JAC HARTJE

VISUAL ARTIST | DJAARA COUNTRY
JACHARTJE@PROTON.ME

@jac_hartje

NEW ITERATION SUBVERSION

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, ethnicity, and class in our domestic and urban spaces. Taking images captured during meditative walks of their city, Hartje re-creates these spaces via manual algorithmic methods 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.
BALLARAT FOTO BIENNALE 23.08 - 9.10.25 REGENT CINEMA, MARBLE ROOM
TENSION LIBRARY AT THE DOCK APRIL 2025

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. Hartje's practice speaks to themes of agency and visibility in our era of hyper consumerist late capitalism and the Neo-liberal turn. Their studio work consists of expanded photography, printmaking, and sculptural disciplines, 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 of Naarm in a mix of cultural influences from their migrant fathers of Dutch and Egyptian heritage and their mother - raised in the care of a missionary family. Themes of alienation, dispossession, agency and brutish institutions stem from both personal experience and familial histories. From childhood Hartje struggled to accept their conservative cultural confines and expectations, it was only after the battle of leaving a long abusive partner that they found their voice, deciding to walk away from it all and go it alone - free to be who and what was true to them. In 2014 they opened a small regional gallery and have since gone on to complete an Honors by research in Visual Art, run a second successful ARI, exhibit work in numerous exhibitions and work for La Trobe University. They hope to carve out a space for themselves and others to connect, share experiences and create work that inspires respectful and inclusive positive change.

Recent Projects

Jac is a strong advocate for accessible arts programs and spends their free time heading up Rookie Artists Inc. The aim of this organisation is to deliver contemporary arts engagement opportunities for both artists and the community. Now in its fourth year the team at Rookie have delivered numerous exhibitions from their shop space and two Cut + Paste festivals.
They also love to engage with other artists through collaborative projects working on print exchanges, large scale works for City of Bendigo and La Trobe Art Institute, and an upcoming festival exhibition.

Cut + Paste Opening 2024

Rookie Exhibition Opening 2023

CreateLab Collab project 2023

I ❤ nd$c_pe - with Fyerool Darma LAI. 2023

Get In Touch

Let's cross paths - see if we can work on your next project together.

Email; jachartje@proton.me

or get social @jac_hartje