Jennet Thomas, All Suffering SOON TO END!

Comprising of a film and neighbouring installation, Jennet Thomas' solo show at Matt's Gallery presents a paradoxical meeting of the rambling rhetoric of a purple-skinned, evangelical preacher on the doorstep of the suburban home of a pensioner couple.  Inspired by a Jehovah's witnesses pamphlet (of the same name), the film is a portrait of British suburbia punctured by the arrival of the Alice-in-Wonderland-like characters to deliver the utopian dream of a world without suffering.

In an effort to convert the husband and wife, the narrative unravels repetitiously, with the preacher (and his sidekick, the green nun) using a healthy dose of dance music to pound out the promise All suffering SOON TO END!  A trip to a theme park of miniatures and a grow-your-own Adam and Eve add another level of absurdity to a work which does all but sermonise "the circus has come to town".

The tree of knowledge from the film is featured in the installation, from which emanates a voice speaking the original text which inspired the work and a projection of the hypnotic test card from the couple's television screen.  If you're really lucky, you might just meet a preacher or nun whilst you're there, now rendered mute as if a moving costume or life-size doll.

Allowing time to consider the work has lead me to appreciate its density of themes and questions regarding the cultism of conventional and unconventional modes of living and the lingering hopes of idealism in a capitalist system.  But this came to me after the circus had left, or rather, I had left the circus and was able to make sense of an otherwise sensational portrait of absurdity.

All suffering SOON TO END! is on at Matt's Gallery until 6th June 2010.