Jenny Gillam

Jenny Gillam

Senior lecturer, Whiti o Rehua School of Art

Jenny Gillam’s exhibition practice engages with aspects of current debate around ecological tensions, ‘place’ as a construct, and nature and its artifice. This research manifests as installation practice and includes elements of photography, audio, moving image, video mixing performances and has recently extended to exhibiting living organisms within the gallery. She develops series of exhibitions, sometimes site-specifically, often produced collaboratively with other artists or with practitioners from another field. Gillam primarily teaches in the undergraduate photography programme and supervises MFA students.

  • Expertise

    Photography, installation, still and moving image, the role of artist/curator, collaborative art practice.

  • Research Highlights

    Future Calls the Dawn, Contagion (2012) Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Eugene Hansen, Jenny Gillam and Dr Kron.
    A multimedia, collaborative installation for group exhibition ‘Sound Full: Sound in Contemporary Australian and New Zealand Art’. A flock of mass-produced contemporary cyber/kitsch bird alarm clocks perching on a wall of graphic design deliberately conflate the places that popular culture, the natural world and art occupy in our lives and how technology mediates that experience. Each alarm clock was set to the time of a place where bird flu has caused human death (from World Health Organisation statistics). The alarms sounded in unison at NZ 12 o’clock each day, although many malfunctioned over the course of the exhibition.

    Ever Green (2012) Jenny Gillam and Dieneke Jansen.
    A Courtenay Place Light Box project that explored how nature exists in the built environment by exploiting the outdoor location and physical structure of the Courtenay Place light boxes. The perceived need to bring aspects of nature into urban contexts, the planting structures of inner city environments and the control of these plants due to space limitations and maintenance requirements, underpinned the project.

    Frank with speaker (2011) and Frank with toy duck (2012) International Society for Anthrozoology conference, Cambridge, UK, 2012
    Selection for the short film programme co-curated by Antennae: the Journal of Nature in Visual Culture for the International Society for Anthrozoology 2012 conference, ‘The arts and sciences of human–animal interaction’. Two short films documenting a small dog responding to stimuli that highlight the difference between canine and human perceptions. The recordings conflated a neutral art gallery environment, make-shift scientific analysis and a home movie of a pet.
    Inaugural Curator-at-large (2012) The New Zealand Film Archive Gallery, Wellington
    With Eugene Hansen, Gillam co-curated four group exhibitions for The New Zealand Film Archive over the year:
    Still explored the relationship between the photographic and cinematic, particularly through the use of moving image which is made by placing a video camera in a fixed position.
    Te Hiko Hou presented the work of three Māori male artists exploring aspects of contemporary ethnicity, its politics and its relationship to a cultural identity which is becoming ever more diverse and individually specific. 
    In Remixed artists directly responded to material housed in The Film Archive’s collection by sampling and re-editing source material.
    In Remade artists choose a title from The Film Archive’s collection and re-envisioned, revised and then remade it. 

  • Qualifications

    Advanced Certificate in Professional Photography (Carrington Polytechnic)
    Graduate Diploma in Higher Education (Unitec)
    MFA (RMIT University)