Jordan Marani at Daine Singer

Artist: Jordan Marani

Exhibition title: NOBODY

Venue: Daine Singer, Melbourne, Australia

Date: March – June, 2020

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Daine Singer, Melbourne

Jordan Marani’s NOBODY is a loose installation of soft-sculpture and textile paintings. The works include a series of paintings of anonymous heads painted on pillows and doona covers, layered over sheets and other found textiles. These are interspersed with text paintings spelling out WTF FTW TWF (what the fuck/ fuck the world/ the world’s fucked) – simple, dumb, basic (and social media referencing) expressions at the state of the world.

The works are expressions of a feeling of nihilism and helplessness – as an artist and a citizen. They are a bunch of ‘big fat nobodies’ with little social or political clout, resigned to yelling at a world they cannot change. A mass of people who are literally ‘stuffed’. The works are rough, raw and emotive. They reference the works of Claes Oldenburg, Tracey Emin and also Australian conceptual artist Aleks Danko’s ‘art stuffing’ works of the 1970s.

In the works, Marani commingles the personal and political and conflates personal trauma with national. References to fire are currently relevant to us all but also gesture to the artist’s personal experiences of fire and loss. The polyester bedding that forms the painting supports recall mum’s bed, as well as the metaphoric airing of dirty linen. Sheets are used throughout the installation as a material redolent with associations that are variously intimate, joyous and dark, they speak of our dreams and nightmares.

The installation continues the artist’s often bleak yet humorous style of making, and use of found and impoverished art materials, a punk/ grunge aesthetic that the artist has worked with since the early 1990s. Marani’s work has characteristically included figurative and narrative painting alongside text works using the vulgar and profane language of Australian politics and the pub.

These works were completed during Australia’s ‘Black Summer’, in which we have lived through devastative losses to our land and fauna through bushfires, as well as suffocating smoke pollution across vast swathes of the country, followed now by the health crisis of COVID-19. In this anxious environment, our dazed citizens ask ourselves: what the fuck?

From 2008-2011 Jordan was co-founder and director of Hell Gallery. His work has been exhibited at Tate Modern, the National Gallery of Victoria, NADA New York, the Spinnerei Leipzig, Shepparton Art Museum, Static Gallery Liverpool, McClelland Gallery, Switchback Gallery, Gertrude Contemporary, Neon Parc, Utopian Slumps, Ryan Renshaw, Ray Hughes Gallery, Powell Street Gallery and at ARIs including Death Be Kind, Inflight, Seventh, and West Space.

Recent projects include publication of his first book, EGGS, which launched at the National Gallery of Victoria (2016), solo exhibitions at Daine Singer (2018 and 2016) and at Ararat Regional Art Museum (2016), a public artwork for the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (2016), residencies at the Leipzig International Art Programme in Germany (2019 and 2017) and group exhibitions in Leipzig and New York (2018). His work is held in the collections of the Yarra City Council, Moreland City Council, LIA Leipzig, and Ararat Regional Art Gallery.