JESS MACNEIL
COUNCIL MEETING ROOM
Jess MacNeil works between painting, installation, video and film. Her practice explores human relationships with the world around us, reflecting shifting perceptions of this environment and our passage through it. Her works are marked by absence and non-specific encounter, by junction and by the potent spaces between. She has exhibited widely internationally and within Australia. Her work was included in ‘Primavera’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and the Samstag Museum of Art in 2008 and was presented at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Her work is in the collections of Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and the Art Gallery of NSW.
MacNeil was the 2022 Myer House artist in residence in the Bega Valley, South Coast NSW.
OpenField will be showing MacNeil’s 2022 video work ‘Regenesis’. Made on return to the NSW Southeast region where she grew up, ‘Regenesis’ is composed of drone footage of Tantawangalo State Forest as it regenerates from 2019/20’s devastating fires. As the drone circles above, the too-sparse vegetation also reveals decades of harsh tree felling. Slowed and continuously repeated, MacNeil has 'data-moshed' this footage, deliberately ‘tripping’ it by sabotaging data at different moments of playback to set off mesmeric digital distortions.
Photos by ainslie.co
