Making Nonsense
texts by Rose Lang

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.

 

The exhibition is an unapologetic, wildly exaggerated, absurdist conflagration of installation, large- and small-scale paintings, paper works, textiles and hand-sewn soft sculptures with bold explosions of colour. Janno has also included the collaborative Corona Girl project with Covid-19 responses from participants around the globe, sewn into the dress of the large-scale female figure, representing togetherness in isolation.

 

This is a show unafraid to advocate for enduring humanist virtues. Love, dignity, compassion, social justice and the primacy of human happiness, promise a gentler and less complicated way of being in the midst of a deeply strange, post-truth moment in history.

​

​

​