Image:
Lauren BERKOWITZ
Remnants (detail) 2022
bailing twine, packaging strap, cockatoo feathers, earth, rocks, broken glass and crockery, peppercorns, eucalyptus, rose petals and weeds
75 x 200 cm
Dookie Agricultural College, Victoria
4th August — 17th September
Bennett Gallery
Presented in partnership with the University of Melbourne Centre of Visual Art, and Winton Wetlands
Artists
Lauren Berkowitz, Judith Nangala Crispin, Sebastian di Mauro, George Egerton-Warburton, Paul Fletcher, Dr Treahna Hamm (Firebrace), Ernest Marcuse, Rene Martens, Andy Pye, Jen Valender, Yandell Walton, and Stephen Wickham
Inspired by Benalla Art Gallery’s idyllic position between the Benalla Botanical Gardens (a manicured gardens designed and developed in 1886) and Lake Benalla (an artificial lake created in the 1970s), Always and Altered ponders our local and universal relationship with the land.
Featuring works from the Benalla Art Gallery Collection, Winton Wetlands digital archive, loaned directly from artists, and resulting from the University of Melbourne’s Art + Ecology Residency at Dookie, the exhibition ruminates on our interactions with and impact on the land. Works explore our shaping of the landscape for a myriad of purposes, First Nations custodianship of the land and connection to Country, the importance of National Parks and conservation projects, and human environmental impacts.
The exhibition highlights the multi-layered history of dispossession and change at Winton Wetlands, located just 20 minutes from Benalla Art Gallery. These traditional lands of the Yorta Yorta people were taken in the 1860s to establish farmlands, before the site was flooded in 1971 to create Lake Mokoan, which provided a space for community water sport and recreation. Calls for better water management solutions and issues such as regular blue-green algal breakouts resulted in the decommissioning of Lake Mokoan in 2009, paving the way for the Winton Wetlands to become the largest wetland restoration project in the Southern Hemisphere — a project of national scientific, cultural and environmental significance.
Just 25 minutes from Benalla Art Gallery is Dookie Campus, which has played a key role in the development of agriculture and agricultural teaching and learning in Australia since 1886. In its continuing role as a key site for the research, teaching and technology development shaping the future of agriculture in Australia, Dookie Campus provided inspiration for the University of Melbourne’s ‘Art + Ecology’ residency program in 2022. Conceived by the University’s Centre of Visual Art (CoVA) in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, in partnership with Dookie campus staff and researchers, the residency program saw nine artists each spend three to four weeks on site to create new site responsive works, each informed by the history of the campus and surrounding environment, meetings with graduate researchers, and local community members.
Benalla Art Gallery Exhibition Partners
