SPIRIT & VISION

Jenny Fraser - - -

“Fraser’s works are intelligent and witty, with a wicked sense of humour that belies the seriousness of her approach. For example, her deeply iconic Faster Foods critiques the fast food industry and consumerism, references Australia’s choice of national symbolism and the QANTAS logo, and raises questions about the appropriateness of hoofed animals in Australia and this country’s entrenched eating habits. Because her image taps into so many existing representations of the kangaroo, both literal and metaphorical, it’s possible to read it on many levels, despite its surface simplicity. With Faster Foods Fraser has succeeded—very cleverly—in appropriating the appropriators.
When I asked Jenny Fraser whether she could identify special reasons why Indigenous artists might deploy new media in their artistic practice, or if this was simply a matter of personal preference, her response was “Why not?” (Touché!) New media is attractive because of its “instant” qualities, she writes, and she also enjoys the collaborative nature of working in this currently under-explored terrain."

Christine Nicholls

from 'Digital Indigeneity, Indigenous New Media Arts', Part 2: Rea, Jenny Fraser, Christian B. Thompson, in Real Time + Onscreen, Open City, Sydney, Australia ISSN 1321-4799, pp 20-21

“None of us exist outside of power, none of us exist outside of the military-media-industrial complex, none of us are free from the globalised economies of exploitation and oppression - there’s no point in pretending that we are. For some of us, that inclusion is the only inclusion we ever experience. In problematising cultural politics as a ‘zero-sum game’, Dorinne Kondo identifies that “any oppositional gesture is inevitably recuperated in the juggernaut of commodity capitalism.” While opposition can be both ‘contestatory and complicit’, that opposition does ‘constitute a subversion that matters’. As part of that subversion, Fraser makes a choice to push through the narrow focus of the polity and symbolic order. Among the subversions she enacts is to make art out of everyday life, to foreground other everyday lives - to appropriate, culture jam and offer alternatives – and to subsequently locate in everyday life so much that matters."

by Linda Carroli 2003

from the exhibition catalogue 'not really queenz'land' 2003

risin' above it 2002
digital photomontage lightbox
Courtesy of the artist and Fire-works Gallery

fasterfood 2002
Photomontage in Lightbox - 126cm x 91cm
Courtesy of the Artist and Fire-Works Gallery