JANINE DUNN
Dunn is an artist and farmer living in Gibsons, BC, who shares stories of daily life on her farm through painting. She draws on personal impressions of motherhood, animal husbandry, degradation and repair, shared labour and hospitality, and isolation and solitude. Her paintings are suffused with people, animals, plants, rural architecture, machinery and tools, making space for the work of dreams, symbols and archetypes to filter her narrative impulses. Working with industrial, agricultural and domestic materials, she collaborates with the weather and elements to develop her canvases.
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INSTAGRAM COVER THE TAKEN BONESOLO EXHIBITION
PALE FIRE
05/18/2024 — 06/22/2024
886 East Broadway
Vancouver BC
see website for open hours
or visit by appointment
In his essay “The Work of Local Culture,” American writer and agrarian Wendell Berry recalls a galvanized bucket that hung from a fencepost on his grandfather’s farm in Kentucky. For over fifty years, he watched the bucket gather fallen leaves, feathers, nuts and bugs. These materials naturally composted over time into several inches of black humus. On this phenomenon, Berry reflects: “I recognize there an artistry and a farming far superior to mine, or to that of any human. … It has been at work immemorially over most of the land surface of the world. All creatures die into it, and they live by it.” He then observes that a similar process of social accretion, through sharing and circulating stories, is integral to creating a vital local culture and bonded community.
Janine Dunn has begun to share stories of daily life on her farm on the Sunshine Coast through painting. She draws on personal impressions of motherhood, animal husbandry, degradation and repair, shared labour and hospitality, and isolation and solitude. Dunn makes space for the work of dreams, symbols and archetypes to filter her narrative impulses. Influenced by the principles of the early twentieth-century purism movement, which valued basic forms stripped of decoration, she uses methods such as bisection, redaction and abstraction to distill her compositions into simplified figures.
The works in cover the taken bone are made with mediums found close at hand: primers and paints from the hardware store and industrial oils for machinery. Dunn works with repurposed brushes, tools and natural implements that have roles in other aspects of farm labour. Drawing from the impulses of arte povera, she seeks to work economically and directly with informal materials and procedures.
The visual narrative of the Pacific Northwest’s climate is cool and desaturated. When watched and felt closely, subtle variations in temperature and tonality reveal themselves. Dunn has an affinity for grisaille, or achromatic, painting and tempers her palette to reflect the muted atmosphere. She often paints on both sides of the canvas, creating a wet, saturated surface that reveals stains from the marks made on the obverse plane.
The region’s dampness and darkness accelerates decay, but also regeneration. Many of the paintings featured in the exhibition have been exposed to the weather and worked with natural matter such as soil, leaves, sand, gravel, bark mulch and straw. These processes imbue the works with traces of the seasonal events that accompany their emergence, becoming visual stories of natural and social time.
Notes: The exhibition borrows its title from Verne Bright’s poem “Good Soil,” published in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, January 1936, 187, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=21083.
Wendell Berry, “The Work of Local Culture” (1988), in The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry (Berkley, CA: Counterpoint, 2017), 102.
Image Credit: Janine Dunn, Farm Table (detail), 2024, 24” x 31” / 61cm x 79cm. Oil, acrylic paint, oil paint on linen. Photo: Janine Dunn.