Janise Yntema creates subtle tranquil works in the ancient technique of encaustic painting: beeswax, resin and pigment, fused with heat. She is noted as one of the foremost contemporary artists working in this material. With her recent inclusion of original photography, she has brought a contemporary platform to this historic medium, blurring the boundary between photography and painting. 

 

Within the genre of landscape, Yntema’s use of beeswax has brought an environmental context to her work. Questions of ecological alterations, both visual and covert, are reflected and bring to dialogue issues of permanency and sustainability. 

"Of things past" opens at the Green Door Gallery on Thursday 29 September

and runs until Sunday  16 October 2022.

Of Things Past

How can one separate environment, nostalgia and memory?

These works with landscape and nature refer to disappearing truths, memories of what once was, and may have been.

As our impressions of contemporary landscape shift, and species, some not yet discovered, disappear, each generation believes their experience as truth.

To imagine skies once darkened by great flocks of birds seems mythic fantasy. As shell-less beaches become increasingly the norm, I think of antique daguerreotypes, their once defined images now ghosted remains.
 

Our idea of nature remains constant, yet nature is altered, earth’s histories removed.

Today, as the biosphere continues to shift, twice as many plants have reached extinction than birds, mammals and amphibians combined, with insects at a rate of 8 times faster.

As repercussions from technological revolutions compound, these paintings offer quiet reminders of the spaces between nature and industry.

Janise Yntema, 2022

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