Coastal Signs is pleased to present Far Flung, a solo exhibition of seven new paintings by Milli Jannides. 

In Far Flung there are familiar devices that viewers of Jannides’ work will recognise; curtains, veils of fabric, portals and filters through which to look, and shifting mirage-like layers that build into restless movement between form and formlessness.

Despite the uniform scale that might encourage the viewer to assemble each scene into a narrative, these are diverse and dexterous paintings. Some works appear to be animated by grief, fear, doubt, punctuated by moments of lucidity, elation… they are as varied, uneven, and changeable as our experience of the world is. 

While previous works have been more closely connected to specific passages in literature, for Far Flung the artist was thinking through a literary form – that of the fragmentary, even kaleidoscopic, female diary voice.

This group of paintings mines the different layers or characters within the self; fragments of the past are put in motion again, mosaic-like. Symbols of growth and transformation recur, including the most obvious figuration of a mother cradling a child in Medium W. (2021), and the splitting of the self in the doubled, inverted faces of Friend, I weep (2021). 

There is a sense of theatre in this body of work; most explicitly in a painting of Belle Epoque-style dancing girls, with sensuous curves and limbs and undergarments, and more subtly in two paintings that feature stage-like structures. One stage fades in and out of a blood-red landscape, while a second, flanked by curling curtains, sits atop geometric shapes that resemble both the stacked structure of audience seating and spinning, spiral time.



Jannides’ paintings always make a time-demand on their audience – they have a secretive quality that ensnares the viewer, asking us to look for longer. Painted in isolation during the global pandemic, the paintings in Far Flung can be seen as a more loaded, fraught reflection on time and it’s operations. As Christian Camacho proposes in his essay on Jannides’ paintings: 

"Recalling Giorgio Agamben’s descriptions of ghosts, I think of many of these works as passages that carry their marks all over them, but instead of being called a skin, they are called a clock."

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The exhibition is accompanied by an artist publication of the same title. The reader comprises texts written by the artist's friends and colleagues and illustrated with images in and around Jannides' Vällingby studio by the artist's partner, photographer Victor Staaf. 

The publication Far Flung is designed by Ellyse Randrup and printed in an edition of 100 on Risograph at Wedding Press, Småland. It will be available from Coastal Signs for a modest koha.