Categories: General
      Date: Sat, 12 Mar 2016
     Title: Land Dialogues
Wagga Wagga Art Gallery
Cnr Baylis Street and Morrow Street, Wagga Wagga NSW 2650

Main Gallery 19 March - 5 June

In conjunction with Land Dialogues conference at the Charles Sturt University
Curated by James Farley and Christopher Orchard, and includes works by Renata Buziak, Amy Findlay, Christine McFetridge, Jacob Raupach, Kate Robertson, Felix Wilson and Carolyn Young.

For exhibition documentation click here: James Farley Photography

Image: Renata Buziak Leptospermum juniperinum... insect repellent...





Text kindly supplied by the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery:

Wagga Wagga Art Gallery’s latest exhibition, Land Dialogues, brings together a collection of emerging Australian artists all engaged in the understanding and representation of place through photographic practice. The nine artists featured in this fascinating exhibition share the common theme of exploring and re-evaluating how the Australian community identifies, represents and values the spaces that we create and occupy.

Land Dialogues has been curated by James Farley and Christopher Orchard, and includes works by Renata Buziak, Amy Findlay, Christine McFetridge, Jacob Raupach, Kate Robertson, Felix Wilson and Carolyn Young. The exhibition is presented in conjunction with the inaugural Land Dialogues Conference, hosted by Charles Sturt University – a three-day exploration of interdisciplinary attitudes to place and space.

The changing relationship to the country and its multifarious environments and cultures as a process of colonisation has seen Australia described as a landscape of encounter. Land Dialogues aims to highlight that a country's character is not static, but protean. As our multicultural composition shifts and relationships to land develop over time our national character and perceptions of what it means to be Australian exhibits incredible potential for change; and in the shadow of anthropogenic climate change, this becomes an obligation.

Describing the exhibition, the curators have stated, "The physical properties of the land remain primary drivers in shaping a contemporary Australian national and cultural identity, and Land Dialogues responds to the contemporary shifting politics of national identity where it is informed by emergent discourse in relationship to place. Whereas early Australian depictions of land followed the aesthetic modes of the sublime and picturesque imported with early European settlers and these modes predominated in early photographs of the Australian landscape, Land Dialogues suggests new ways of interacting or engaging with land."

In conjunction with this exhibition and the Land Dialogues conference at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery is also proud to present a recent major new media work by conference keynote speaker Mitchell Whitelaw, Drifter. This fascinating work, which poses the question, ‘How might we read a landscape through data?’, constructs a constantly changing portrait of a river system out of tens of thousands of data points: scientific observations, newspaper articles, maps, images and audio.

Land Dialogues will be on display at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery from Saturday 19 March until Sunday 5 June, 2016, and will be officially launched at 6pm on Friday 15 April to conclude the program for the Land Dialogues conference. On Saturday 16 April at 11am, Johannes Klabbers, keynote speaker at the Land Dialogues conference, will present a public philosophical ‘performance’ within the exhibition, on the topic, ‘What is it to be post-human?’.