.png?sfvrsn=2510022a_0 "Rebecca Dagnall, The River 1")
.png?sfvrsn=27aa3912_0 "Rebecca Dagnall, The River 3")
.png?sfvrsn=c48f6030_0 "Rebecca Dagnall, The River 2")
.png?sfvrsn=208ba26_0 "Rebecca Dagnall, The River 4")
Rebecca DAGNALL, The River, 2022. Single channel HD video with sound, 59:17 minutes, edition 1 of 5. Commissioned for Boola Katitjin 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.
Boola Katitjin - Level 3, Student Hall (on rotation)
Rebecca DAGNALL
Born 1972 Melbourne, Victoria
Lives and works Perth, Western Australia
Rebecca Dagnall is a Western Australian photographic artist. Her work explores themes of suburbia and culture, the bush as psychological space, the Australian gothic, and people’s relationships with their immediate surroundings.
The River is a single-channel video which pictures two figures canoeing on Djarlgarra (Canning river) with dense bushland on either side. As the canoe journeys down the river, the visual imagery and soundscapes become increasingly surreal, moving beyond the realm of the physical into the imaginary. Patterns unfold and images reveal themselves, alluding to the creative and fertile spaces of the mind.
This work was inspired by the artist’s memories of canoeing down the river with her father when she was a child. Dagnall explained that: ‘The work draws on memory and experience through the perceptions of the real and imagined. Universal connections reveal themselves acknowledging the interrelatedness of people, memories and the places we inhabit.’