Janenne Eaton, Fences B/orders Walls – Keep Clear, Canberra Contemporary Art Space Gorman Arts Centre,  55 Ainslie Ave, Braddon. Tuesday to Saturday 11am to 5pm. Until November 17.

Janenne Eaton is a Melbourne-based artist who in her work inhabits the domain that lies between that which can be seen with the eye and that which is comprehended by the mind. It is like when you see a road sign but, in your mind, you somehow misread it, or associate it with something else, and something unexpected emerges that carries with it scars of the original visual catalyst. It becomes like a cerebral afterimage that remains with you long after the original stimulus has vanished.

Eaton’s most recent Canberra exhibition is divided between two venues, both within the Gorman Arts Centre precinct. At the Nancy Sever Gallery there are 13 smaller paintings and digital photographs, while across the courtyard at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space is one massive painted installation that is more than 18 metres in length and occupies the full end wall of the main gallery space.

As always, her work is visually arresting, immaculately finished and bewildering in its technical resolution. This time, some of her work, including the huge painting, is executed on Xanita board, a UV printable board that is not made from cardboard or timber, but from post-consumer recycled cellulose fibres. It appears more like a manufactured roadside or hording, than a specially crafted artwork.

Eaton writes concerning her present body of work: “Much that influences my work is found in the visual vernacular of the streets and highways that animate the dense urban environment in which I live and work. Inspiration often arrives where walls and spaces imaginatively intersect with influences from intangible forces and the textured terrain of a tangible world.”

The big painting, Fences b/orders walls – keep clear, refers to a world that is preoccupied with building walls, rather than bridges, whether this be Israel encircling the Palestinian population, or Donald Trump’s naïve endeavour to build walls around the US to keep the rot out, not realising that the rot may be within.

The painting is confronting and uncompromising, without room for negotiation or paths forward and only a blocked passage. It is effective with its billboard-like presence and inscrutability, despite the meaning ostensibly spelt out in the words “fence” and “keep clear”.

Eaton frequently emphasises the fact that her initial training was as an archeologist and not as an artist and that as a modern-day archeologist she collects data on how we exist in tight urban units and communicate through modern technologies.

Her small canvases, panels and photographs tap into many of the long-standing favourite motifs of her art, including penal colony garments, bullet holes, studs and flags of surrender.

As is frequently the case with her exhibitions, they are dark, prickly works, largely monochromatic, where meaning is slippery and subversive. They allude to narratives which, on one level, are obvious and in your face, but on another endlessly complex and impenetrable.

These are dark glimpses into realities that surround us, but which may forever be ineffable and not quite within our reach.