JENNY PAPALEXANDRIS

Jenny Papalexandris is a Visual Artist/Photographer and Educator based in Australia. She holds a Master of Art (1997) and a Bachelor of Education (Art) 1987 from the UNSW Art & Design (COFA) in Sydney. 

She explores photography as a subjective response to the world of light and shadow. Her photographs are highly expressive and visually commanding. Thematically rich and diverse, her photography is imbued with a strong sense of poetry, symbolism, and metaphor. They are personal records tracing universal themes of loss, identity, the body as metaphor and nature. 

Jenny Papalexandris continues to exhibit both nationally and internationally. Her work has been featured as part of the Head On Photo Festival in Sydney, Australia. She has also participated in exhibitions in Spain, Italy and the U.S.A. She has been the recipient of numerous Art Awards. Her work has been included in various publications and media, including Harper’s, Black and White and Shots Magazine.

In 2016, The New Press (NYC) published Papalexandris' photography book, Five Bells_ Being LGBT in Australia, designed by EWS Design and funded by the Arcus Foundation. The book was a two-year project and was launched at Aperture Foundation in New York City.

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Note of Intent:
The Yonder Series traces a poetic visual narrative along the Amtrak Crescent Line from Penn Station in NYC to New Orleans in Louisiana. The thirty-hour train journey induces deep reverie. The sequence of twenty-five images in ‘Yonder’ is concerned with a state of mind. Memory does not follow a straight path, and similarly this story cannot be told in a linear structure (sequential) but rather the form is circular (recurrent) to evoke the dream sequence presented.  

The images are filmic and presented as a series of vignettes with the use of jump cuts, flashbacks, and deliberate repetition to mimic the way memories are recalled. Just as the speed of the train blurs and obscures our vision, our memories of the past are in a state of transition from one place to the next. We retain only selective images, the “landmarks” that are fixed in our consciousness. 

The view outside the cabin window of the train acts in the same way; we watch as urban decay, fleeting faces, the melancholia of the landscape blurred by sheets of rain relentlessly passes us by as if caught in a film noir dream. We are then transported indoors to dark hotel rooms, only to return to the platform and the on the train once again. There is a brooding heavy atmosphere to the sequence of images, a suffocating lack of light and air as the world is passively observed from the window.

The very concept of ‘yonder’ becomes a metaphor in this work for a destination that is unattainable, a journey without end. Ennui takes the place of action and resolution. We are made of longing caught in a loop of time.