John Fries Award 2020

John Fries Award 2020

13.03.2117.04.21 UNSW Galleries1

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CEO, Copyright Agency

Adam Suckling

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The Copyright Agency continues to be a proud sponsor of the annual John Fries Award, now celebrating a milestone eleventh and final year. One of Australia’s most anticipated and important awards, it showcases the most engaging and experimental works of emerging and early career visual artists across Australia and New Zealand.

This year’s award entries have once again delighted and challenged.

From poignant moving-image works, to performance and large-scale paintings, the 2020 Award shines a light on the next wave of talented, contemporary artists who engage and share their unique perspectives and experiences of place and identity.

Since its inception, the coveted John Fries Award has offered a crucial springboard for emerging artists to launch their careers. Established in 2010 by the Fries family and Viscopy, it is the proud and generous legacy honouring former director John Fries.

The Copyright Agency champions artists, providing support through licensing artworks, philanthropy, and advocacy for copyright that fairly benefits creators. We work to ensure artists receive a fair payment when their work is reproduced and facilitate resale royalty payments.

In 2018, we launched our inaugural Fellowship for a Visual Artist, a careersustaining grant providing $80,000 for an artist to develop and create new work in any medium. Our Cultural Fund continues to provide other essential grants for artists and arts organisations so that they have time and space to create new and meaningful works that enrich Australia’s visual arts sector.

2020 is the seventh year in which we have presented the John Fries Award at UNSW Galleries, rewarding audiences with a unique opportunity to connect with the next generation of artistic talent. The UNSW Galleries is a vital partner and our thanks go to José da Silva, Karen Hall and the UNSW team.

Please take your time to wander through the exhibition and reflect on the new perspectives that each work inspires, and be buoyed by the brave and wonderful talent that is the dynamic ‘emerging’ contemporary art scene of Australia and New Zealand.

Foreword

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Director, UNSW Galleries

José Da Silva

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After a year of unexpected challenges, UNSW Galleries is delighted to be presenting partner for the eleventh and final year of the John Fries Award with 2021 marking the conclusion of this longstanding prize.

For more than a decade, the John Fries Award has recognised and supported the significant contributions of early-career practitioners to society and culture. Profiling more than 120 contemporary artists since 2009 from across Australia and New Zealand, the Award has offered an important platform for the creation of new work and the development of practice at a critical time in an artist’s career.

This year Melbourne-based curator Miriam Kelly returns to curate the finalist exhibition, working closely with the artists to realise their new commissions. Shortlisted from over 400 applications and working throughout the challenges of a global pandemic, this year’s seven finalists present exciting new works that interrogate systems of knowledge and language, and use storytelling as a method of enquiry and disruption.

UNSW Galleries has presented the John Fries Award finalist exhibition since 2014, and is thankful to the Fries family and Copyright Agency for the opportunity to be involved in this leading award for early career artists. After a postponement in 2020, we are pleased that we can host the finalist exhibition on-site, allowing the vibrant community of artists, curators, and friends that the John Fries Award corrals to come together for the closing celebration.

Partner Preface

Artist & Founder of the John Fries Award

Dr Kath Fries

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It is with a deep sense of gratitude that I approach the final John Fries Award.

I’m grateful for how it brought together so many wonderful early-career artists across Australia and New Zealand, giving them the opportunity to share their diverse practices and supporting new ambitious works. There were numerous people along the way who generously contributed their time, energy and expertise to the growth of the John Fries Award. I’d especially like to express my appreciation to the Viscopy Boards and CEO’s 2009 to 2017, the John Fries Award Committee, Visual Arts team at Copyright Agency, our judging panels and the six fabulous guest curators.

Since 2010 the John Fries Award has created a cherished space to reflect on and remember my father, his generosity, encouragement and practical approaches to supporting his family, friends and colleagues to pursue their dreams. I’ve always regretted not giving a eulogy at his funeral. I was too stunned with grief at the time, but the John Fries Award has become, in a sense, my annual eulogy for my father. I’ve been personally involved with the John Fries Award every step of the way, working very closely with most of the curators and the administration team. Having such a personal stake in what has become a high-profile award, has sometimes been challenging as well as deeply rewarding; I still have a twinge of discomfort being on the selection panel, judging my peers.

Although it is sad that the John Fries Award is coming to an end, I’m proud of what we have achieved over the years. The extensive list of John Fries Award finalists seems somewhat like an extended family, artists for whom being part of the John Fries Award was an early-career springboard, from which they have gone on to bigger and better things.

Each year when the winner is announced, I’ve been moved by their sincere surprise and humble responses. They were never told beforehand, we insisted on keeping it a secret until the public announcement. My mother, Vivienne Fries, generously funds the award money each year. She is always a bit nervous, but also delighted to stand up in front of everyone and announce the winner.

The audience numbers at the opening events always blew us away. I’m sure they will be there in spirit and online this year when the final John Fries Award winner is announced. Congratulations to all the finalists of the last John Fries Award. My heartfelt appreciation to everyone who has been involved in the John Fries Award journey over the years.

Eulogy for the John Fries Award

Curator, John Fries Award 2019-20

Miriam Kelly

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The John Fries Award 2020 brings together major new works by some of the most exciting early career contemporary Australian artists. As is the nature of an Award exhibition, the exhibiting artists have distinct individual practices that span a variety of media, from video, performance and sound to painting and installation. Within the works developed for this exhibition there are, however, strong overlaps and connections, as these artists have variously interrogated systems of knowledge, language and power, and – particularly after a year of isolation – reflected on the importance of interpersonal relationships and the fragility of our world.

The year that preceded (and delayed) the 2020 edition of the John Fries Award continues to background the presentation of the finalist exhibition in 2021. The heightened sensibility surrounding the difficulties in realising creative and collective endeavours is perhaps most succinctly conveyed by Sara Morawetz’s, All My Anxieties. Beginning in 2017, Morawetz’s ongoing work is a diaristic self-reflection project that is completed with the artist’s characteristic scientific methodological approach to art-making, and an interest in both human vulnerabilities and social constructions of success and failure.

Melanie Jame Wolf’s performance film, Acts of Improbable Genius 2021, similarly navigates societal failings, expectations and standards with a focus on gender archetypes. With a perfectly pitched and sardonically lacerating script, Wolf’s two-channel video homes in on the language of sexism and denialism still prevalent in and perpetuated by comedy.

The manipulation of the written word and image by those in power – and in response to it – also underpins the considerations of Ryan Presley. Presley’s work, Aeronautics (What goes up must come down) 2020, engages with the role of painting in Western art traditions in relation to capital, ownership, control and morality, to highlight past and ongoing injustices against Aboriginal people at the hands of politicians and mining giants.

Shevaun Wright’s redacted installation speaks to the written exchange that took place in the preparation and proposition for this exhibition. This presentation is the outcome of a work that sought to layer references to the history of the contract in conceptual art practice with the use of the contract in the brutal colonial occupation of this nation.

Exhibition Introduction

The role of language in power-plays and world-building also underpins the richly layered sound and animatronics installation by Daniel Jenatsch.

In The Close World 2021, Jenatsch considers the expanding role of AI and machine learning as it intersects with the realities of the escalating climate crisis and the drive to decentre humans.

As 2020 also brought the value of human connection, care and compassion into sharp relief, a number the artists also sought to reflect on their immediate relationships, and the systems of exchange that make them unique. With an expanded approach to portraiture, JD Reforma’s new installation Castor and Pollux 2021 celebrates his maternal aunt, and reflects on the layers of knowledge transfer between them, and across the generations.

Darcey Bella Arnold too considers her relationship with her mother and the human capacity for making meaning through marks, in an expanded project of non-representational portraits; or Portraits of Words as the artist describes them.

As always, the selection of just one Award recipient from such a strong pool of finalists is the near impossible task of an esteemed panel, and I extend my warmest thanks to this year’s judges: Jaklyn Babbington, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art Practice at the National Gallery of Australia; Cherine Fahd, artist and academic; Stephen Gilchrist, Associate Lecturer of Indigenous Art at the University of Sydney; and Kath Fries, artist, the John Fries Award Founder, and daughter of the late John Fries.

The 2020 edition of the John Fries Award also marks a triumphant finale of this much-loved exhibition program, coordinated by the Copyright Agency and made possible by the generous philanthropic initiative of the Fries family. Despite the many and varied disruptions to the delivery of this last John Fries Award – ¬from distance and lockdowns, to limited access to materials and workspaces, through to illness and loss – each of the finalists has made entirely new work for this exhibition. To celebrate this extraordinary commitment and energy, and to honour their distinct processes of production, this accompanying publication introduces to their works presented in the finalist exhibition through extracts from artist statements, conversations and written correspondence over the past year, in the artist’s own works. It has been an honour and a pleasure to work with each of these practitioners, and I thank them warmly for making this final John Fries Award exhibition such a success.

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Darcey Bella Arnold, Portraits of Words: Spirax Dictionary 2019. Photograph: Christo Crocker

Darcey Bella Arnold

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Darcey Bella Arnold is an Australian, Melbourne-based artist of British and Scottish descent. Arnold completed a BFA, Drawing at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne in 2007, and a BFA, Honours at Monash University, Melbourne in 2009. A selection of recent exhibitions includes: me say edit be, ReadingRoom Gallery, Melbourne, 2020; My Mother’s Labour, Sutton Gallery Project Space, Melbourne, 2018; Folded brick, Darcey Bella Arnold and Deimantas Narkevičius (LTU) organised by Paulius Andriuškevičius and Nicholas Kleindienst, Neon Parc Project Space, Melbourne, 2018; and Talking with the Taxman About Poetry, Testing Grounds, Melbourne Arts Precinct, 2017.

Arnold’s curatorial projects include Duck on the Pond, involving artists Elena Betros López, Noriko Nakamura, Lisa Radford, Salote Tawale, Roberta Joy Rich and Kalinda Vary at an offsite location in Melbourne, 2018; and Bricklaying with artists Dan Moynihan, Georgina Cue and Adam Wood at Rearview Gallery Project Space, Melbourne, 2017. Arnold attended an Artist-In-Residence program with Eastside International (ESXLA) Los Angeles in 2016, and was included in Kimposium, a social sciences symposium curated by Dr Meredith Jones at Brunel University, London in 2015. Arnold is a 2020 Studio Artist with Gertrude Contemporary and is represented by ReadingRoom, Naarm/Melbourne.

Arnold’s practice considers the artist’s close and unique relationship with her mother, Jennifer. As one of her carers, her work is a meditation on language, image making and familial relationships. Using gleaned material, she has explored her mother’s unique use of language and combined it with the artists’ language of image making.

Through Arnold’s responsive use of diacritic marks and the misuse of the English language the narratives of her paintings are left open for interpretation, intentionally, and language becomes a configuration in the creation of a compositional image. darceybellaarnold.com

Darcey Bella Arnold Born in Melbourne, VIC. Lives and works in Melbourne, VIC

Portraits of Words: Spirax Dictionary 1 2019 Synthetic polymer paint & digital print on canvas board, 125.0 x 95.0 cm

Portraits of Words: Spirax Dictionary 2-3 2020-21 Synthetic polymer paint & digital print on canvas board, 130.0 x 95.0 cm

Portraits of Words: Spirax Dictionary 4-5 2020-21 Synthetic polymer paint & digital print on canvas board, 120.0 x 85.0 cm Courtesy: the artist & ReadingRoom Naarm/Melbourne

We have always encouraged Jennifer to write down her thoughts on words, she corrects the newspapers regularly.

These words are written down in her Spirax notebooks, incorrect sightings and corrections included, and often pronunciation, part of speech, definition, and origin.

Jennifer has an acquired brain injury which has, amongst other things, affected her language centres.

Her language is now unconventional, with an AustralianEnglish and French bent. Recently I have been painting using Jennifer’s language as a patterning device, drawing from the pages of these Spirax notebooks she has created and studying them, using them as my main source material.

In the series ‘Portraits of Words’, I have painted portraits of this source material with slight interventions of colour and play with words and form. Painting the covers of this source material feels like painting a portrait of this material, a portrait of words.

Darcey Bella Arnold, 2021

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Daniel Jenatsch

Daniel Jenatsch, The Close World 2021. Image courtesy: Benjamin Creek

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Daniel Jenatsch is an artist and composer who makes interdisciplinary works that explore the interstices between affect and information. His work combines hyper-detailed soundscapes, music and video to create multimedia documentaries, installations, radio pieces and performances. His work looks at the social construction of subjectivity, with a concern for the ways in which forms of knowledge and power construct and inform our social and mental ecologies. His works have been presented in exhibitions and programs at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Arts House, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, the Athens Biennale, NextWave Festival, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Liquid Architecture Festival, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and the MousonTurm, Frankfurt. jenatsch.net

Daniel Jenatsch Born in Sydney, NSW. Lives & works in Melbourne, VIC

The Close World 2021 Three-channel sound with animatronics, 60:00 mins; 50.0. x 90.0 x 30.0 cm (approx.)

Voices by: Franziska Aigner Animatronic design: Benjamin Creek Painting: Claudia Greathead Courtesy: the artist

To get to the Close World we must come to this world of terrors.

We must touch the return of the time, the innocent earth beneath the grass of words.

To get to The Close World we must flock amongst the birds.

The Close World is a world building exercise conducted in a series of conversations with GPT-3, which is OpenAI’s autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. The Close World was created by training GPT-3 simultaneously on fundamental texts on the philosophy of language, and on the key works of ‘worldbuilding’ authors of fantasy and science fiction.

In conversation with GPT-3 The Close World was created, and what follows is an historico-fictive series of stories that talk to the foundations of Natural Language Processing in the 1970’s with the creation of OWL (One World Language) by William A. Martin and of an attempt to reach ‘The Close World’ a world that exists in a realm before language.

In The Close World we encounter a parliament of OWL’s who exist in the borderlands between The Close World and the gallery and from here they are able to share tales of their journeys through and between ‘The Close World’ which shift between music and the spoken word in a recursive dialogue that simultaneously builds and explores this world.

As Brian Massumi puts it in What animals Teach us About Politics ‘Animal play creates the conditions for language,’ and that it is the gestural conditions of language that open the possibility to ‘spontaneously surpass the given [conditions of the present]’.1 This spontaneity lies both at the heart of the limits of language and, as philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein puts it, ‘The limits of my language are the limits of my world;’ but what are the limits of a world without language? 2 Daniel Jenatsch, 2021

1 Brian Massumi, What Animals Teach Us about Politics, Durham: Duke University Press, 2014, p.8,17.

2L udwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922

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Sara Morawetz

Sara Morawetz, All My Anxieties 2017 – ongoing

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Sara Morawetz is a conceptual artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico whose interdisciplinary practice engages a range of mediums including performance, installation, photography and video. Her work is an examination of the systems and structures that measure experience, investigating concepts such as time and distance to explore their physical, emotional and exhaustive potential.

Her recent projects have involved collaborations with scientists from a range of scientific institutions including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (USA). Her work has been exhibited throughout Australia and internationally, including exhibitions at the Museé des Arts et Métiers (France), Australian Consulate-General New York, RAPID PULSE International Performing Arts Festival (Chicago, USA), Open Source Gallery (NYC, USA) and Dominik Mersch Gallery (NSW, Australia).

Sara is a PhD candidate at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney and an Australian Postgraduate Award recipient. She has received numerous awards and prizes including: ‘the churchie’ National Emerging Art Prize (2016), the Moya Dyring Studio Scholarship (2018), the Vida Lahey Memorial Travelling Scholarship (2018), and the Terrence and Lynette Fern Cité International des Arts Fellowship (2020), as well as project funding from the Australia Council for the Arts. saramorawetz.com

Sara Morawetz Born in Newcastle, NSW. Lives & works in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

All My Anxieties 2017 – ongoing Performative action, artist books, digital work, dimensions variable.

Courtesy: the artist

All My Anxieties is an ongoing personal periodical –– a continuing performative action and emotional archive designed to catalogue my flaws, failings and insecurities one month at a time. Conceived prior to the COVID pandemic (yet produced in its wake), this iteration of All My Anxieties presents a methodical analysis of my internal monologue at a unique moment of isolation and uncertainty. With titles including All My Failures, All My Petty Grievances, All My Unforced Errors and All My Minor Victories, All My Anxieties is an unfiltered exposition of my raw, neurotic, and routinely conflicted sense of self and the internal metrics by which I measure the world around me.

Sara Morawetz, 2021

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Ryan Presley, Aeronautics (What goes up must come down) 2020. Photograph: Carl Warner

Ryan Presley

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Dr Ryan Presley was born in 1987 in Alice Springs, and currently lives and works in Brisbane. His father’s family are Marri Ngarr and originate from the Moyle River region in the Northern Territory. His mother’s family were Scandinavian immigrants to Australia. Presley’s art practice is a reflection of his locale, which he audits and critiques. In doing so he mounts a larger inquiry that interrogates the articulations of power. Presley’s work has been included in Just Not Australian, Artspace (2019); Trade Markings (Frontier Imaginaries Ed No. 5), Van Abbemuseum, Netherlands (2018); the 33rd Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards, Darwin; and the TarraWarra Biennial: Endless Circulation (both 2016). His work is held in public collections at the Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Queensland Art Museum, Murdoch University, and the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (all in Australia). Presley completed a PhD at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, in 2016. His solo exhibition Ryan Presley: Prosperity was held at the Institute of Modern Art in 2018. ryanpresley.com.au

Ryan Presley Born in Alice Springs, NT. Lives and works in Brisbane, QLD Ryan Presley, Aeronautics (What goes up must come down) 2020 Oil, synthetic polymer paint and gold leaf on polyester-cotton canvas, 182.0 x 152.0 x 4.0 cm Courtesy: the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

Aeronautics (What goes up must come down) utilises canonical Christian iconographic traditions as a foundational starting point. It references iconographic paintings of St Francis Receiving the Stigmata, instead replacing the saint with three Aboriginal men taking a stand against an incursion onto their lands. Two helicopters replace the traditional Christ seraphim; each with apparatus attached that are used for the geolocation of particular underground materials of interest to mining corporations. Helicopters fitted with these mounts were spotted flying over the lands of Northern Territory communities shortly before the rollout of the 2007 Northern Territory Emergency Response. The legislation attached to this has effectively opened up these previously protected areas to potential exploitation.

The 2020 Rio Tinto Juukan Gorge incident publicised the bellicose type of exploitation that is commonly experienced by Aboriginal communities dealing with governments and multinationals. The South Australian government’s 2021 decision to allow exploratory drilling in Lake Torrens along with express permission to ‘damage, disturb or interfere’ with sacred Aboriginal sites in the area demonstrates exploitation as the cultural norm in Australia.1 On the right side of the painting is a fortified community comprised of harbourside mansions found in Sydney.

Ryan Presley, 2021

1 L ysaght, Gary-Jon 2021, ‘SA Government approves drilling on sacred Lake Torrens, despite opposition from Aboriginal groups’, ABC News, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-01-05/sagovernment-approves-lake-torrens-sacred-sitedrilling/13030346, accessed 31 January 2021.

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Castor and Pollux 2021

JD Reforma

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JD Reforma is an interdisciplinary artist working broadly across sculpture, performance, installation, video, photography and writing. The meaning explored in his work is embedded in different racialised and classed contexts: the lived experiences of the Asian-Australian diaspora; popular culture and the cult of celebrity; corporate branding and institutional critique; and political dynasticism and cultural imperialism. He is also a humourist and satirist, a practice enacted online through the Instagram persona Keeping Up With the KPIs, a memebased account in which the ubiquitous Kardashian/Jenner celebrity dynasty are positioned as imaginary figures within an institutional critique of the art world.

Most recently he has completed major commissions for Hyperlinked, 2020, curated by Isobel Parker Philip, Art Gallery of New South Wales; HI-VIS, 2020, curated by Luke Letourneau, Casula Powerhouse; Don’t Let Yourself Go, 2020, curated by Megan Monte and Josephine Skinner, Cement Fondu, Sydney; and Collective Trace, 2020, curated by Anna May Kirk, Sophie Penkethman-Young and Nerida Ross, PACT, Sydney. His work has been extensively profiled by Broadsheet Sydney, Art Collector Magazine, The Guardian, The Saturday Paper, RUSSH Magazine, Running Dog and Runway Journal. He is a 2020 City of Sydney Live/ Work Space Artist; and was a 2019/20 Carriageworks Resident Artist and a 2018 4A Beijing Studio recipient.

Other key exhibitions and commissions include The Fullness of Time, 2019, with Caroline Garcia, Verge Gallery, University of Sydney; No Righteous Left Among The Living, 2019, COMA, Sydney; Spring 1883, 2019, The Establishment, Sydney; Do You Know This Feeling?, curated by Sebastian Henry-Jones, Firstdraft, Sydney; the 2018 and 2019 NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship, Artspace, Sydney; The TV Show, 2018, curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham, Wollongong Art Gallery; Confidently Beautiful, with a heart, for Halò, 2017, curated by Katrina Cashman, part of the Bayanihan Philippine Art Project, Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney, which was also exhibited as part of Club Ate at Blacktown Arts Centre, curated

by Filipinx-Australian artists Bhenji Ra and Justin Shoulder; Coconut Republic, 2017, which was awarded the contemporary prize at the 2017 Fisher’s Ghost Art Award at Campbelltown Arts Centre; and 48HR Incident, 2015, curated by Aaron Seeto, Pedro De Almeida and Toby Chapman, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. jdreforma.com

JD Reforma Born in Sydney, NSW. Lives and works in Sydney, NSW

Castor and Pollux 2021 Mixed media installation Courtesy: the artist and COMA, Sydney

Castor and Pollux is a dual portrait of myself alongside my aunt and godmother, whose name is Elisa but whom I have always known as Butch. Butch is actually a mis-anglicisation of the name of a Filipina actress, Boots Anson-Roa, that Butch adopted when she was young. Boots Anson-Roa played the character of Eliza in a soap opera that Butch really loved growing up, and so Elisa became Boots.

While I always assumed that she was called Butch because she’s also a butch lesbian, the name Butch actually came when she relocated to Australia from the Philippines.

The way she pronounced Boots – with an ‘uu’ sound – was misunderstood by her new colleagues and friends, and they thought she was calling herself Butch. Now everyone calls her Butch, and it just so happens that she is cosmically aligned with the butch feminine.

Among other overlaps in our lives – we’re both gay, both Geminis, for example – there is a very strong surrogate maternal connection between Butch and I. She was essentially brought here, to Australia, as a young woman in her thirties to care for me so that my mum could go and work. Butch never assimilated to life in Sydney like my mum and the rest of my family. She hasn’t built a strong social network here, and is still very connected to the old country and her customs in the Philippines. There is a certain abstract romance in her relationship with the Philippines.

After Butch endured a recent health crisis, I have been thinking a lot about expanded forms of portraiture as a direct way of memorialising the individuals and connections in my family. The fact that Butch facilitated not just my life but also my mum’s professional life is central to this work; to its aesthetic, material and emotional undercurrents. Castor and Pollux is an installation of artefacts and ephemera of Butch and I’s relationship arranged into the constellation of Gemini, our shared zodiac – a family portrait as celestial bodies.

JD Reforma, 2021

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Melanie Jame Wolf

Melanie Jame Wolf, Acts of Improbable Genius 2021 (stills)

Melanie Jame Wolf works solo and with friends, making interdisciplinary pieces about flows of immaterial capital: social, cultural and affective. She examines these economies and entanglements through works for theatre, gallery and screen spaces. Coming from a ten-year background in contemporary performance, Wolf’s work explores questions of ghosts, class, gender, the mechanics of narrative, sensuality and the body as a political riddle. Leaning into a hyper-stylised pop aesthetic, she is invested in humour as a strategy for critical possibility. She works with language in subliminal and surprising ways and with video and installation as an extension of her choreographic practice.

Her work has been presented at HAU – Hebbel am Ufer; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; nGbK Berlin; Arts Santa Monica, Barcelona; Schwules Museum, Berlin; Sophiensaele, Berlin; Münchener Kammerspiele; Arts House, Melbourne; and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; and was selected for inclusion in major exhibitions including The National 2019: New Australian Art at Carriageworks, Sydney, 2019; Festival of Live Art, Melbourne; VAEFF Film Festival, NYC. She has been supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, Creative Victoria, Hauptstadtkulturfonds, Fonds Darstellende Kunst and Creative Europe. Residencies have included Cite international des arts, Obsidian Coast and Arts House. savage-amusement.com

Melanie Jame Wolf Born in Launceston, TAS. Lives & works between Melbourne, VIC and Berlin, GER

Acts of Improbable Genius 2021 Two-channel digital video, single channel sound, 17:30 mins Courtesy: the artist

Acts of Improbable Genius explores the libidinal economy of comedy. Who the complex machinery of desire permits to be funny, and who it does not. This two-channel video is inhabited by a duet of archetypal comedian personas: Stand Up Ron and Pierrot the Clown. It is shot in black and white. This formal choice underscores the pair’s anachronistic status and draws out a problematisation of nostalgia-as-material, an affect that surrounds and feeds both comedians. The two perform the same stand up routine via a repeated voice over. They are trapped in a looping eternal return of show business. Stand Up Ron and Pierrot are ghosts. The distinction between them is that Pierrot knows he is dead, while Ron does not - and so, he continues to perform for his life; dying hard.

Stand Up Ron is a persona I have been working with for several years. Performing him in Acts of Improbable Genius was a form of exorcising him from me. Filming him for this work is the most possessed I have ever felt in a performance. Ron is a complex character who speaks to an entangled combination of historical moments including Me Too, and the ugly collision of the white male comedian with contemporary identity politics. Pierrot the Clown is an instantly recognisable stock character whose history dates back to seventeenth century Italian commedia dell’arte. His sadness is perpetuated by his unrequited love for, and rejection by, a woman, Columbine. Pierrot became wildly popular in France at the turn of the 19th Century into the 20th as a figure of the ‘revolutionary everyman’.

My film nods to the violent irony of an everyman in whiteface.

In playing Stand Up Ron and Pierrot, I am drawing explicitly on Renate Lorenz’s notion of transtemporal drag. This approach has been instrumental to my practice.

It understands ‘drag’ as an act of assemblage, and as a verb: dragging images and references across time and through histories to see what sticky debris they collect along the way. Lorenz writes, “‘Transtemporal drag’ designates embodiments with a focus on chronopolitics, which represent an intervention in existing concepts of time and establish temporalities that counter, interrupt, or shift an advanced economic or scientific development or a heteronormative course of life”.1 Melanie Jame Wolf, 2021

1 Renate Lorenz, Queer Art: A Freak Theory, New York City: Columbia University Press, 2012, p.23.

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Shevaun Wright

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Shevaun Wright is a lawyer and artist primarily engaged in a research-based interdisciplinary practice, utilising the contractual medium and the notion of the ‘social contract,’ as well as re-contextualised dialogues as a tool for engaging in institutional legal and artistic critique. Informed by her Aboriginal heritage, she aims to extrapolate feminist and post-colonial critiques of the law and art as a means to access and reveal similarities in their discursive practices.

Wright has practiced as a commercial lawyer in Australia for approximately six and a half years, specialising in commercial contracting and litigation. From 2015–16 she undertook residencies in New York as a fellow of the Art + Law Program and then the Whitney Independent Study Program (Studio). She has obtained Masters degrees in art and law, and recently completed her Master of Fine Arts at UCLA, in the Interdisciplinary Studio program founded

by Professor Mary Kelly and now under the supervision of Professor Andrea Fraser. She attended UCLA as the Australian John Monash Cultural Scholar.

Wright’s work has been displayed in New York, Los Angeles and Melbourne. Her project The Rape Contract 2016 was shown at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art as part of ‘Unfinished Business: Perspectives on art and feminism’ in 2017. The Parliament of New South Wales acquired Wright’s Site Specific Work 2015 – Suggested Corporate Names Catholic Church Child Abuse Compensation Fund 2015, which was awarded Aboriginal Art Prize in the same year. shevaunwright.com

Shevaun Wright Born in Darwin, NT. Lives & works Los Angeles, USA

Dispossessed (

) 2020-21

Brown paper and framed ink on paper, dimensions variable Courtesy: the artist and MARS Gallery, Melbourne

This project is about institutional blackface. It is about silencing and redaction, and leveraging liberal credibility off the backs of Aboriginal arts.

On 14 February 2021 the Copyright Agency advised that my John Fries Award entry was unacceptable.

This is the remainder of what is left when voices with less resources confront powerful monopolies and the law.

The work comprises 23 framed A4 documents, a wrapped canvas, wall label and QR code. Each intentionally left blank page is a placeholder for a letter or document from the Agency that they would not allow me to show, even redacted. My letters and contractual art have been redacted to satisfy the Agency’s concerns that my own views misrepresented contractual and copyright frameworks.

This work, which began as a conceptual installation on colonisation, copyright and cultural appropriation, has now become a performance, an enactment of the settlor logic behind the work.

Shevaun Wright, 2021

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About the Copyright Agency

Published on the occasion of John Fries Award 2020 Finalist exhibition 13.03.21 – 17.04.21 Curator Miriam Kelly UNSW Galleries Corner Oxford Street and Greens Road Paddington NSW 2021 johnfriesaward.com ISBN 978-1-925404-05-0 Publication design Mark Harley, Athlete Printer Hogan Print, Sydney

Darcey Bella Arnold Daniel Jenatsch Sara Morawetz Ryan Presley JD Reforma Melanie Jame Wolf Shevaun Wright

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