Jacobus Capone: Orisons

‘Orisons’ brings together recent works by Western Australian artist Jacobus Capone that reflect on human and ecological fragility. The exhibition includes video, photography, and paintings documenting Capone’s performative actions and attempts to map connections between internalised experience and the world around us.

The 10-channel video installation Echo & Abyss 2018 pays homage to Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Duino Elegies’ 1923, a collection of poems on the human condition. It features extraordinary scenes from Capone’s pilgrimage to Rilke’s resting place in Switzerland and the ice sheets of Greenland. Sincerity and Symbiosis 2019 forms part of the ongoing ‘Forewarning’ project that documents reconciliations and farewells within environments that have become fragile through time and human undoing. The work depicts a daily durational performance within an undisclosed plantation forest in Japan where Capone honoured each tree.

The exhibition also includes the series Northern Paintings 2017 that record the artist’s daily ritual of memorising string games while confined indoors in the Arctic Circle alongside a set of works from Perdition & Prayer 2020-ongoing. These delicate paintings made with copper leaf, volcanic ash and glacial water gather symbols and research that have informed Capone’s practice to create a personal iconography expressing our search for communion with a natural world at risk by humankind.

Curator: José Da Silva

Presented with the support of the Australia Council for the Arts. ‘Echo & Abyss’ has been assisted by the Government of Western Australia through the Department of Culture and the Arts, Western Australia.