Exhibition. John Batten Gallery, 64 Peel Steet, Central. 11am-7pm Tue-Sat (closed 2pm-3pm); 1pm-5pm Sun, or by appointment. Tel: 2854 1018. Until Sept 30
Artist Jayne Dyer offers a glimpse of our life. Her Mapping The Sky Hong Kong exhibition looks at the elements as a way of viewing how we perceive the world. 'These paintings investigate the ways we chart or define our place or time,' she says.
Her multiple panels offer a means of seeing how we order and make structure from lives that are always changing. 'They are about what it is we are, how we place ourselves,' she says.
Dyer has chosen the 36-panel format because it offers a way of reflecting fragments of memory. It suggests a broader outlook but still gives viewers a very real physical engagement with that.
'I'm very interested in how differently we see the world of the present and the past. If we all speak in a conversation, we'll all have different memories of what took place, what was said, different interpretations.
'My work now has become about 'us' and how each of us constantly charts those things that are in flux. I want to explore physical space and its opposite: memory and the shadows cast by physical objects.'
So she paints small acrylic paintings and screen-prints onto balsa wood panels. The surfaces of her work are scratched, rubbed, layered with paint. Changes are depicted by painting fields of colour, screen-printing text, creating geographical and cartographic images and adding astronomical drawings into her work. Each box-shaped panel - in acrylic, gouache, and screen-printed - is hand-sized and projects from the walls.
