JAC HARTJE

VISUAL ARTIST | DJAARA COUNTRY

JACHARTJE@PROTON.ME

@jac_hartje

CURRENT ITERATION TENSION

16 APRIL-25 MAY @ LIBRARY AT THE DOCK CLICK HERE

Algorithmic Landscapes

Algorithmic Landscapes is a series of works employing expanded photography, printmaking, and sculptural disciplines. Hartje's practice focuses on contemporary domestic and urban life, finding themselves drawn to urban waste lands, waterways, and sites of dereliction. They began working with space and pattern through materials such as tape, string, projections, and shadow play as methods for interrogating our built environments. Algorithmic Landscapes visualises the constraints and constructs of gender, sexuality, race, and class in our domestic and urban spaces. Taking images captured during meditative walks of their city, Hartje re-creates these spaces via an algorithmic method of manipulation – finding the information, isolating it, perfecting it, formulating it, propagating it, repeating it – a process akin to industrial production, urban regulation, and intelligent algorithms. The resulting infinite patterns Hartje sees as a conceptual mapping of the systems which construct, administer and delegate our physical and virtual environs and ecologies.

About Jac

Jac Hartje is a multi-disciplinary artist based on Djaara Country in central Victoria. Hartje is an art-worker and artist whose practice is a combination of independent studio work and collaborative arts engagement projects. Their studio work centers on experimental photography, printmaking, and sculpture, focused on our domestic and urban environments. Their arts engagement projects seek to find ways to nurture emerging and experimental art while improving access and engagement in contemporary art across regional Victoria.

Hartje grew up in the migrant suburbs if Naarm in a mix of cultural influences from their 2 migrant fathers and their mother who was raised in the care of a missionary family. As a girl Hartje struggled to accept the traditional cultural confines and expectations from a very young age “My life at home was always tense and isolating it was very clear I was never going to be the good wog wife.” Threatened with being cut out of the family if they pursued an art career after high school Hartje spent a long time trying to bring the two worlds together. At 30 they decided to walk away and go it alone, leaving behind their family and an abusive partner - they opened a gallery. “From a very young age art was my refuge, it spoke my language, it was the one place I felt I belonged,”

They have since gone on to complete an Honours in Visual Art, run two successful ARI’s, exhibit work in numerous exhibitions and enjoy working at La Trobe University. Hartje works tirelessly as a sole parent and full-time carer alongside her practice in an effort to carve out a space for themselves and others to connect, share stories and create work to inspire positive change.