VISUAL ARTS REVIEW:Jasper Knight - 1970s Disasters

Jasper Knight’s brightly coloured and playful exhibition, 1970’s Disasters was on show at the new space of established Perth gallery, Greenhill Galleries in Dalkeith until Saturday, November 8. Thematically the show re-presented some modish interiors and architectural fads of the 1970s via the distinctive media employed by Knight; enamel paint, masonite and perspex.

Each of the works were well made and the images were individually and collectively engaging. The handling of the material was an interesting mixture of pictorial construction and deconstruction, with the various formal and ground elements at once tied together in cohesion and juxtaposed with the application of the enamel paint.

Coloured perspex surfaces sat well alongside the gloss paint and the limited palette of bright colours, but its solid, glassy surface and constructed edges were playfully set against the free hand application of liquid paint and the residual drips and splashes from that process.

The presence of masonite peg board as an integral part of the ground was an interesting and humorous contextual reference to Roy Lichtenstein’s dots. Rather than elevating printed pop culture to high art, the machined perforations speak of the corner store and the supermarket and return us to the suburban realm of the images.

It was a little unclear whether Knight’s treatment of the theme was intended to be nostalgic or satirical (or a love-hate mixture), though the title of the show would suggest perhaps a leaning towards satire. The media employed, for this viewer, conveyed additional layers of era-associated nostalgia, while the “pop” handling of the images also harked back to the 60s and 70s.

The stylistic uniformity and composition of the works also carried well some residual sense of the date of their source images, in the same way that a peculiar tint of photographic prints pervades an era of processing or that super8 home movies have a 'look' that situates them in time.

Knight’s exhibition was a successful union of craftsmanship and a great sense of play with what otherwise might have been very mundane or fashionably kitsch subject matter. It was a refreshing presentation of works engaging with the everyday sets of the suburban Australian upbringing of the thirty-somethings’ generation, without recourse to sensationalism or over-burdened with the need to find something sinister beneath the veneer.

More contemporary artists should allow some evidence of the pleasure that they derive from their practice to remain in their exhibited work, not subordinated to a sense of having to do 'something important' or 'significant'.

Jasper Knight
1970s Disasters
12 Oct– 08 Nov
Tue–Fri 10am–5pm
Sat–Sun 10am–4pm
For more information please visit www.greenhillgalleries.com