Janet Werner

Listings(s)

'Mad Bad Sad Glad'

WHATIFTHEWORLD presents 'Mad Bad Sad Glad', a solo exhibition by Janet Werner. Werner’s work focuses on the invention of fictional characters based on found images from popular culture including models, celebrities, dolls and figurines. The paintings operate within and against the genre of portraiture, taking anonymous female figures and imbuing them with fictional personalities. For Werner, the process of painting is a way of investigating the iconic power of the image, invoking imagination, memory, and projection to invest the anonymous figures with human subjectivity and emotion. The final paintings are composite portraits that retain aspects of the original while also representing notions of transformation, innocence and loss. In Werner’s current practice the proportions of the figures shift; an argument erupts between beauty and the grotesque and the figure itself becomes the site of contest. Folded, cut, occluded, or altered, with colors ranging from luminous to ashen, and scale shifting from pixie to giant, these figures possess an otherworldly aspect. There is a subtle suggestion of witchcraft in these portraits, though it is not clear if these beings are the ones casting spells or the ones upon whom the spell is cast. Mute and expectant, leaning into the frame, at once imposing and powerless, the characters embody conflict and contradiction. Wearing their complications like a crown, they confront the viewer with their big loneliness, beckoning like absurd clowns or sorcerers practicing a kind of rough magic. A hard-cover monograph accompanies the exhibition, and is available through the gallery.

Janet Werner was born in Winnipeg and lives and works in Montreal. She received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and her MFA from Yale University, New Haven, CT. Werner has shown widely in Canada and recently at the Prague Bienale.

11 August 2012 - 15 September 2012