BREE JONSON

Based in Manila, Jonson is known for her enigmatic works that convey the complex and darker tendencies present in the human condition through her allegorical paintings of animals in scenes of perpetual motion. Painting realistic dogs, cats, rabbits, wolves and unusual subjects such as sea urchins and anemones, Jonson presents these creatures in various quotidian entanglements that trigger familiar yet bizarre semblance to our own life experiences. By fleshing out primal instincts universal to both, she collapses the divide between animals and humanity, to question and challenge our relationship with nature.

In her latest exhibition, Notes on Stillness, Jonson continues her ruminations and keen observations on the human condition and the natural world. The exhibition brings together a diverse collection of new works that free flow between various topics inspired by the artist’s personal affections, subconscious dreams and intellectual curiosities. Here, many of the animals presented are no longer in a brutal state of maniac flux, and instead appear to be in a moment of suspended rest and contemplation. In the painting Everything and Nothing, a pack of canines drink from a fissure in the ground, its streams washed into a blurred field of overlapping blacks and greens. A lone dog gazes out, stuck in the middle of drift ice in Ice Floes, its hazy scene melding into an half-erased sky of melancholic grey. In many of these new works, landscapes dissipate and devolve into abstraction, horizons and lines breaking and dripping into oblivion. Yet the humanly essence of Jonson’s animal subjects becomes even more acute, more tangible.

As according to the artist, ‘stillness is ultimately about taking a step back, looking, feeling, absorbing’. For in stillness, we break ourselves away from the flux and distractions of life, and return back to ourselves, our origins, and our shared humanity.