IN THE GALLERY: Mitre Lake

Jill Orr

18 Mar - 9 Apr 2022

Jill Orr is one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists. Her work spans performance, photography, video and installation, and centres on issues of the psycho-social and environmental where she draws on land and identities as they are shaped in, on and with the environment.

This presentation features two linked series of performance works, both filmed on the salt flats of Mitre Lake, Wotjobaluk Country in Australia. The landscape is a theatre of natural events, traces of life temporarily captured within the encrusted surface. The mirrored surface reflects both the ancient and recent past as well as the potential of the future. Orr has returned to this lake as a motif many times throughout her career, her performances enacting the cyclic struggle and perpetual motion of the relationship between humans and the environment. Orr’s series Falling and Flight Reclaimed reflects the current dynamic state of flux and To Bear and Behold the potential for regeneration ahead.

Mitre Lake was recently exhibited in the prestigious Art Basel OVR 2022 and Orr was selected by Art Basel as one of the “Seven photographers redesigning photography.”

Documentation by Janelle Low