MCAC is delighted to host ‘Ellipsis’, presenting new work by young Northern Irish artist Jennifer Trouton. It is the second project in a new series of exhibitions entitled Beneath the Painted Surface curated by Megan Johnston. Beneath the Painted Surface, is a series of three exhibitions that investigate the liminal (i.e. thresholds, boundaries and borderlines) and subliminal elements in the medium of painting. Three Northern Irish contemporary artists have been selected because their practice engages with these issues. Through these exhibitions, MCAC aims to provoke contemplation, dialogue and debate about the formal readings of the painted surface — colour, line, perspective and narrative. We will also engage with the artist to incite deeper examination of painting in historical, modern and post-modern eras.
Trouton’s work is based on a collection of abandoned possessions found by Trouton in a house, which she moved into in 2005. This house had been previously lived in by a man who left behind a fragmented inadvertent history of his life. She calls the show ‘Ellipsis’, a word indicating a pause in speech, an unfinished thought or a trailing off into silence before the end of a sentence. It is this silence that defines the concept of Trouton’s show.
‘The paintings in this show step deep into a world of relics, of the newly departed but utterly gone. Jennifer Trouton seems to have the gifts of a medium, reaching through the first swaying layers of the past that hang around us and bringing back old testimonies’. – Writer Polly Devlin.
Trouton’s paintings evoke auras, atmospheres and feelings. Devlin calls the new paintings ‘faint records of earlier times uncovered; old letters read with a sympathetic eye; photographs from foreign lands transmuted, the rambling notes of someone slowly losing their mind deciphered; all this can be seen or understood under the surface images presented to us, surface images which are seductive in their own right’.
