JahRoc Galleries invite you to the opening of “Life’s Contents” a new exhibition of paintings by Helen Norton.

SATURDAY 5th JUNE
OPENING 5-7pm

Meet Helen Norton & participate in a Q&A with the artist
Live music by Graeme Dickinson
Margaret River Fine Wine

All Welcome

Exhibition continues until 27th June

What have our lives become? The new guiding principal, the internet of things, has whipped up a frenzied world of emotionally charged lunatic ideas through indignant holograms and magic tricks mostly delivered via social media. We can barely make out what is real in our lives or who to believe. Things that were once contained only in our nightmares and mental institutions, are now streamed into our pockets or handbags every minute of the day and night with our permission – attacking our sanity and concentration not unlike water torture … drip, drip.
Getting older has its perks. You see things go around enough times, that the patterns or cycles become clear. Before the tech Genies took hold, we had other greedy mongrels seducing us with their stuff or their propaganda, be they, shock jocks, encyclopaedia salesmen, snake oil rogues and the like.
If they were not so powerful we might just ignore them. However, they can and do destroy lives, families, marriages, towns, and cultures in order to get what they want. Really no different to your standard narcissistic psychopath. The funny thing about them though, is that their power to rule the worlds, both outside and inside our heads, can be cut off so easily with one little finger touch. What is harder is the motivation to press the off button.
The answer is lived experience, reality, and hard-core sensual life as it happens on the ground. The medicine is the man with the shovel digging, or the soft and gentle touch on our shoulder from a friend, a panting dog or a walk in the garden.
It’s getting harder to dodge the nonsense of these unreal robotic times, with all the panic and chaos it can create through ‘thin air’ so quickly, but if you turn it off it just stops! I believe we need to fight with all our human will to remain firmly in charge of being human. I am not joking. Being recalcitrant and earthy, and living a sensual life is important in the face of the current nonsense that has gripped the world. Eat well, walk, run, love, laugh, paint, write, kiss dogs on the face, sleep with your cat, read real paper books, grow vegies and chooks, eat meat if you want, and burn wood in a fire place, with your phone turned off, inserted in a zip lock bag, buried deep in the freezer.
Helen Norton 2021