Janna Watson Has Something To Say
An installation view from Janna Watson’s current solo show, Speaking in Tongues. Photo courtesy of Bau-Xi Gallery.
To stand amongst an array of Toronto-based painter Janna Watson’s pieces is to be pulled into an energizing cosmos of swirls, swishes and streaks of emotive gesture. Lavishly layered, the mix of media Watson employs – from oil pastels to acrylic paints – build into a swell of unencumbered abstract mannerisms that immediately command attention.
Her past paintings, divinely described in this essay by curator and critic Donald Brackett, have been defined by tantalizingly saturated washes of colour that create an expanse in which her tumbles of colour take shape. But in her latest solo show at Bau-Xi Gallery, Speaking in Tongues, Watson has ventured into new sorts of territory, from subject matter to spatial definition.
Watson, who grew up in an Evangelical home with a Pentecostal preacher father, crafts an interpretive intersection between the formative spiritual experience of being taught to pray in tongues – a practice also known as glossolalia, which involves a person saying words or making sounds that mimic speech, but in patterns that are considered foreign to the speaker and positioned as a sort of divine communication method – with the notion that visual articulations can stand in for verbalized thoughts.
Janna Watson, Speaking in Tongues. Mixed media on panel (84 x 72 inches). Photo courtesy of Bau-Xi Gallery.
“I love words – they’re so impactful,” Watson told me while I took in the show this week. “But I have a hard time describing my work.” She manifests this tension, and the freedom she feels in self-expression through painting, via frenetic strokes and bold textural punctuations like a glossy squiggle of Carmine found in the piece Lunch Poems (P.S. All the names of these works are wonderful!).
I ask Watson if it was challenging to mine aspects of her past for thematic inspiration, and she notes that it’s her first foray into such an autobiographical approach – but that the timing was right. “I'm at a point in my life now where I've worked through a lot of trauma and sadness in therapy, and I'm in a place where I want to really explore all of the tones of joy,” she says.
There’s certainly a captivating exuberance that resonates from the assortment found in Speaking in Tongues, whether it be the swipe of earth and blue tones – that to me looks like a waterfall – cascading down the show’s titular work, or the dramatic ribbons that twirl through Passion as Juicy as a Grape. I was especially drawn to this example of colour field exploration, which is a new element in Watson’s oeuvre; not only because of the work’s intriguing dimensionality, but also because of her decision to let the wood grain of the panel on which it’s painted assert itself from behind the moody mingling of reds.
Janna Watson, Passion as Juicy as a Grape. Mixed media on panel (40 x 40 inches). Photo courtesy of Bau-Xi Gallery.
What’s most pleasing about the handful of colour field pieces in Speaking in Tongues is the pause they offer between the show’s more frenetic focal points. “I started with the pieces like Places I’ve Never Been when working on this show,” Watson recalls, drawing attention to the boisterous vantage points found in the show’s larger-scale works. “They were so overwhelming that I felt like I needed to include something soothing beside them.”
She taps into this notion of respite through the navigation of negative space, with panels drenched in bold hues like tangerine and pastel pink and accented only by playful undulations of similar shades at the bottom of each work; although, and I love this about Watson’s practice, it’s noted that any orientation can be chosen to showcase her paintings.
In making the decision to contrast ideas of openness with the coltish commotion of the wilder works in the show, Watson also creates a definitive impression of the ‘micro’ planes we are looking at in pieces like Tongue Twister. She explains that because she paints with the panels on the ground, she experiences “a sense of being inside of a painting when I'm working on it. I wanted to give that feeling to the viewer, and I decided to ‘blow up’ my work as if we’re looking at it from inside of the composition.”
An installation view from Janna Watson’s current solo show, Speaking in Tongues. Photo courtesy of Bau-Xi Gallery.
The idea of opposition, and the potential dynamism in digging into it, also crops up when we chat about another colour field work in the show, Ace of Cups. It caught my eye thanks to its compelling ice blue hue and of course, its name. As someone who pulls cards as often as I can, I had to know what the significance was in touting Tarot.
“In my household growing up, Tarot was basically considered witchcraft,” Watson says. “It was a super no-no.” She adds that while she doesn’t align with Pentecostalism any longer, she “did take the practice of speaking in tongues with me, because it’s a way in which I can pray or meditate very easily. It’s a tool that I’ve brought into my life as it is now. And I use Tarot as a way of connecting to my intuition; it helps me know what I already know. It’s like I’m integrating two pieces of my spirituality in this show that don’t really go together in the outside world but internally, they bring me peace.”
Watson says that she drew the Ace of Cups card while beginning to create works for Speaking in Tongues, and it came to symbolize the uplifting spirit she endeavoured to capture. “It’s a very emotional card, but ultimately hopeful – like the beginning of something new and exciting,” she says. “I really wanted to execute feelings of elation and abundance in these pieces.”
Speaking in Tongues is on until June 27th at Bau-Xi Gallery Dufferin, and an artist talk will be held at the space tomorrow, Saturday June 22nd, at 3pm.
