Jennifer Mason
Spatial Disruptions

12 – 29 December 2010

Spatial Disruptions is concerned with the meaning of formal disorder. Familiar domestic spaces lacking in architectural continuity and figural presence are arranged in such a way as to render them functionless or meaningless. What were once places to inhabit have become a source for formal experimentation.

Walls, windows and cupboards - the stuff of domestication - are composed in almost abstract terms and without recourse to familial themes. Rather than enhancing the innate culture that exists behind the façade of a family home (as Jennifer Mason has done in the past), here Jennifer is interested in the shape, the empty space and the tonality that is inherent within these architectural clusters.

Yet the works still deliberately impart a sense of the domestic. Redundant pot plants and paintings are situated within these spaces as conspicuous vestiges of a human presence, as a reminder of the domestic sub-text. In other words, the works are not entirely ignorant to a parallel reading that points to the soulless monotony of day-to-day domestic existence. These interiors are templates for white suburban culture. But the interiors cannot be lived-in as they are inverted, meaningless rooms that open out into endless voids.

Jennifer has isolated architecture’s capacity to alter the mood of those who exist within it by forcing the viewer to simultaneously inhabit both the work itself and the gallery that inhabits it. In this sense Jennifer is an artist dealing with, in broad terms, experience but also the experience of art and its role as a consumer product. Born 1978, Jennifer lives and works in Auckland, New Zealand. Trained in Fine Arts, she also holds a BA from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and has studied at Stony Brook University, New York.