Uh Oh, Look Who Got Wet
2019

Audio

• Janiva Ellis

  In 2019 Biennial

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  Janiva Ellis

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  Play Transcript

  Jane Panetta: This monumental painting by Janiva Ellis in many ways is really dominated by the landscape. It's not a rendering of any single landscape, it's really this kind of hybrid landscape and I think she uses that backdrop to kind of heighten the ambiguity that then plays out with the figures. The figures you see in the painting, you don't quite know what they're feeling, you don't know where they're going, you don't quite know what the narrative is. There's definitely tension playing out I think, and that's also something she augments through the landscape. There are these very foreboding clouds at the top of the landscape, and even the sort of strangeness of it I think lends an unsettled quality to the painting in general.

  Narrator: In the figures, Ellis echoes her approach to landscape—their elements seem to have been pulled from a number of different places. One large figure lies across the ground.

  Jane Panetta: You don't know quite what's going on. Is the figure sleeping? Is the figure thinking? Then, in the center of the composition, there's what looks like a female figure kind of striding forward that feels very dynamic and is really the centerpiece of the painting. But again there's a real ambiguity to, are they running, are they fearful, what's playing out there? And then they're holding what looks like a baby that's again painted quite differently and I think Ellis is always interested in the different ways you can paint a figure within a single composition. That it can have a cartoonish element, it can seem like a more figurative naturalistic body, and that they can also be painted at all these different scales within this single composition.