An Installation by Janina Green

Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale

 February 10^th – March 11^th 2001

We should be grateful for what we have, not ask for the moon. For, as Bette Davis said to Paul Henreid at the end of “Now Voyager”, we still have the stars. A visit to the Gippsland Art Gallery earlier this year gave us both moon  and stars. As a result of inspired curatorship, visitors had to pass through an exhibition of photographs by the internationally acclaimed stars of American landscape and nature photography, Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, to arrive at Janina Green’s meditation on the local landscape. In moving from the front to the back of the gallery, we not only moved from the stellar to the lunar, and from the global to the local. We also passed by the great male masters’ heroic encounters with the sublime attributes of Nature and Mechanismo on our way to the space which housed the female photographer’s search for a place for herself in the scheme of things - a search guided by the illusive light of mirror reflections and the fatal attraction of lunar modules. 

Unlike the timeless landscapes of Adams and Porter, Green’s landscapes of the Latrobe valley are marked by autobiography and history. In childhood and adolescence, she and her friends frequented these humble lowlands, lakes and streams outside the industrial town where their parents worked. The local girl - no longer local, no longer a girl - revisits these scenes, and registers them with the eyes of a mature adult; she associates them with other landscapes now close to home and equally cherished – scenes in Japanese vases and Chinese paintings; images of illusions and dreams in other places. The resulting assemblage of photographs was exhibited near the Latrobe valley and viewed by people who are familiar with the Latrobe River, Lake Narracan, Beck’s Bridge and Tom’s Bridge, by people who share her cultivated nostalgia. 

Green associates her youthful illusions with those of the child in the Chinese painting, who mistakes the reflection of the moon in the water for the real moon. She places photographs of a fair child and a young Asian woman, both holding moon-shaped mirrors, alongside her photograph of the painting. The landscape photographs are manipulated and crafted, through hand tinting or other forms of colour heightening, to create the rose-tinted aura of nostalgia or the highly coloured look of childhood vision. The child’s view is also suggested through inflation of scale: commonplace objects, people and natural phenomena (like domestic ornaments, parents and creeks) appear huge to a child. The humble and prosaic landscape around Yallourn is given an inflated, majestic scale. The two Asian vases are rendered monumental as well as plum-coloured, heavily and darkly rose-tinted. Alongside them, the indistinct hazy image of a Latrobe valley scene (elsewhere printed in sharp relief) fades into palest of rose. This bleached and ethereal image draws attention to the fragility of memory and desire, to the artifice and illusiveness of nostalgia.

 The dark undertones of domestic and sexual menace that  gave a disturbing edge to some of Green’s earlier images of her Gippsland childhood are not evident here. Age and distance seem to have softened the scars of a childhood spent among a displaced, disturbed and uprooted migrant family. But if she is now grateful for what she has, and no longer hankers after the moon, that does not mean that she has risen above it all and abolished her demons. On the subject of gratitude, the saccharine sentiments of Christian clerics may be comforting but the cynical observations of two English scholars who studied human behaviour are more insightful:

“There are minds so impatient of inferiority that their gratitude is a species of revenge, and they return benefits not because recompense is a pleasure but because obligation is a pain.” (Samuel Johnson, 1751)

“Revenge is profitable, gratitude is expensive.” (Edward Gibbon, 1776) 

Freda Freiberg