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ANN JAEGER
SEASON OF THE WITCH
Polite Society is excited to announce the launch of Season of the Witch, an exhibition of new paintings by Ann Jaeger.
We are entering a culture which no longer expects truth, and in which we are learning to live with almost universal ambiguity.
In the United States, 1968 witnessed the growth of the anti-war movement, and an upsurge of protests over the conflict in Vietnam. Psychedelia had ushered in huge cultural and social shifts during the summer of love, while young men drafted into the war were returning from home addicted to amphetamines and heroin. The space race was on. The My Lai massacre was exposed. Civil rights protests and riots were taking place across the U.S., sparked by the assassination of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Violence and division scorched the country.
The generous, freewheeling optimism of the post world war 60s gave way to cynicism and anger as photo and television journalism revealed the reality of racial injustice and a war waged on another continent; the drug trade changed from a path to social enlightenment to a global commercial enterprise.
Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan recorded Season of the Witch in 1966. The song embodies the destabilization of our perception of reality, both good and bad, that is a hallmark of psychedelic experiences, and seems to foretell the loss of innocence about to descend on North American culture.
In similar fashion, Francisco Goya’s etching series, Los Caprichos, realistically documented the atrocities and madness of war in Spain at the end of the 18th century. Goya’s output formed a critique of the excesses of the wealthy class, corruption within the church, fallout from the French Revolution, war with France, and the ascent of Napoleon, all of which led to a rise in superstition, social chaos, and the decline of rational thought.
Today we live in a post-truth, realm which is moving headlong into a society driven by artificial intelligence. Cognitive dissonance is evident in a rise in demagoguery, conspiracy theories, denial in the face of scientific evidence, and live-streamed war, even as millions of people are displaced, and humanity stands on the edge of irreversible environmental destruction.
The early internet, which similarly promised an egalitarian society with equal access to information and global communications, turned into commercial monopolies owned by Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook, with the sole goal of making a profit.
In this era of information overload, misinformation, and AI generated content, we should be deeply curious about the semiotics of images and how they frame society.
Using photographs which were inherited from the artist’s late brother, Jaeger began using cues to produce a new series of paintings. The black and white New York City photographs taken in 1968 were representative of the people and buildings in neighbourhoods that he experienced – Central Park, Brownsville in Brooklyn – or sometimes portraits of friends. The photos which came to Jaeger after her brother’s death are of people she never met and were mostly documentary in nature. Concurrently, Jaeger was working in her studio on a series of paintings inspired by Goya’s Los Caprichos etchings.
In Season of the Witch, the paintings for this two-part exhibition are connected to each other, as well as to the present era, by the periods of social and political upheaval they respond to. Jaeger believes that painting conveys truths which even photographs cannot - How do we know what is true if we cannot believe what we see with our own eyes?
ANN JAEGER
Ann Jaeger is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work intersects literary, theatre and visual arts. The playful veneer of Jaeger’s semi-figurative imagery dissipates to expose elements of discomfort, ambiguity, and violence. Her work critiques the visual notation embedded within news media, and the expression or retention of emotion in static, spontaneous, or even banal, photos of people, particularly those in motion.
Jaeger’s literary output includes essays reflecting on the arts and culture sector for the media, for her blog Trout in Plaid, and include numerous gallery, and catalogue essays for visual arts exhibitions. Her poetry has been published in the League of Canadian Poets, Cornell University's Epoch Magazine, and the Capilano Review.
Her solo and group exhibitions of painting and sculpture have been featured most recently at Evans Contemporary, Cœur Nouveau, Artspace, and the Arts and Culture Centre of Warkworth.
Jaeger’s curatorial work have included exhibitions launched with the Precarious Festival, and Evans Contemporary, and has worked on numerous productions as a set and prop designer with the Theatre on King,