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15/7/2005

Janice McNab

The Changing Room, Stirling

The Chocolate Box Paintings

This solo exhibition by artist Janice McNab showcases a series of oil paintings that transform mundane details of everyday life into highly-charged paintings. Five of these oil paintings depict scaled up details of the empty plastic trays of chocolate boxes, the others deal with associated themes in the form of topiaried trees and night interiors. Painted as fragments without edges, these paintings can also be read as landscapes.

These images unravel a line of questions about the place and point of painting in culture. The viewer is asked to reconsider their own relationship to cultural objects and consumption. The difficulty of seeing what things are, and the social anxieties we are controlled by, have been underlying themes of McNab's work for the past ten years.

McNab's painting looks straightforward and realistic, employing the reality of the photograph for their source material. The viewer is, however, continually returned to the essential fiction of a painted surface. Even as painting is a document, it is always a metaphor and in the silence McNab constructs within these new paintings lies an unsettling world.

"McNab became fascinated with the packaging in chocolate boxes. She presents them as science-fiction-like landscapes, shiny and rolling, in close-up, stretched out over the whole surface of the painting. A recognisable and yet alienating pattern that seems meaningless at first, but is nevertheless an everyday part of our lives. Empty luxury wrappings as proof of our excessive consumption. An implicit reference to excess and an indication of the relativity of the things that occupy our minds. Wrappings and boxes veiling a certain emptiness." from the essay commissioned to accompany the exhibition by Tanja Elstgeest, art historian/curator at De Veenfabriek, Leiden, The Netherlands

Artist Talk Saturday 27 August 3pm Janice McNab will give a talk about her practice and the new paintings in the exhibition.

Artist Biography
Janice McNab was born in Aberfeldy, Scotland in 1964 and has lived and worked in Amsterdam since undertaking the Scottish Arts Council Amsterdam Residency in 2000. She graduated from MFA at Glasgow School of Art in 1997. Solo exhibitions include Leisure, Talbot Rice, Edinburgh, 2004; The Greenock Factory Project, Tramway, Glasgow, 2002. She is currently exhibiting in the Prague Biennial, 2005. McNab is represented by doggerfisher, Edinburgh.

Supported by: Scottish Arts Council, Stirling Council and the Mondriaan Foundation

The Changing Room
contemporary art space
35 The Crawford Arcade, King Street - Stirling
The gallery is open to the public Wednesday - Saturday / 12 - 5pm

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