Janet Tran

Theoretically, an artist who would focus on material, as ends and for itself, and not as means of representing, or of signifying, has, when they begin their work, a freedom, which is infinite, to show us something. Yet, as any impulse takes on form, it stands indebted to our “cultured” and conditioned sense, to thought and feeling, beaten into what they are through histories (and more than that) of prejudice, cemented by a `burrows and entrenches its erroneous decision, in a people, by abusing physicalities: selecting some “comportment of material” to victimize, another to be benefitted; force and violence change it from a groundless and mistaken understanding to a state of institutions, to a thing that will be noticed, by a child, for example, seeing nothing of its origins. In weaving, then, the canvas of society, it labors on all levels as to reproduce itself as a reality, a law of physics, so to speak—a quality of that in which we live. We are accustomed to its messages: the world of our experience is doubled in the semi-solid webs of connotation that determine what we recognize. And yet, again, if apperception truly is a product of the world, the world of matter which society affects but cannot master absolutely, then within each individual there echoes, intermingled with the self-affirming voice of the oppressor, the rebellious, hopeful murmur of the wronged. It is the artist who, perceiving this distressful battle undecided, in their self, expresses, not an isolated, alien resistance, but a self-resistance; antibodies burgeoning within a part diseased. And in so doing, they become the process of accomplishing that longing which our so tormented people nearly forfeits in its long confusion: fairness to itself. In self-taught artist Janet Tran’s erratic painting, often born of arbitrary probing of the medium itself, we are enticed, and yet unable, to completely apprehend a human element: a body part, a vital essence. This abruptly checked intent to recognize our living matter, blood and tissue, leads us as by slight of hand to fleetingly identify with indiscrete and unifying energy. In favoring that undigested pullulation common to celestial and chemical constructions, we are turned away from bodies, and to pleasure in a withering of certainty and pride. In what appears to be a narrow frame, a penetrating eye in search of dominant or central atoms endlessly extends, and is devoured by a carefully affected whole, a confluence of color nearing actual illumination. Tran has turned to scuplture and collage as proper methods for a more directly social or political examination. Here, conversely, figures unabashedly confront and even study us; in many ways both frail and unassailable. Their cramped existence tarries like the relic of a vast attrition, meek and incidental as the refuse of a vast machine. It seems deliberate skewering or strangulation renders them and keeps them in their structure; but despite a great discomfort, there is calm, and in these tortures springs ambiguously something like a scion out of hardened earth; a hope with no illusions of our difficulty. — Will Kettner