Jenny Fraser works within a fluid screen-based practice of bold and confronting art that utilises popular cultural references as a bridge to challenge viewer’s frames of reference. Her practice has also been partly defined through a strong commitment to collaboration with others and she is motivated to redefine the art of curating as an act of sovereignty and emancipation, founding cyberTribe online gallery almost 15 years ago. Because of the diverse creative mediums Jenny uses, much of her work defies categorisation. More recently her work takes iconic and everyday symbols of Australian life and places them into a context that questions the values they represent. With a laconic sense of humour she picks away at the fabric of our society, exposing contradictions, absurdities, and denial.
Jenny is a celebrated screen artist, she was awarded an honourable mention at the 2007 imagineNATIVE Film Festival, Toronto, Canada and in 2009, was nominated for a Deadly Award. She was awarded an Australia Council fellowship in 2012 for her project Midden, and in 2013 was made an Associate Member Centre for Creative Arts at La Trobe University.
She was the first Aboriginal Curator to present a Triennial exhibition in Australia: The other APT coinciding and responding to the Asia Pacific Triennial which was then accepted for inclusion into the 2008 Biennale of Sydney, and toured to the Tjibaou Center Culturel in Noumea, New Caledonia.
Jenny was also part of the curatorial working group for conVerge - where art and science meet - at the 2002 Adelaide Biennial, which was a major exhibition of New Media artworks. She has travelled extensively and completed residency programs from remote communities in Queensland and the Northern Territory to the Rocky Mountains in Canada and also Raw Space and New Flames in Brisbane.
A Murri of mixed ancestry, she was born in Far North Queensland and her old people originally hailed from Yugambeh Country in the Gold Coast Hinterland on the border of South East Queensland / Northern New South Wales. She has a professional background in Art and Media Education and has since completed a Master of Indigenous Wellbeing at Southern Cross University in Lismore, NSW. Jenny is also currently finalising a PhD in the Healing Arts and Decolonisation with the Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education.
