen’s approach to the exhibition space as a whole is one of perfect balance. She references ‘the stations of the cross’ as her inspiration for how audiences will engage with the installation, each collage or video offers a moment of reflection within the tightly controlled emotional landscape of the overarching exhibition. This one satisfying moment of balance is tinged with hope and is the one indication that this liminal state will not last forever, there is the possibility of passing through.
There is a mild ethical concern about Whalen’s choice to draw the audience into her rite of passage, marooning them in an environment designed to initiate grief. But the payoff of the experience is much larger, it draws us into Jodie’s healing process and shows the collapsible boundaries between art and life. This trauma is real, these emotions are Whalen’s and we are standing inside the relics that mark her attempts to contend with her moment of transition. Don’t think of me as gone is not just an exhibition, but a real-life reckoning with deep personal upheaval and an attempt to incorporate this experience into a ‘future self’. So as the light of a perpetual sunset touches our skin we must barrack for Whalen, urging her to look to the future, keep swimming towards the horizon, because the darkest moment is just before the dawn.
Tulleah Pearce
[1] Thomassen,B. ‘Uses and Meanings of Liminality’, International Political Anthropology Vol. 2 (2009) No. 1