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Sarnia, ON – Petrolia artist Jane Austin, will have an exhibition of her work entitled, Jane Austin: Constructions Titillating and Otherwise, at Gallery Lambton from November 27, 2004 to January 8, 2005. Meet her at an opening reception at Gallery Lambton on Saturday, November 27 at 3:00 p.m.
Jane Austin’s work is familiar to art viewers in the area, and in this new body of work she takes a departure from her large paintings of local landscapes. Her work in this exhibition consists of a range of mixed media constructions in which she explores a variety of ideas, often through whimsical takes on the human body. “Making these constructions is like sophisticated child’s play. I take or make objects and toy with them. I combine them from this play then I start to make the artwork. This was the approach that Surrealists and Dada artists used in their work,” Austin says. Surrealism was a 20th century movement of artists who used fantastic images and incongruous juxtapositions which represented unconscious thought or dreams. Surrealism developed out of another European artistic movement, Dadaism, in which artists flouted conventional aesthetic and cultural values by producing works marked by nonsense, travesty and incongruity.
New ideas for artwork develop from this way of working, according to Austin. “It’s like an ever expanding universe of ideas with no possibility of making all the rather amorphous ideas into physical creation.” Austin’s artworks often contain dual and multiple meanings, offering richer possibilities to the viewer. In this way the viewers are not excluded if the artwork seems ambiguous. They can come up with their own meanings based on their own life experiences. “Often the full range of meanings in the work isn’t even apparent to me until after the work is done or until I hear another person’s interpretation of the work,” Austin says.
Jane Austin currently teaches visual art at Lambton Central Collegiate and Vocational Institute, Petrolia. She has an Honours B.A. from York University, Toronto, Ontario and a B.Ed., from the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario. A solo exhibition of Austin’s work appeared at Gallery Lambton in 1996 and she has also been included in a number of the juried shows at the gallery. Austin has exhibited her work extensively throughout southwestern Ontario.
For more information, contact Gallery Lambton at (519) 336-8127.
For more information about Lambton County, visit www.lambtononline.ca.
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Contact:
Holly Rutherford
Gallery Assistant Community Relations
County of Lambton
Telephone: (519) 336-8127
Fax: (519) 336-8128
email: holly.rutherford@county-lambton.on.ca
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