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Game Changer

Helen Johnson – New painterly strategies

Shelley McSpedden
Eyeline 76
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Hats Riddle (2010–11) portrays a scene in which four men, buried up to their necks in sand and provided with only the most limited information, must correctly guess the colour of a hat, that has been placed on their heads, in order to avoid execution at the hands of a merciless adjudicator. Those with a passion for mental gymnastics might recognise this popular brainteaser, variants of which are endlessly reproduced in the kind of puzzle books you would expect to find in a GP’s waiting room or nestled in the bag of a regular public transport user. This ode to problem solving seems a fitting opener to ‘System Preferences’, a recent exhibition by the Melbourne based artist Helen Johnson, as her oeuvre to date can be read as an ongoing concern with the thorny problems thrown up by painting, politics, and any intersection of the two.

Over the past decade, Johnson has established an idiosyncratic practice, resolutely committed to the questions of how aesthetics can best be utilised to engage with a broad range of contemporary social and political issues. She is known for her large scale tableaux painted on paper and attached directly onto walls or composite architectural armatures. Laden with symbolic imagery drawn from diverse visual and cultural sources, these scenes speak of the contradictions, binds and dilemmas faced by individuals attempting to establish a coherent political position amidst the messy minutiae of daily life in a late-capitalist society. Whilst some narratives seem drawn from life, for example that of a young man at his desk busily working on a campaign for biodiversity whilst basking in the warmth of an electric heater, others are more poetic in approach, such... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

The Centre for the Study of Adhocracy: Producing singularities in a more and more standardised world, 2006. Installation detail. Image courtesy of the artist and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Photograph John Brash.

The Centre for the Study of Adhocracy: Producing singularities in a more and more standardised world, 2006. Installation detail. Image courtesy of the artist and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Photograph John Brash.

Changing Silks (Rinehart, Forrest, Pratt), 2011. Image courtesy of the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne. Photograph Andrew Curtis.

Changing Silks (Rinehart, Forrest, Pratt), 2011. Image courtesy of the artist and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne. Photograph Andrew Curtis.