SAM Selects, SAM Spotlight 2024 artists announced
12 December 2023
Shepparton Art Museum announces Jen Valender and Carmel Robertson as 2024 Community Gallery artists.
The Shepparton Art Museum (SAM) is pleased to announce that multidisciplinary artist Jen Valender has been selected as the successful applicant to the SAM Selects exhibition program for 2024. The SAM Selects exhibition program allows artists, creatives, curators, and community groups to submit a recent creative project to be exhibited in SAM’s Hugh D.T Williamson Community Gallery. Applications for the space are reviewed by an external panel. Valender will become the third artist to participate in SAM Selects, with her exhibition Field opening 3 February 2024.
Created during her artistic residency at the University of Melbourne’s Dookie campus as part of the Centre of Visual Arts’ Art + Ecology program, Valender’s SAM Selects exhibition Field features a multi-channel video installation made up of four moving image works: Re-search, Bovine Harp, Artist as Animal, and Sediment. The exhibition will also display a set of wind harps created from antique surveyor’s equipment, and a soundscape created using the harps. Set amongst the fluorescent canola fields and dairy farms of Dookie, each film combines sculpture, performance, and video to explore various aspects of agricultural life and the relationship between art and the natural world.
Caroline Esbenshade, SAM Curator – Community, says of Valender:
“Jen is in an extremely exciting place in her career—she exhibited widely in 2023, including at MPavillion in Melbourne, and was recently selected as a regional winner in the M&C Saatchi Group & Saatchi Gallery Art for Change Prize, with two of her works currently on display at Saatchi Gallery in London. We are delighted to have her as part of our 2024 exhibition program and to be the first to present these works together, highlighting her experience of making work in response to the region. We hope the exhibition will bring a new perspective of the Goulburn Vallery for locals and visitors alike.”
Later in 2024 SAM’s Community Gallery will feature a new body of work from local artist Carmel Robertson, who has been selected as the 2024 SAM Spotlight artist. SAM Spotlight is an annual paid opportunity for an emerging solo artist based in the Goulburn Valley and Hume region to work closely with the SAM Curator – Community to develop a new body of work for exhibition. Successful artists are selected through an application process, which is also reviewed by an appointed panel.
Jen Valender: Field will open at SAM on 3 February 2024, with SAM Spotlight: Carmel Robertson to open in November 2024.
About the artists:
Jen Valender is a multidisciplinary artist who creates performative encounters on and with the landscape that raises questions about the relationship between art and the natural world.
Through moving image, she explores the ways in which art may be used as a navigational tool to investigate human and nonhuman connections. Valender has exhibited widely in galleries and museums in Australia, France, Germany, South Africa, and Portugal and holds a Master of Fine Arts (Research) from the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.
Image: courtesy of the artist
Carmel Robertson is an early career artist living in Shepparton, Victoria. She began painting full-time in 2016 after a 22-year career in art education, teaching art and photography at Notre Dame College in Shepparton. For the past seven years she has been exploring approaches to realism in oil paint and has exhibited in group shows locally, including past SAM Community Gallery exhibitions, and presented a solo exhibition at the Euroa Butter Factory in 2022.
Image: courtesy of the artist
About SAM:
Shepparton Art Museum (SAM) is located on Yorta Yorta Country, Shepparton, Victoria.
As a leading Australian regional art museum, SAM showcases its exhibitions and collections in new and exciting ways to create a welcoming, inclusive, and engaging space for all visitors.
Recognised for its significant Australian ceramics collection and nationally significant collection of Indigenous art, SAM’s programming is designed to be locally relevant and engages with global contemporary ideas. Through its exhibitions, collection, programs and events, SAM creates a place where art helps us to better understand the ancient culture of this country and contemporary multicultural Australia.
Major international photography exhibition YEARBOOK comes to SAM for PHOTO 2024
4 December 2023
Shepparton Art Museum announces major international solo exhibition from USA-based photographer Ryan McGinley as part of PHOTO 2024 regional program.
Shepparton Art Museum (SAM) is pleased to announce its participation in the biennial PHOTO 2024 festival in March 2024. From 1 March to 14 July 2024, American artist Ryan McGinley's photographic project YEARBOOK will be showing at SAM, marking the artist's first solo exhibition in Australia.
An ever-evolving project, YEARBOOK is a large-scale photographic installation consisting of over seven hundred studio portraits of musicians, artists, and creatives living and working in New York.
A joyful celebration of the diversity of the human body, each photograph in YEARBOOK features its subject posing against vibrant candy-coloured backgrounds, appearing like fashion or rock band promotional posters. Plastered over every available millimeter of the gallery walls, the installation envelops the visitor. Each individual image is a unique portrait that grants the viewer access to a delicate, once-private moment between the photographer and sitter. First presented in 2008, YEARBOOK has featured in several in major public institutions across Japan, Denmark, Korea, and Spain.
Melinda Martin, SAM CEO, says of the exhibition:
“It’s a privilege to be a part of PHOTO 2024, and we’re thrilled to be premiering Ryan McGinley’s work to an Australian audience. Ryan’s work is so vibrant and celebratory, and many people will be able to see themselves reflected in the multitude of bodies represented in his portraits. Despite its scale, each portrait in the installation possesses its own distinct identity; each subject’s unabashed ownership of their moment in front of the camera works as a collective rejection of the ‘perfect body’.”
A regional weekend celebration of PHOTO 2024 and YEARBOOK will take place at SAM on 8 March 2024. Details of the weekend’s program will be announced in 2024. YEARBOOK will be showing at SAM from 1 March until 14 July 2024 with free entry. To learn more about the upcoming PHOTO 2024 program, visit their website: https://photo.org.au/
About Ryan McGinley:
Ryan McGinley is a New York–based photographer. His early photos displayed the unseen intersection of skateboard and graffiti culture, with a strong queer focus. At age twenty-five, he became the youngest artist to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City (NYC). For over a decade, McGinley has road-tripped continuously throughout the United States to create work that incorporates the human body within the American landscape. Dubbed by GQ as “the most important photographer in America”, McGinley can often be found on the streets of NYC participating in queer activism, fighting for LGBTQIA+ rights. McGinley frequently presents international solo gallery and museum exhibitions and has an ongoing studio practice photographing members of NYC’s creative community.
About PHOTO Australia:
PHOTO Australia was founded in 2018 to launch a major new photography biennale in Melbourne and sites across Regional Victoria. Taking place every two years, the festival addresses the major issues of our time in a program of free exhibitions, outdoor displays and artist commissions across the city, as well as awards, talks, workshops, tours and experiences. Presenting ideas critical to contemporary photographic discourse, PHOTO encourages the public to engage with and think about photography and visual culture in new and inspiring ways.
The inaugural festival PHOTO 2021 ‘The Truth’ presented 105 exhibitions by 160 artists. PHOTO 2022 ‘Being Human’ saw presentations of 130 artists across Melbourne including icons Cindy Sherman and Helmut Newton, with British Journal of Photography claiming the biennale is “Australia’s most prestigious photography festival.” Both festivals have attracted a total of more than 250,000 participants. PHOTO 2024 01–24 March ‘The Future Is Shaped by Those Who Can See It’ will be the third edition.
About SAM:
Shepparton Art Museum (SAM) is located on Yorta Yorta Country, Shepparton, Victoria.
As a leading Australian regional art museum, SAM showcases its exhibitions and collections in new and exciting ways, creating a welcoming, inclusive and engaging space for all visitors.
Recognised for its significant Australian ceramics collection and nationally significant collection of Indigenous art, SAM’s programming is designed to be locally relevant and engages with global contemporary ideas. Through its exhibitions, collection, programs and events, SAM creates a place where art helps us to better understand the ancient cultures of this country and contemporary multicultural Australia.
Featured image: Ryan McGinley, YEARBOOK, installation view 'Body Loud' at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, 2016. Courtesy the artist.