grass all the greener
Hannah Joynt
June 10- July 5
Absurdity, delight and humour continue to illuminate
the worlds created by Hannah Joynt in 'grass all the greener'
opening Friday June 10
In "Grass all the Greener", Otepoti Dunedin-based artist Hannah Joynt continues her exploration of the absurd through incongruous juxtapositions of utilitarian and opulent objects and scenarios. In Pontoon Piano (2022), for example, Joynt positions a piano and freestanding pink lampshade on a pontoon. Where a pontoon more commonly signifies aquatic activities, the piano and lampshade are companionably found in domestic spaces. Despite the jarring incongruity, all the works in this body of work involve or are situated in the context of leisure pursuits. The Annual Event (2022) takes a harvest festival or agricultural show as its origin but attenuates the co-ordinates. Instead of a woodchopping competition, the contestants chop watermelons, and do so with an array of implements from axe to rake, spanners and spade. Elsewhere in the festival, participants tackle oversized corncob pieces with a two-person crosscut saw and giant standing cacti with knives.
Joynt eschews hyperrealism for a naive, representational style of realism that is most successful in the exhibition’s largest painting, Making Your Leisure Your Pleasure (2022). In the absence of crisp delineation, the activities of a busy painting such as The Annual Event become somewhat blurry and indistinct. However, the larger scale of Making Your Leisure Your Pleasure enables Joynt to attend to details while still retaining definition. Among the waterlogged willow trees and pink flamingo floating craft (small boats, peddle boats), Joynt depicts flamingo birds, abseilers, sunbathers and ubiquitous orange road cones. The bareness of the trees in what otherwise appears to be summer adds to the disquiet.
Robyn Maree Pickens, Otago Daily Times, June 16 2022