Other Space

 

 

 

 

 

Megan Jenkinson is known for her collages, and in the pre-digital days these were of the physical cut and paste variety. Nowadays, collage comes via Photoshop and other computer manifestations. In Other Space, this very new body of work, Jenkinson is in art galleries photographing walls, floors and shadows, focusing her gaze on interior details rather than the displayed objects themselves. Then the collage maker sets too and digitally crafts these 'other spaces'. They are niches, walls, corners and shadows that printed onto flat vinyl, pull away from us deep into an imaginary space within the wall. The affect is both physical and psychological.

In Cinders for example, texture and the colour of stone is palpable. We stand before the beautifully flecked ochre of cut granite that distinguishes the interior of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. Shadows from objects barely seen caress the walls. At the centre is an empty shallow niche. All is illusion and delicate suggestion. Light dances softly on the stone. And Jenkinson, for the first time in her practice, prints the photograph directly onto a re-usable vinyl. No frame or glass - just the immediacy of another space, flat onto and into the wall.

Harlequin has a similar sense to it, but there is less edge and just a wonderful softness about it. We are inside the National Gallery of China in Beijing. The spectral presence of a single vertical rod is both light and lightness personified - a paeon to simplicity, beauty and elegance. There is a similar poise to Wearing down the Point of Words. But in this big, physical print mounted right to the floor (so that we could almost walk into it), the poetic is replaced by a menacing shadowed complexity. There is something more veiled and threatening here - nothing might be quite what it seems.

JS