Jennet Thomas: All Suffering SOON TO END!

Issue 43, Summer 2010. See the entire magazine online here.

Matt’s Gallery, London
14 April – 6 June

By Rebecca Geldard

The purple doorstep evangelist of Jennet Thomas’s film installation All Suffering SOON TO END! (2010) puts heat under the old saying ‘never trust a man with a beard’, for this preacher proves a caution in every sense. This new work may be based on a pamphlet, albeit one printed by Jehovah’s Witnesses (whence the statement of the exhibition’s title), but the referential map Thomas creates out of fundamentalism is vast and frighteningly relevant to the everyday. And like much of the London-based artist’s film output to date, it’s peculiarly British. Thomas’s cartoon-styled religious antihero situates one in the midst of many test-card era and contemporary references, for he appears the unlikely humanoid amalgam of familiar beardy types (from Matthew Corbett to Simon Pegg via Robin Cook and Derren Brown), topped with Mrs Slocombe’s violaceous barnet.

Thomas’s solo project follows several other important film installations at Matt’s, by artists she has very likely influenced, such as Nathaniel Mellors, Lindsay Seers and Paul Rooney. Its timing, though, couldn’t be more perfect, arriving in London just as the general election becomes a budget hybrid of the US-style presidential campaign and a phone-in gameshow. Thomas uses performers and borrowed visuals to reframe facets of British society and popular culture, her absurdist approach and precise modes of sampling serving to release stereotypes or ‘harmless’ data from the contexts one associates with them; here the contrasting ideals of Middle England and organised religious groups are brought into hideous alignment via the music video, the evangelist workshop, kids-TV symbolism and the suburban soap opera.

The exhibition space has been divided in two: one side a spartan cinema playing Thomas’s 30-minute film, the other a disco-style diorama of related props and motifs. The Purple (more Teletubby Tinky Winky than papal) Preacher attempts the religious conversion of an elderly suburban couple (with the help of a Wicked Witch of the West taxi driver-cum-nun). They knock him off with a spade after his repressive and gruelling marketing routine (so that they can get back to the telly), only for him to return again (and again) to spread the word of humankind’s undoing and salvation, at the generous behest of “GAA” – an implied Wizard of Oz presence encapsulated within business presentation graphics and spiel. The couple’s ordeal includes the rebirth of a lifesize Adam and Eve in their bathroom and a hallucinatory trip to a model village during which the tiny scenes of pastoral England-past appear fractured by images of war and destruction.

Thomas steers in and out of good and bad taste with the charm and ease that comes of a thorough understanding of the content and contexts she purloins. However fake or throwaway the inferences, Thomas’s purposely handheld camerawork, outlandish plot and dialogue appear as tightly sewn as the OCD interiors she films in. Moments of tension, humour and even seduction arise from the incongruous union of acutely observed details: how the ‘tree of knowledge’, for example — a pendulous talisman worn around the green nun’s neck, a logo on the front of kids’ workshop T-shirts and a sculptural centrepiece within the ritual circle of the gallery — might convey the absurdity of extremes; the political distance between Pat Butcher’s earrings and modernist designs for a better life.

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