Past Exhibitions
2021
Making Nonsense
Fortyfivedownstairs Gallery
An expanded exploration of the oversized soft-sculpture installations Janno produced during her Masters' studies at VCA (2017-18), Making Nonsense is her response to the pandemic of 2020 with all its accompanying crises, upheaval, and disorientation. Understandable as a defiant celebration of life, resilience, humour, and absurdity, Janno’s enduring preoccupations as an artist encompass ideas about compassion, love, and community as the sustaining principles of a kinder world.
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2019
National Gallery of Victoria
Art of Dining, Best of the Best
Janno represented Victoria College of the Arts at the NGV in 2019 and created a table, and installation based on stories of Cleopatra, Mark Antony, love... The brief referenced Tiepolo, Christian Dior, Cecil Beaton, Masked gala balls, Venice, Salvador Dali, sumptuous feasts, pearls, lust, betrayal ...and lavish excess. A perfect brief made for Janno and she spent 6 months hand sewing, painting, and imagining her installation and had much help from her family, CWA ladies, local builders, vintage finds, friends to see it to fruition---a Table and labour of love.
2018
VCA Masters exhibition,
Melbourne University
Cocoon
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Excerpt from my writings 'Tales of a Practice'... 2018
"Life and art can be crazy and inseparable, and the ‘cocoon’ materialised in my practice as if a ‘puff of smoke’ from an Aladdin’s magical lamp. A structural and ephemeral metaphor to articulate the possibilities and importance of safe space and refuge for all those who might be endangered or vulnerable. To represent those things that ‘can’ or can’t be spoken, the ‘cocoon’ in essence mutated, transforming from an earlier incarnation of a hot air balloon with associated personal ties to a vulnerable, and profoundly autistic son, threaded to notions of escape, voyage, freedom, childhood and of holding on and letting go. The ‘cocoon’ in the space of my imaginings is a nest-like den, with soft opalescent walls of downy fluff that offer possibilities of shelter and respite. There are circular windows in this protective womb of space, overlooking rolling green fields of forest wildflowers and cascading water. Birds sing, bees hum, dogs bark, children play and tell their stories. A ‘Noah's Ark’ of cocoon that embodies life, encompassing home, fragility, mother, nature, nurture, metamorphosis, time and ancient references such as Ovid and the prehistoric statue of the Venus of Willendorf."
2015
Forty Five Downstairs
Look Up - Brave Up
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Look up –June 2015
Look up is a body of work about humanity and reconnecting with nature. Janno explores fragility and the concept of the empty nest as her children grow up and exercise their independence. The exhibition is a call to experiencing the real and actual world around us.
Janno’s artworks seek to sow hope, bravery, love, optimism, resilience and whimsy. They are anchored by a deliberately ridiculous and unwavering sense of humour and bemusement. Her approach is unapologetically bold with a preference for blazing colour and mixed media. She deploys text, thread and richly associative metaphors to portray the most vulnerable, fragile and endangered in society.
In her previous solo exhibitions, Janno has explored the theme of the outsider; the foreigner living in a non-English speaking world; the disenfranchised urban poor; and closer to home and as the mother of a child with autism, the isolation of disability.
Look up portrays the plight of nature and the outsider in a collection of large, abstract, colour-fuelled paintings, oversized sculptures, and smaller, intimate, sewn paper works.
Look up-Brave up October 2015
As happens in life, we get thrown unexpected challenges.
Look up has ballooned and taken on its own uncharted journey, exploding into a defiant herald to live.
Look up continues to be a body of work about humanity and reconnecting with nature and now extends to explore janno’s own fragility as she herself defies the possibility of her own extinction.
The empty nest is now lined with messages of hope and love from friends and family around the world in order to weave safety, love and support for her three boys.
(Look up has undertaken a metamorphous into Brave up) edited by Rose Lang