Artists

some of the Blackout Collective Artists

Jenny Fraser is a Murri interested in refining the art of artist/curating. She is a centrifuge for Aboriginal Media Arts, founding cyberTribe online Gallery in 1999 and the Blackout Collective in 2002 and has since maintained a regular program of exhibitions and events. Jenny was the co-ordinator for the new media arts component of 'Spirit & Vision' a Trienniale featuring 94 Aboriginal Artists at Sammlung Essl in Vienna, 2004, and also part of the curatorial working group for 'conVerge - where art and science meet', the 2002 Adelaide Biennial, which was a major survey of Australian new media artworks. More recently she was the first Aboriginal Curator to present a Triennial exhibition in Australia: ‘the other APT’ coinciding and responding to the Asia Pacific Triennial. Her own artwork is regularly screened internationally, including the Interactiva Biennale in Mexico, and she received an honourable mention at the imagineNATIVE Film & Media Arts Festival in Toronto, 2007.  In recent years Jenny has also assisted the Boomalli Cooperative revival since 2009.  http://cybertribe.culture2.org/jennyfraser

Jason Davidson is a Gurindji / Mara / Nalakarn artist, based in the Northern Territory. He has a background in music and design, studying Visual Arts at Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory. His practice involves producing works including elements of animation, video, music and his unique 'X-Ray' art style - hand drawn designs of animals and body organs. Recently he has brought these issues to light again with the launch of a new website Aboriginal Imagination. Featuring the arts, health and copyright, it is also intended as a safe haven for family members and other artists to promote their artwork in an Aboriginal controlled environment free of other cultural gate-keepers.
http://www.aboriginalimagination.com.au

Michelle Blakeney is a Yaegl woman from the Far North Coast of New South Wales. She has been a photographer for several years, and her continuing passion and ambition is to document her own people's unique culture and history through photography. Hundreds of photographs stored in crates at her mother's house record over 16 years of familial events and gatherings. While for many families this is not out of the ordinary, for Aboriginal families, many of whom are only now recovering members from forced separations, photography provides a link from the past to the present that is immediate and powerful. It is this healing power of photography that fuels her love of the medium. Currently a resident of Sydney, Michelle has also recently branched out from her photographic practice to encompass moving image screen-based practice.  Presented in the forms of story telling, performance and teaching, Blakeney aims to reveal a positive image of Indigenous Australians.

* the artists featured here at the moment are those involved in the Blackout project: 'Superhighway across the sky' 2013

more biographies later