“West Wing Light & Shelf Life”
John R. Neeson
11 Jan → 16 Jan 2011
John R. Neeson, ‘West Wing Light & Shelf Life‘, 2011, installation view: West Space, Bourke Street Mall, 2011. Image courtesy of West Space.
West Wing Light is an installation of venue-specific representational works, made on-site, that directly reference the architecture and changes of light throughout the day at The West Wing space, the progress of which can be viewed over two weeks.
Shelf Life is a sequence of small still-life paintings of objects collected from the cafes on the same level as The West Wing.
"Shelf Life invites a slippage between notions of still life and shelf life. John R. Neeson nods in the direction of the retailer’s need for a quick turnaround of goods, but the imperatives of use-by dates are not known in the style-conscious contemporary art world. Still life, a genre once thought not quite muscular enough for careerist modern artists, has its own imperatives of freshness and vitality – in fact, shelf life.” – Penny Webb
John R. Neeson