Envelop, 2022

Envelop

 

A Thousand Different Angles catalogue excerpt by Melissa Miles:

 

"The architectural features of the gallery and her own artistic interventions work together to subtly direct where we look and move. Cleverly, Johns-Messenger anticipates our likely path through and around existing architectural elements, and uses our prior experience with simple optical devices to turn the familiar into something quite unexpected. Most of us interact with mirrors every day and are used to looking at their two-dimensional surface and registering depth and space. Yet we know that mirrors can offer both clarity and trickery. For Envelop, Johns-Messenger draws on that comfortable familiarity with mirrored surfaces and puts it to work with a large window that invites gallery-goers to look out to a tree in the McClelland grounds. Picking up on the human scale of the individual glass panels comprising
the window, she uses periscope optics, light and mirrors to displace lines of sight and profoundly alter our experience of the gallery space inside and out. In merging the indirect or mediated perception experienced through the mirrors with the more direct perception of the gallery space, Johns-Messenger’s work seemingly absorbs us into an abstract image."

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Venue and exhibition: A Thousand Different Angles, McClelland Gallery and Sculpture Park, curated by Lisa Byrne and Simon Lawrie in homage to Norma Redpath and Inge King.

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Year: 2022

Media: wood, paint, mirror, two-way mirror, glass and glass film

 

Dimensions: 290 x 554 x 400 cm

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