Jack Trolove: Keening
- 28 November 2021
11 December 2021–29 April 2022
Artist Talk: Saturday 11 December, 1pm–2pm
Te Manawa Museum, Palmerston North
When I paint, I’m trying to find feeling.
It’s as simple and as complicated as that.
I try to make paintings that remind us how much emotional muscle we have. The materiality of paint holds a lot - it can carry gestures and energies that are unsettling, disturbing or blissful, and sensations like plummeting and flight, simultaneously. The more years I spend painting, the more magical this seems to me.
The raw linen shows through the paint; these paintings are not whole stories. If anything, they’re the holes in stories, showing themselves being made and undone. Untethering at the threshold. I find paintings themselves can work as thresholds, by creating a literal second skin to move through, to feel moved.
This exhibition is dedicated to those who work in transformational practices at other thresholds — to the keeners, kaikaranga, midwives, rongoā practitioners, palliative carers, choreographers, therapists and healers to name a few. To people who the world makes liminal, including those who live between gender — ours are some of many bodies that keep the thresholds of the world from closing down. To experts from the natural world: the mangroves, the dawn, the dusk, thank you for showing us how to thrive at the in-between.
These paintings are for you.
Jack has been a practicing artist for over twenty years, showing in spaces across Aotearoa, Australia and Europe. He has an MFA from Massey University and is currently pursuing his doctorate at Elam School of Fine Arts. He has been awarded an international artist residency by the Scottish Arts Council and has undertaken other residencies in France and Spain. He’s been an award winner and finalist in the Wallace Art Awards on multiple occasions. His last solo show ‘Tenderise’ was the subject of a feature review in Art New Zealand. Reviewer Michael Dunn wrote, “Tenderise proves to be, on reflection, a show of considerable depth and relevance. In it Trolove has evolved as a painter of substance as well as a virtuoso manipulator of paint.” Jack’s work can be found in public and private collections both here and overseas.
