Jordan Marani
Nobody’s Home
12 August - 16 September 2023

Nobody’s Home, 2023, is a companion exhibition to 2020’s NOBODY. The time period of these works traverses the anxious social, climate and political environment of the last few years. Their genesis was in Australia’s ‘Black Summer’, in which we lived through devastating losses to our land and communities through bushfires, followed by the health crisis of Covid-19, economic instability and housing insecurity.

Nobody’s Home is a chaotic installation of painting, sculpture and textile works. The gallery is populated by a chorus of anonymous heads, nobodies, standing in for the artist and ‘the general public’ — the powerless masses with little social or political clout, resigned to yelling at a world they cannot change.

Through his work, Marani explores themes of class, politics and the housing crisis. He commingles the personal and political and conflates personal narrative with national and social issues.

Bed sheets are used throughout the installation as a material redolent with associations that are variously intimate, joyous and dark. They speak of our dreams and nightmares, as well as the metaphoric airing of dirty laundry. Along with moving boxes and other domestic objects throughout the installation, they reference the current housing crisis. More personally and obliquely, they also allude to the artist’s mixed experiences of home. They express joy in chaos and making, and a history of loss, trauma and insecurity.

The installation continues Marani’s bleak yet humorous approach to working with found and impoverished art materials, a punk/grunge aesthetic that he’s worked with since the early 1990s. His work has characteristically included figurative and narrative painting, alongside text works using the vulgar language of Australian politics and the pub.

Jordan Marani makes darkly humorous work involving personal narratives, cynical observations of the human condition and explorations of family, loss and the past. Through painting and sculpture employing bright colour, humour and word play, he explores the funny side of the dark side.

Marani makes art of the everyday, reflecting his immediate surroundings and community. His work is drawn from such crude and everyday references as suburban life, popular culture, booze, football, the art world and family history. Early works used materials from scavenged, recycled and reclaimed rubbish, such as paintings on boards salvaged from skips, bottletops, and food packaging, and from basic and impoverished materials, such as cardboard and house paint. Recent works continue to utilise humble materials, such as bed sheets and handkerchiefs, alongside more formal and polished works on board and canvas. Marani blends lowbrow culture with high art, with an insistence on the value of the working class and crass.

Over the last 30 years Marani’s work has been littered with profanity drawn from the ugly vernacular of Australian politics and the pub. He started creating text and four-letter word paintings in the late 1980s, with a series of ‘Shit Paintings’, and has been exploring word play, profanity and the joys of four-letter words ever since. His multi-faceted practice includes figurative and narrative-driven paintings alongside ongoing series of text-paintings, installation and found-object sculptures.
From 2008-2011 Jordan was co-founder and director of Hell Gallery. His work has been exhibited at Tate Modern, the National Gallery of Victoria, NADA New York, the Spinnerei Leipzig, Shepparton Art Museum, Static Gallery Liverpool, Switchback Gallery, 200 Gertrude Street, Daine Singer, Neon Parc, Utopian Slumps, Ryan Renshaw, Ray Hughes Gallery, Powell Street Gallery and at ARIs including Death Be Kind, Inflight, Seventh, and West Space.

Recent projects include solo exhibitions at SOCIAL (2022), Daine Singer (2020, 2018 and 2016) and at Ararat Regional Art Museum (2016), publication of his first book, EGGS, which launched at the National Gallery of Victoria (2016), residencies at the Leipzig International Art Programme in Germany (2019 and 2017) and Driving Creek Pottery (2023) and group exhibitions in Leipzig and New York (2018). His work is held in the collections of the Yarra City Council, Merri-bek Art Collection, LIA Leipzig, and Ararat Regional Art Gallery.