A song for the unsettled
18 February - 20 March 2021
Moonah Arts Centre, Moonah Tasmania
There is a wonderful painting that I’m always drawn back to when I’m with Jo Chew’s most recent work. Not for its similarity of form, medium, or subject, but for its strange capacity to hold very different ideas together tenderly in collision.
The Last of England is a painting by Ford Maddox Brown from 1855 or thereabouts. It hangs in the Birmingham City Art Gallery, a place I know well. It depicts a family in a tondo form, a circular canvas. Shivering under blankets, it tells the story of a man and wife bundled together with children and belongings on a small boat, setting off for what will in turn be the big, tall, ship that will take them to an unknown world, Australia. What Ford Maddox Brown does so very well in The Last of England is something that I think Jo Chew does very well too. In that 19th century family scene are fears and optimisms that, far from being enemies of one another, are of an equal voice, a shared voice. Just as pride and humility are not foreign to one another, but rather the same condition, Jo Chew’s work explores that unusual capacity of art to express values that in any other expression would be considered in irresolvable conflict.
Mobility, precarity, homelessness, are all dangerous things. And with art we counter dangerous things with dangerous ideas: optimism, hope, making do. There is no better way to counter a dangerous thing than with a dangerous idea. In Jo Chew’s work we have a very powerful and dangerous idea. Though you may feel sad when in-front of Jo’s work, that’s ok. Because in a strange way, fear and sadness are the greatest fuels of hope and optimism.
Necessity is the mother of invention, or so they say. It’s from Plato I think. It’s a bit of a sad proverb really, as necessity is often so easily avoidable with care and responsibility. But it’s true enough in the inventions of binding, and keeping things – and one’s self – together. And Jo reveals that the strongest of technologies are those that are found close by. Sometimes held together by what appears to be faith alone, these forms evidence the weight of gravity that is the family. Patched, mended, sewn and sutured, it might not always be the way we planned it – but we know it remains strong.
Toby Juliff, February 2021
Poetry and music are often considered soothing or reassuring, acting as a ‘a song for the unsettled’ – this exhibition displays works that acknowledge a precarious edge to our experiences and desires. The temporary and the shifting or drifting, the unhomely and the unsettled. But it also offers a salve, a gentle suggestion of restoration and repair. The parts – suspended paintings, words sewn onto plastic storage bags, drawings pinned in a row - are supported and speak to each other through repeated forms and shapes.
Jo Chew, February 2021
