Janet Werner: What Time Is It, Mr. Wolf?

What is more impressive, if harder to see, is the way stories are working on us all the time, reshaping us… – Jonathan Gottschall

In every respect, the work of Janet Werner speaks to the potential of art – at once responsive to and productive of social illumination. Evolving her distinct approach to portraiture for over two decades, she imagines nuanced women’s worlds where other identities and other stories play out. The antithesis of conventional portraits, Werner’s subjects are composed of found images, often containing details drawn from vintage beauty magazines, fashion catalogues and illustrated books. Masked or obscured, the figures evade easy or precise likenesses, rather deconstructing the notion of femininity itself. Operating on their own terms with their own associated narratives, the works in this exhibition highlight identity and gender as thoroughly social constructs – processes of performance and negotiation, always in flux and uncertain.

This process of negotiation infuses the production of these images as well, an exploration captured in Werner’s most recent work. Here, she draws back the curtain on her own artistic labour to incorporate elements of her studio and sources – the stage for practices of representation that are far less magical than mutable. Drawing attention to the act of painting itself with its co-existing dimensions of accretion and erosion, she does not hide shadows of former layers or mistakes. Like the childhood game “What Time Is It, Mr. Wolf?”, for Werner art-making eschews linear progression, evolving instead through a mix of starts and stops, intentions and accidents, risks and resistances.

Image detail: Janet Werner, Studio (Miro), 2017, oil on canvas, 152.4 x 182.9 cm (detail). Courtesy Parisian Laundry