Filter
In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein the monster was thought by his creator to be a truly beautiful thing, a creature of purity and perfection, until life got into him. Only then did his form reveal a hideous fixity, utterly inadequate to the revelation of his would-be humanity-to his creativity, intelligence, and capacity and need for love. In the seven large, and several smaller canvases comprising Janenne Eaton's series 'Filter', the grid is revealed as the unlikely subject of just this kind of horror story: the story of an ideal form taking possession of a life to which its own rigidity, its own anti-naturalism, is profoundly unsuited, and which precipitates that life's destruction. The twenty-first century grid has lost its modernist predecessor's airy detachment from the world. Now, perversely, it is its own very abstraction, its disregard for the particular, and its endless iterability makes it over as a global mesh of forces-political, economic and cultural- which dematerialise and deaminate space and fix and flatten lives.
'Filter' images what Teresa Brennan describes as the reduction of 'the lively heterogeneity of nature and diverse cultural orders to a grey mirror of sameness'.' This is the ego's anxious response to its threatened sense of identity when the undeniable advantages of immediacy, in a world without borders, replace real connections in space and time.
Sweep across the canvases, with minimal attention-as though surfing the net, or suffering a barrage of ad-spots-and sameness is just what we see. Our eyes teem with dots and our vision blurs. But focus squarely on each canvas in turn, and these destabilising effects are revealed as precisely-crafted breeches in uniformity: real-time is reinstated in the hand-rendering of each dot, whilst