Jessica Anderson-Kunert

Visual Art – Melbourne

Jessica Anderson-Kunert is a Melbourne based anthropologist and artist. In 2005 she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) from the Victorian College of the Arts and in 2009 completed her Master of Fine Arts at RMIT. Jessica Anderson-Kunert’s practice is primarily concerned with processes of representation and how these operate to inform notions of the self and body. Sourcing images from the world of advertising and the glossy pages of fashion magazines, techniques of collage, appropriation and abstraction are applied to pervert signification. Operating in sculpture and installation, recent photographic collages have explored themes of materiality, desire and excess. There is an obvious emphasis on materiality in all of Anderson-Kunerts’s work. Obsessive collecting of source material, hours of precise cutting and an almost unhealthy attention to fine detail has been a common thread in her work processes since 2004. Raising issues of authenticity the work can be seen as an attempt to strive for something close to the real and simultaneously an expression of an intense anxiety about the resulting loss of the original object. Recent explorations into the collage process have seen Anderson-Kunert explore sound and video for the first time under her side project, Spooky Budgie.