Image:
Paul FLETCHER
Still from Broken River 2023
1st – 30th September 2023
Outdoor Projection Façade
Each night throughout the month of September, Benalla Art Gallery will screen four video artworks by Jen Valender and Paul Fletcher.
Valender and Fletcher were University of Melbourne Art + Ecology resident artists at Dookie in 2022, and both currently feature in the Benalla Art Gallery exhibition, Always and Altered, presented in partnership with the University of Melbourne and Winton Wetlands.
Video Works:
Jen VALENDER
born: Auckland, New Zealand 1985
Sediment 2023
Digital single channel film, colour, stereo sound
9 minutes 6 seconds
Director of Photography: Gene Alberts
Colourist: Nicholas Andrews
Courtesy of the artist, and the Centre of Visual Arts, University of Melbourne
The work Sediment was developed through the Centre of Visual Art, University of Melbourne’s ‘Art + Ecology’ residency program at Dookie Campus. Valender explains of the work, “Aeolian harp sculptures, created using antique surveyors’ tripods from Dookie Agricultural College, are played by the wind within a local quarry and activated by Australian pythons. The sound made by the harps remains raw and unaltered.”
Jen VALENDER
born: Auckland, New Zealand 1985
Artist as animal 2022
single channel colour film
3 minutes 38 seconds
Director of Photography: Gene Alberts
Courtesy of the artist, and the Centre of Visual Arts, University of Melbourne
An endurance allergen performance across the pollenated, waterlogged canola fields of Broadacre Farm while wearing high heels and carrying an 8kg cattle gut strung harp.
Paul FLETCHER
born: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia 1962; lives and works: Dja Dja Wurrung Country
Planted 2022-23
HD Video, Stereo Sound
5 minutes 45 seconds
Fletcher describes the work as, “Intertwined entanglements at micro and macro levels in time and space. We are planted here now. What we will plant for now and future generations. Originally recorded on site in residence at Dookie taking signals from a potted Yarrow plant to trigger sounds and visual shape changes and patterns, this was finished in 2023 by combining abstraction of Dookie Bushland reserve, microscope imagery and the planted sheep.”
Paul FLETCHER
born: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia 1962; lives and works: Dja Dja Wurrung Country
Broken River 2022-23
HD Video, Stereo Sound
2 minutes 23 seconds
This video work captures Broken River between Dookie and Benalla, early one frosty morning,. Gentle abstraction transforms in and out of a naturalistic landscape portrait.
About Jen Valender:
Jen Valender is a visual artist and researcher originally from Aotearoa New Zealand and based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. She predominantly works with moving image, performance, sculpture and sound to express her interest in ethical binds, psychology and cross-species coexistence. She recently produced solo exhibitions at the Mission to Seafarers (VIC), Multi-Arts Pavilion Museum Lake Macquarie (NSW), and engaged in artist residencies in the Blue Mountains and Berlin.
Valender was the recipient of the Ian Potter Museum’s Miegunyah Research Project Award (2019); Next Wave’s New Precinct Award (2020); an Australia Council for the Arts New Work Commission (2022); a Creative Victoria Regional Arts Grant (2022); City of Melbourne Art Grant (2023); and was a finalist in the Manly Art Gallery & Museum Environmental Art Prize (2022).
Valender has exhibited locally and internationally and holds a Master of Fine Arts (Research) with First Class Honours from the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.
About Paul Fletcher:
Paul Fletcher has created audiovisual works and installations responding to all manner of contexts, and places as diverse as planetariums, museums, public parks and gardens, and even zoos. Curators of Zagreb Contemporary Museum of Contemporary Art described his installation artwork, Drive to Work (2007) as “an hallucinatory blend of abstract animation and figurative scenes that completely capture the observer’s visual system. The film gradually evolves …”
In 2022 Paul completed a COVA Residency at Dookie and a City of Bendigo Creative Gastronomy Residency program at Bendigo TAFE. Paul is currently working on a State Library Victoria Creative Fellow research project responding to the ‘Barker & Co Cakoes Collection of Decorative Patty Pans.’
The activation of Benalla Art Gallery’s after-dark projection space has been supported by the RACV; the Victorian State Government through the North East Victoria Tourism Board; and the Victorian State Government’s $2.5M Building Works Package
