Image: Jan Nelson, Black River Running #4, 2017. Oil on linen, 74 x 57 cm. Photo: Mark Ashkanasy. Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery.

Anna Schwartz Gallery presents Black River Running, a solo exhibition by Australian artist Jan Nelson. The exhibition will run from 27 April to 26 May 2018.

For nearly two decades Jan Nelson has meticulously created paintings that concentrate deeply on the role of the visual in the construction and experience of an adolescent self. In contemporary times, this concern is more relevant as it has ever been. For her new series Black River Running, Nelson splices and cuts from various sources to create a simulation of the real, an exquisite corpse upon which our worldly anxieties are projected: nuclear blasts, the failure of capitalism, cyber attacks, metadata and the encroachment of the online into everyday existence.

In the age of the curated self-exemplified by; selfies, Instagram, Tumblr and Snapchat, the critical developmental phase of adolescent self-actualisation is now mediated by smartphone screens and subsumed into the online. Screens play a vital role in the crafting of Nelson’s distinctive aesthetic.  The monitor’s high-definition projection of her hybridised portraits, sets a perfectionist bar, which she then sets out to meet through the slowly evolving task of painting. This labour of human hand, Nelson perceives as a performative act, exposing the gap between the constant striving towards digitised perfection and the flawed reality of our idiosyncratic humanity.