Linda James: Fallen

Linda James has worked as a full-time artist since 1980. Since graduating from the Canterbury School of Fine Arts in 1983, she has received several awards, including the Olivia Spencer Bower Award in 1989 and a Creative New Zealand grant in 2003. Fallen is the latest of many shows James has held at COCA since her gallery debut Discord/Out of the Chaos in 1998.

James' formal strategy involves appropriating images from Western art history and the contemporary media. Whilst such borrowings are, arguably, intrinsic to art-making, James follows 1980s pioneers of so-called 'Appropriation Art' (i.e., Sherrie Levine - and perhaps, in a New Zealand context, Ian Scott) in self-consciously foregrounding this aspect of her practice. In a manner similar to these earlier artists, James explores how traditional notions of identity and authenticity are destabilized and trivialized in an environment where the commerce in images (via television, the internet, advertising) has reached saturation point.

This was a primary concern of James' last COCA show, Love Story, Precious Lives II (2009) where the artist took the two-second sound-bite media detritus of buildings destroyed in bombing incidents and translated these images into large-scale paintings. James' observation that 'These real and... catastrophic events move via the camera and cyberspace to re-emerge into the smallness of everyday life as illustrations for political events,' 1 exemplifies her concern with the distorting, trivializing media lens.

Addressing the works created for her current show, James describes her desire to 'illustrate a narrative of failure, surrender or fall from grace' whereby her subjects 'move from being real people, to a photographic illustration, then... a painting.' 2 This statement both reiterates James' preoccupation with our experience of reality as a media construct and presents her 'solution': to re-present these fleeting news fragments as carefully considered (and, at times, monumental) paintings in the reflective space of the art gallery.

In the process, James ironically perpetrates yet another distortion of reality, as all such re-makings of pre-existing images and prior events inevitably must be. However, she does so quite knowingly in order to explore the nature of 'representation' and to assert her own political agency. Hence James' comment that 'interrogating images... can show the ways in which structures carry within themselves the nature of their own collapse.' 3 In this way, she reminds the spectator that even if all presentations of reality (whether in paint or on TV) are constructions, not all constructions are created equal. Moreover, as an artist actively re-making her world, James rejects slavish acceptance of media-created reality, and sets an example we all might follow.

-David Khan

1 Linda James, artist comment for 'Love Story, Precious Lives II,' COCA online, http://www.coca.org.nz/exhibitions/127/, c.2009 <02.10.10>

2 Linda James, unpublished artist notes for 'Fallen,' c.2010.

3 Linda James, 'Out of the Chaos III,' artist notes online, http://www.lindajames.co.nz/jameschaos111.html, c.2003 <02.10.10

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