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Artist: Janaki Lennie |
| Exhibition: The Roving Eye |
| Date: May 31 2006 - July 27 2006 |
Curator: Gigantic ArtSpace
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Bio:
Janaki Lennie was born in Melbourne, Australia. When she was 10 years old her family moved to Perth on the west coast. Today a city of about one million people, Perth remains the most isolated capital city in the world. Growing up in Western Australia, separated from most of the world by the Indian Ocean in front and the Australian deserts at her back, Lennie remained mesmerized by the thin shining strip of beach that seemed to mark the boundary of the world. The vivid light and vast horizons of this sparsely populated coastal plain formed the basis of her visual lexicon. As Lennie documented this space in her work, she became increasingly preoccupied with the impact of manmade objects on the otherwise open vistas of Western Australia.
Lennie moved to Texas in 1994. Downtown Houston is a far cry from those coastal suburbs of Perth, but has been a powerful artistic inspiration, tying in perfectly to her interest in the human impact on our visual environment. Her imagery is gleaned from the immediate surroundings of Houston, it has universal familiarity. The invocation of light and space acknowledges romantic landscape painting, but without nostalgia. The atmospheric quality of urban twilight and artificial light reflected off foliage and concrete alike is disturbing and seductive, while a peculiar perspective in the work situates the viewer in a place where the scene is abstracted and silenced.
Lennie holds a BFA from Curtin University, Western Australia and MFA from the University of Houston. She has had solo exhibitions at Delaney Galleries in Australia and at Women and their Work in Austin, TX, as well as at McMurtrey Gallery, Houston and Rudolph Projects/Artscan Gallery, Houston. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Central Michigan University, Amarillo Museum of Art, University of Dallas, Arthouse in Austin, Fayetteville State University in North Carolina, New Jersey Center for the Arts, and Fremantle Art Center in Western Australia. She is represented in the collections of Art Bank Australia, Curtin University, Telecom Australia as well as corporate collections in the US. Awards for her work include a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, Telecom Australia Open Drawing Prize, Fayetteville State University National Competition Prize, and a Cultural Arts Council of Houston and Harris County Fellowship. She has recently completed a large commissioned painting for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. Her work has three times been selected for publication in the juried art journal New American Paintings.
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