Exhibits,

Jonas Ropponen Obedient Things and Whatnot

Opening: Wednesday 20 May, 6-8pm Dates: 20 May – 6 June 2015

Jonas Ropponen is a Melbourne-based artist working mainly with object-based installation encompassing paintings, sculptures, prints and narrative. He lectures in Fine Art at RMIT University and Monash University and has shown consistently since 2003.

Jonas incorporates grotesque elements and discarded objects in his work, offsetting these with bright colour combinations. Body hair, fingernail clippings, studio sweepings, bits of card and discarded timber make it into Obedient Objects and Whatnot. If he could lay a golden egg of a shit in the middle of the space he would. But, he won’t, he’s not that sort of person. He likes forms with reasonably discrete edges, verifiable solidity and much longer histories. A shit would also have a certain flashy, immediate realness that he would find olfactorially, and conceptually, too distracting. A fossil shit, now, that would be good. However, in this show, sloppy papier mache and plaster are mixed together with various mediums and objects to make combine paintings and lumpy sculptures in a rather scatological manner. Personal history goes awkwardly into the mix with his DNA and bits-n-bobs he’s found about the place. Religious paraphernalia familiar from his upbringing is pulped in a blender and is hastily smeared and splattered around like the actions of someone not quite over something (oh, dear!).Paint is added and added again with a straight-out-of-the-tube painting philosophy that meets colour blindness.