Jasper Jordan-Lang: ‘Attention Interest Action’ at Cache
/
Jasper Jordan-Lang’s exhibition ‘Attention Interest Action’ at Cache brought attention to the people and places who have come before us and provided a window into the everchanging landscape of Naarm/Melbourne.
Walking down Little La Trobe Street, I worried that I would miss the entrance to the gallery. Founded by artist Tommaso Nervegna-Reed and architect Andre Bonnice in early 2024, Cache resides on the top floor of the old offices of Edmond & Corrigan, the architectural firm behind many prominent Melbourne buildings, including the VCA Theatre building in Southbank, Building 8 of RMIT and Niagara Galleries in Richmond.
I entered Cache full of assumptions. Previous iterations of Jordan-Lang’s work that I have encountered were meticulously refined geometric forms that came together in response to their geography. What I did not expect was to see a collection of photographs emblematising the visual style of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner 2049.
At first glance, the five photographs comprising the exhibition were incomprehensible—akin to the experience of seeing an impressionist painting. I was convinced that the work had been altered in some way: Photoshop, AI or collage. However, on closer inspection (and receiving clarification from the artist himself) the crackling neon pictures revealed themselves to be unedited photographs of existing images.
The original pictures in question were stock photographs for La Do Vietnamese and Thai, a now defunct restaurant located on the corner of Boundary Road and Canning Street in North Melbourne. Once marketing spring rolls, Peking duck and miscellaneous alcoholic drinks, a decade of wind, sun and rain exposure has morphed the once commonplace into the sumptuously absurd.
Riddled with nostalgia, Jordan-Lang’s work buzzes with the grit and vibrancy of a late-night dining spot, the kind that is bathed in a pool of neon light and where the edges of your vision blur. Images of martini glasses and pints dripping with anticipation scratch against a decade’s worth of exposure to UV radiation. There is no colour from nature in this series—if they were food, they would probably give you cancer—but the effect is a cybernetic display of extravagance.
Nestled among the gridded black rails that guard the old Edmond & Corrigan library, the five photographic artworks take on the characteristics of a lab-grown gemstone. Ink-jet print on particle board, the photographs jilted against the utilitarian space, their vibrancy a sonogram of the bustling city outside.
In many ways ‘Attention Interest Action’ is an extension of the site specific, minimalist work that Jordan-Lang has previously produced. In this iteration, however, rather than engaging with found objects as a reference to location, Jordan-Lang makes traces of Melbourne’s lost geography visible through the pictorial plane. The oblique marks imprinted in the photographs footnote the years of development under city life. Each indication of grit and weathering forms a register of years passed.
The particle board backing of the pictures mimicked the floor of Cache to create a synergy between art and place. The photographs also matched the space in a different way: while the subject of the images captures the effect of time, the gallery, which operates on a month-to-month basis while waiting for renovation plans, is an example of time passing itself.
Resplendent is a terrible word. Truly it is terrible, it imparts a high-school-naivety onto beautiful things and in doing so transmutes them into a gaudy caricature. However, despite my reservations towards the term, when I entered the tight gallery and saw Jordan-Lang’s exhibition, it was the first word that came to mind.
The photographs speak to the ever-changing topography of Melbourne and offer a glimpse of stagnation within a rapidly developing landscape. Jordan-Lang’s ‘Attention Interest Action’ is the relief print of the city’s past and a spectre of the people and places who have come before us.
Lily Beamish, Naarm/Melbourne
‘Attention Interest Action’ by Jasper Jordan-Lang was exhibited at Cache in Naarm/Melbourne for a single weekend, August 24–25 2024.
