Janina Green, Sanja Pahoki, Jo. Scicluna + Brie Trennery

Strangeland is a collaborative project involving four artists working in photography and video who set themselves the challenge of responding to an unfamiliar ‘Australian’ landscape. They nominated Horsham gallery director, Merle Hathaway, to suggest a site that none of them had been to. She suggested Lal Lal Falls 125 km north west of Melbourne.

Lal Lal Falls is a ‘scenic’ reserve that had its heyday during the gold rush period. It was renowned for the beauty of its waterfall claimed to be the most spectacular in the region. It has experienced a series of ‘facelifts’ over the years in order to regain its appeal and bring back the sightseers. On the day the artists first visited the site on Christmas Eve 2006, in the midst of an Australian drought, the waterfall site appeared more like a long-abandoned picnic site and bleak cavern; a dramatic backdrop without its landmark.

During their subsequent visits the artists (self dubbed the ‘camera club’) were forced to confront their individual ideas of the landscape. Over a 10-month period several dramatic measures were taken to ‘beautify’ the picnic area. The artists were met with shiny new amenities and the radical removal of several long-standing pine trees. Barbed wire and warning signs divided this area from the gorge and the waterfall site becoming a jarring interruption to the picturesque.

Through setting a series of collective constraints throughout the process they each sought to challenge or subvert each of their known methodology, aesthetic and perceived successes. What emerged for the four artists during their process was a consolidation of their professional and personal connections, as well as four distinctly different connections to the site, ranging from the indifferent to the inspired. This risk was inherent to the process. In this exhibition the artists have collaboratively decided to place equal importance on the document of the expeditions as well as the interpretation of this strangely compelling site.

Strangeland first showed in Melbourne’s Kings artist run initiative October 2007. Since then, Merle Hathaway has invited the artists to tour the project at Horsham Regional Art Gallery. This incarnation of the project presents the same body of work that is reconfigured and/or rescaled within a very different exhibiting space - from a one-room installation in an artist run space to three relatively large and separate rooms in a regional gallery. This project has emerged to not provide a clear representation of the Lal Lal site, but rather an investigation of landscape through a narrative of process and varied connection to place.