Jan Nelson

Jan Nelson's exhibition in Western Australia 'Walking in Tall Grass' comprises what initially appear to be three diverse elements: hyperrealist paintings of teenagers, high-key abstracts and photographic vignettes of daily life. Unsurprisingly, the dominant voice belongs to the teens. Part August Sander, part Rineke Dijkstra and part Philip Pearlstein spooked and antsy on acid, Nelson's kids are perched against single-colour backdrops of a richly saturated intensity. The almost audible background hum is matched by the pitch of the sitters' clothes - be it Carter's J-pop space-critter top or greasy-haired Charlotte's short-sleeve manga rip-off. The faces that peek out of this colour clash are composed of an exquisitely painted range of pinks and browns that are the vulnerable, fleshy foil to the dazzling surrounds. Nelson catches adolescence in its reptile moment - when you're hyper-aware of your surroundings, your blood running hot or cold depending on who's around. Each boy and girl is caught between implosion and delightful blossoming, no matter how composed they appear to be on the surface. Underlying this, the redemptive act of painting holds itself out as a kind of safety net - as if to be subject to an art of the hand is to be held, secured. Here Nelson neatly turns around hackneyed notions of the voyeur while allowing us to gape at the gawky high-wire act of teendom. This canny balance of ethics and aesthetics, tension and release, is one of her signature achievements.

I've a hunch that it's Nelson's preference for the mutable - for which adolescence is a metaphor - that drives her genre and media-hopping. While her paintings transform the handmade into a glossy magazine aesthetic, her photographs are painterly - both in the studied lyricism of their colour and in their mannerism. Operating in a space between Jeff Wall and Wolfang Tillmans, Nelson's scenarios are tautly theatrical takes on ordinary days. The prosaic Walking in Tall Grass #1 (2002), for instance, is exquisite. As one girl tries to yank a school bag from another, they act out the yearning of the bully and the dull panic of dispossession in a way that highlights the impersonal physics of daily life's humiliations. At its most rudimentary, life is a matter of balance, the application of force to an object. Though vernacular, Nelson's photos clearly nudge towards an idiosyncratic formalism.

The other voice in Nelson's three-way conversation is her set of striped abstract canvases Autumn Collection (2003), Winter Collection (2003) and Spring Collection (2003). Painted with the same care as their hyperrealist counterparts, they amplify the portraits' formal qualities and are subsequently infected by the ephemeral nature of teen fashion. The visual equivalent of a mouthful of sherbet, these unstable colour fields are as restless and insecure as the pimple poppers themselves.

This ability to hustle across the broadest of cultural terrain, and refusal to privilege form over content, or content over form, lets Nelson into the nether regions between mass media and high culture, where she holds together the emotional register of her images with a soberly intelligent reflection on the ways they are built. The resulting tone is one of a deliberate picture-making process devoid of rash expressiveness. That this is done under the figure of the shifty adolescent, however, makes me wonder if the whole shebang could erupt in a fit of temper or suddenly grow frightfully ugly. This tacit notion lends the show a kind of drama so often lacking in art that is calculatedly aware of what it's about. But then, as Nelson knows, there's self-consciousness and self-consciousness. And just maybe at the heart of 'Walking in Tall Grass' is the idea that art itself - under the intense spotlight of critics and lovers alike - is prey to its own reptile moments.