Graduate Art Show and Espresso GARAGE Awards 2012

THE GAS : Graduate Art Show & espresso GARAGE awards 2012 fr

vGriffith university Art Gallery Queensland College of Art 226 Grey Street South Bank brisbane, australia

Finalists selected from the 2012 graduates of the Queensland College of Art (QCA)

INTRODUCTION

THE GAS: GRADUATE ART SHOW is an annual end-of year event in Griffith University Art Gallery’s exhibition program. Since its inception in 2009, THE GAS has grown in momentum and ambition, alongside that of QCA artists and their individual trajectories, pursuing the best of what art offers us. Griffith University Art Gallery (GUAG) runs a separate curatorial program to that of the student-centred Queensland College of Art (QCA) Galleries, and so we love the chance each year to get in on the act, to engage with and focus our attention on the art of graduating students. We get to connect with the outcomes of their studies and witness the way in which QCA programs filter through the dimensions of artistic practices – honed through an intense period of a life – a period that allows for experimentation and challenge. I would like to thank all of the entrants to THE GAS 2012.

THE GAS: Graduate Art Show 2012

Publication credits:

Griffith Artworks staff:

+ Espresso GARAGE awards

Design: David Sargent, Creative Director,

Naomi Evans, Curator and Acting

Liveworm Studio

Director (November 2012

Writers: Naomi Evans (ed.), Laura Brown,

– November 2013)

Griffith University Art Gallery

Lisa Bryan-Brown, Kathryn Sawyer,

Karen La Rocca, Administration

Queensland College of Art campus

Nicola Scott

and Finance

21 November 2012 – 9 February 2013

226 Grey Street, South Bank Brisbane, Australia

Photography: Mick Richards © The artists and authors.

A Griffith Artworks project.

Griffith Artworks is Griffith University’s management authority for Griffith University Art Gallery (GUAG), and Griffith University Art Collection (GUAC).

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Graduate Art Show

Jo Duke, Collection Manager Camille Serisier, Curatorial and Collections Officer Kathryn Sawyer, Curatorial and Collections Officer Dr Chris Bennie, Exhibitions and Public Programs Officer Laura Brown, THE GAS 2012 Curatorial Intern

Through THE GAS, GUAG also gets to connect artists with people who might not otherwise know about their work – art gallery owners, writers, curators and buyers. We think this is immensely rewarding stuff. We were able to work with a range of talented artists with widely divergent sets of concerns. In 2012, GUAG presented 42 artworks by 32 artists: Ellie Anderson, Olivia Bradley, Freda Davies, Gerwyn Davies, Charlie Donaldson, Gus Eagleton, Caitlin Franzmann, Dale Harding, Rachel Hazzard, Ebony Horn, Jason Jameson, Gregory Jessup, Jeanette Lee, Brighde Lewis, Louis Lim, Dan McCabe, Dennis McCart, Carol McGregor, Kate McKay, Llewellyn Millhouse, Mika Nakamura-Mather,

Sarah Oxenham, Brett Ramsay, Laura Richter, Leena Riethmuller, Angelica Roache-Wilson, Nicola Scott, Kylie Spear, Tyza Stewart, Malinda Swain, Athena Thebus, and Eileen Xie. Many people made huge efforts towards THE GAS 2012, and I would like to acknowledge the staff of Griffith Artworks, and in particular Karen La Rocca and Dr Chris Bennie. I would also like to acknowledge that in previous years, this exhibition has been run under the stellar leadership of Simon P Wright, who is currently on a year-long secondment to the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, as Assistant Director Programming. Our congratulations to Simon on his appointment, and a sincere ‘thankyou’ for the work he contributed to the 2012 exhibition, as part of THE GAS 2012 pre-selection committee, which also included Dr Chris Bennie and myself.

This exhibition would not be possible without the support of visionary people, and I make special thanks to espresso GARAGE and its owner Simon Livingstone (who also runs Piaf Bistro and the Sardine Tin located nearby espresso GARAGE, all at South Bank). Simon Livingstone has been a great friend of Griffith University Art Gallery, and this is the 5th year in a row that espresso GARAGE has supported THE GAS and QCA students with a cash prize offered to standout artists, via the espresso GARAGE award 2012.

The judge of the espresso GARAGE award 2012 was respected contemporary art dealer Josh Milani, of Milani Gallery, Brisbane, Australia. GUAG colleagues join me in thanking Josh Milani for the generosity of his time, expertise and discernment in judging this year’s award.

Josh Milani nominated two artists to be recipients of High Commendation, and we congratulate Olivia Bradley (graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts) for her multimedia installation Light Study #1 2012 and Llewellyn Millhouse (graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Art - Honours) for his wall mounted sculpture/ painting Golden Mattress 2012.

Josh Milani awarded the espresso GARAGE award 2012 to two equal winners: Carol McGregor for her large-scale, multi-panelled work journey cloak 2012 of painted recycled boards covered with thousands of seeds, and Dale Harding, for his carved wood, string and text work titled no blame rests with them 2012. McGregor and Harding graduated in 2012 with a Bachelor of Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art and GUAG colleagues join me in congratulating them for their works which are striking, graceful and powerfully moving.

Naomi Evans, Curator and Acting Director

THE GAS 2012 List of Works

Ellie Anderson Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1987, Brisbane, QLD, Australia Herd 2012 silkscreen on Kohzo Paper 62 x 420 x 7.5cm

Gregory Jessup Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1987, Brisbane, QLD, Australia Mostyn Bramley-Moore 2012 oil on canvas 60 x 45 x 5cm

Olivia Bradley Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1975, Sydney, NSW, Australia Light study #1 2012 projectors, plastic tubes, DVD, speakers, edition of 5 dimensions variable

Jeanette LEE Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1964, Brisbane, QLD, Australia Coping Mechanism 2012 perspex, copper, tin, wood 29 x 60 x 45cm

Freda DAVIES Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1992, Brisbane, QLD, Australia Untitled 2012 oil on board 19 x 16 x 2cm Gerwyn Davies Honours (Photography) b.1985, Ipswich, QLD, Australia Untitled (Seagulls) 2012 digital photograph 110 x 110cm Charlie DONALDSON Undergraduate (Photography) b.1991, Brisbane, QLD, Australia The Strength of the North 2012 inkjet print, Perspex, found images, brick dimensions variable Gus Eagleton Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1989, Coffs Harbour, NSW, Australia Cinema 2012 aerosol, oil on canvas 50 x 50 x 4cm Caitlin Franzmann Honours (Fine Art) b.1979, Brisbane, QLD, Australia In the shallow...you can still drown 2012 timber, plywood, hanging lamp, sound, 7:35 mins looped 250 x 250 x 250cm Dale Harding Undergraduate (BoVA CAIA) b.1982, Moranbah, QLD, Australia Descendant of Bidjara and Ghungalu peoples, Central Queensland no blame rests with them 2012 timber, zinc rich paint, string, pencil 240 x 60 x 15cm

Graduate Art Show

Louis LIM Honours (Photography) b.1989, Brisbane, QLD, Australia Anthony from the series ‘Strangely Familiar’ 2012 C-type prints, text 250 x 250cm overall Dan McCabe Honours (Fine Art) b.1990, Brisbane, QLD, Australia Untitled 2012 photographic print on synthetic fabric, pine, acrylic and oil on board 250 x 750 x 0.4cm Dennis McCART Postgraduate (Fine Art) b.1957, Brisbane, QLD, Australia Edgeland 2 2012 mixed media, oil on canvas 76 x 50 x 6cm Carol McGregor Undergraduate (BoVA CAIA) b.1961, Hastings, Hawkes Bay, New Zealand Wathaurong descent, Victoria journey cloak 2012 recycled boards, acrylics, seeds 250 x 450 x 1cm Kate McKAY Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1992, Glenelg, SA, Australia Remnants 2012 five panels: oil on board 40 x 29 x 2cm each

Rachel Hazzard Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1992, Toowoomba, QLD, Australia Required Self-discipline 2012 oil paint on board 60 x 90 x 4cm

Llewellyn Millhouse Honours (Fine Art) b.1990, Brisbane, QLD, Australia Gold Mattress 2012readymade canvas, single foam mattress, acrylic paint 150 x 200cm

Ebony HORN Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1992, Gold Coast, QLD, Australia 119 Years 2012 mirror, plastic, silicone various dimensions

Mika Nakamura-Mather Honours (Fine Art) b.1963, Fukushima, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan The world outside the palace walls 2012 oil on wood 98 x 180 x 2cm

Jason Jameson Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1973, Ballina, NSW, Australia Big Bang Bubbles 2012 two parts: cypress pine, Perspex mirror, steel 60 x 240 x 100cm overall

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Brighde Lewis Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1992, Brisbane, QLD, Australia The Chimera 2012 sterling silver casting 6 x 7.5 x 4cm

Sarah Oxenham Honours (Photography) b.1981, Brisbane, QLD, Australia The Interstitial: A Slow Space 2012 digital video, 16:9, silent, looped

Brett Ramsay Honours (Photography) b.1983, Brisbane, QLD, Australia LEISUR[E]SCAPES 2012 photograph (Giclée on PhotoTex wallpaper) 280 x 420cm Laura Richter Honours (Fine Art) b.1990, Brisbane, QLD, Australia Collecting a void 2012 assemblage-based installation 300 x 200 x 200cm Leena Riethmuller Honours (Fine Art) b.1988, Brisbane, QLD, Australia Big Toes (Saliva Melting) 2012 saliva, custom built table with aluminium inlay, magnifying lamp, stainless steel and glass freezer 125cm x 70cm Angelica Roache-Wilson Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1991, Brisbane, QLD, Australia Apollo 2012 oil, paint stick, stickers and glitter on vinyl 90 x 40 x 2cm Nicola Scott Honours (Fine Art) b.1988, Brisbane, QLD, Australia Figure in motion (self-portrait) 2012 acrylic paint, photocopied image on paper 25 x 45 x 1cm Kylie Spear Honours (Fine Art) b.1986, Macksville, NSW, Australia from the series The Space Between Thoughts 2012 Drawing 2 (white sheet) Drawing 5 (thrown chalk) Drawing 6 (hand) digital video, 16:9, silent, looped Drawing 7 2012 binaural sound, looped Tyza Stewart Honours (Fine Art) b.1990, Moura, QLD, Australia Regulatory Body 2012 oil on board, pencil on paper, pen and tape on digital print 50 x 120 x 3cm Malinda Swain Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1981, Gold Coast, QLD, Australia Blank 2012 Digitally printed book, edition of 5, 21 x 21 x 1cm Athena THEBUS Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1990, Brisbane, QLD, Australia Roadside Sharman 2012 4 channel digital video, 16:9, silent, 10 minutes, looped Eileen XIE Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1991, Brisbane, QLD, Australia Blue Constellations #2 – 4 2012 Constellation #5 – 8 2012 silver, gemstones, glass, thread, paint, twigs dimensions variable

Ellie Anderson

Herd 2012

Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1987, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

silkscreen on Kohzo Paper 62 x 420 x 7.5cm

Ellie Anderson studied as a printmaker, producing intricately detailed works that draw her viewer into a fantastical world.

With possibly thousands of fine black lines on paper, the viewer’s focus may fall at once on the attention paid to such fine detail and the beauty created on the whole; the macro and the micro.

Displayed along a platform as an installation of eight pages, each silkcreen is folded over or under the other to form a repeating pattern that functions as a kind of Rorschach blot, mimicking the symmetry found in nature. Stare at the drawings for long enough and the figure of a cow emerges, leaning on its side both against and away from itself. Here the viewer may develop a narrative in their own mind, depending on which details of the drawings do or do not relate to personal experience. An evidently careful and detailed approach is clear in the work, with the result strongly formal and narrative.

Drawing on the narrative and aesthetic found in folk tales, Anderson’s work explores the beauty of patterns found in nature. Combining cultural references and motifs of natural fauna and flora, the drawings present complex ornamental designs to suggest a new relationship between the natural world and western consumer society.

Ellie Anderson has featured in a number of exhibitions across Brisbane ARI’s, including Nine Lives Gallery, POP Gallery, Bleeding Hearts Gallery, and The Box. Anderson has recently been shortlisted for the Iain Turnbull Memorial Bursary for Printmaking, and is a semi-finalist in the RAW Visual Artist of the Year Award 2012.

Laura Brown, 2012

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Olivia Bradley Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1975, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Theory surrounding visual perception asserts that what we see is largely made up of what we have previously experienced, rather than what appears before our eyes. For Light Study #1, Olivia Bradley stretches and probes the bounds of perception, confusing the visible with the invisible, the audible with the silent.

Concerned with engaging the viewer’s experience of an artwork, Bradley investigates how perception may be altered and impacted by variables such as light, colour, and sound.

Light study #1 2012 projectors, plastic tubes, DVD, speakers, edition of 5 dimensions variable

With Light Study #1, Bradley utilises the potential of light as a medium for illustrating perception, as it may be modelled to create space and form. In this work, several poles of light reach toward the ceiling, dimming and brightening along to the sound of breathing. The viewer becomes unavoidably implicated, not just as their visual perception is skewed as the room lights and dims, but as their breath might become measured to align with the rhythm of the work. Effecting a subtle, trance-like state, Light Study #1 envelops the viewer in a meditative and contemplative space.

Olivia Bradley graduates this year with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. Her work has featured in exhibitions across Australia, as well as in Spain, Germany, and Italy.

Laura Brown, 2012

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Freda DAVIES

Untitled 2012

Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1992, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

oil on board 19 x 16 x 2cm

Freda Davies’s small painting evokes many things: the outline of a mountain, the view from a window, or a mound of snow. None of these references are certain however, as the image could also be read at surface value for purely formal qualities of line, shape, and colour. Whilst resolutely minimal in design, the work also exudes warmth and depth through Davies’s use of colour and through the intimacy of the painting’s modesty of scale.

the landscape in a literal way, Davies highlights an appreciation for the innocence of nature. Drawing on the language of abstract painting, her images are resonant with human emotions that nature might evoke, but which may prove hard to articulate.

Hung slightly higher on the gallery wall, Untitled functions like a comma in space: like a magnet, it beckons you to come closer and gives pause for reflection.

Davies relies on observational drawings and an intuitive response to the stillness and beauty found in her surrounding landscape. Rather than aiming to depict

With expressive brushwork, the transparency in layers of paint, and the rippling of the glossy surface, Davies hopes for minute details to evoke nuances between lightness and solidity, the meagre and the monumental.

Freda Davies graduates this year with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting.

Her work has been shown in galleries across Queensland, and she has won the Hinterland Young Artists Award and the Regional Encouragement Award for Excellence in Visual Art and Design.

Laura Brown, 2012

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Gerwyn Davies Honours (Photography) b.1985, Ipswich, QLD, Australia

Lounging on an implied beach, the subject of Gerwyn Davies’s A Million Bucks wears a costume, but not one appropriate for swimming or tanning. Body and limbs are constrained in a tube of blue-check fabric, and the figure’s head is engulfed in a mess of white dolls hair. With this experimental and impractical outfit, the body is largely absented in favour of its attire.

Davies’s practice combines costume making and photography, fundamentally concerned with the fabrication of elaborate, bricolage constructions that utilise everyday materials to explore the use of dress in self-representation.

Interested in the role played by fashion in

Untitled (Seagulls) 2012 digital photograph 110 x 110cm

the performance of identity, and how the dressed body functions as a platform for projecting an individual’s articulation of self, A Million Bucks highlights the potential for playfulness and subversion within this form of self expression.

Davies is an emerging Brisbane-based photographer who has exhibited nationally and in the USA. He has received multiple grants and awards including: Emerging Fashion/Editorial Photographer of the Year 2012 by Capture Magazine, and Student Fashion Photographer of the Year 2011 by the Australian Commercial and Media Photography association. He graduated from Queensland College of Art in 2011 with a Bachelor of Photography majoring in both Art Practice and Creative Advertising, with prior qualifications in Journalism and Sound from Queensland University of Technology.

Lisa Bryan-Brown, 2012

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Charlie DONALDSON Undergraduate (Photography) b.1991, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

Charlie Donaldson combines found objects with printed photographs to explore the connections between photographic and sculptural space. The photographs themselves serve as arbitrary reference points for ‘nowhere’, depicting familiar but empty places that seem to exist in uncharted zone somewhere within our urban landscape. These images are hung, wedged, propped, and suspended using found objects. The tension between 2D and 3D collide, between the image and its method of ‘framing’, so that the significance of each is thrown into doubt.

Sculptural elements in Donaldson’s work provoke an immediate physical response. This interaction continues in a dynamic that plays out between the space of the gallery and the space within the photographs, as two arenas share a similarity in form (empty, structural), but vastly different in their charged connotations (‘nowhere’ versus the heightened context of the gallery setting).

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The Strength of the North 2012 inkjet print, Perspex, found images, brick dimensions variable

By manipulating sculptural materials, Donaldson is able to push this tension a step further. Alluding to de-constructed windows and frames, sheets of perspex and a brick subtly transforms photography to something that powerfully references the construction of a building. Here a parallel in our experience lies between the composition of photographs and the constructed space they occupy.

Charlie Donaldson graduates from a Bachelor of Photography this year. His work has been shown across Queensland galleries, including the Old Museum, the Queensland Centre for Photography, and at the Queensland College of Art. His work is held in the Darryl Hewson Collection and in numerous private collections.

Laura Brown, 2012

Gus Eagleton

Cinema 2012

Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1989, Coffs Harbour, NSW, Australia

aerosol, oil on canvas 50 x 50 x 4cm

Gus Eagleton’s art has explored figurative painting on canvas and in urban street art, where he has used aerosol and oil paints in small compositions and across massive murals. Central to his work is an interest in the tensions that manifest in the urban landscape. He explains: As economic growth fluxuates, so to does infrastructure, this correlation has a direct association to a living organism both expanding and deteriorating. Sky rises ascend and the long forgotten remnants of the old world slowly deteriorate. This notion of living moving infrastructure is a direct link to people, a structural doppelganger, shadowing cultural traits and trends. The theory of Apollonian and Dionysian is just one of many dichotomies with a relation to two complete opposites in simultaneous harmony. Apollonian being ordered and imperialistic, while Dionysian is free and rebellious.1

The representation of a cinema, taken from a photograph of a site in New South Wales, where the artist grew up, bears out a sense of loss. Glass entry doors to the cinema reflect nearby commercial mega-enterprises, while a single open door to the dark interior beckons us to consider the vacant seats, lingering smells and the violence about to be done to memory or nostalgia for that place. The lower component of the painting reveals a maelstrom of oil paint, a cosmos that seems to resist and repel its painted self.

Eagleton undertook a Bachelor of Fine Art from Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Brisbane between 2011-12. He has exhibited in artist-run and independent spaces in Brisbane and the Gold Coast, and has been the recipient of several awards including: Lilli Pilli Youth Award, Coffs Harbour, NSW (2008); Green Dragon Highly commended Award, St. George Bank, Brisbane (2009).

He was featured in Australian Art Collector magazine, Issue 62, October – December 2012.

Naomi Evans, 2012

1 Gus Eagleton, artist statement, 2012.

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Caitlin Franzmann Honours (Fine Art) b.1979, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

In the shallow... you can still drown 2012 timber, plywood, hanging lamp, sound, 7:35 mins looped 250 x 250 x 250cm

Caitlin Franzmann is interested in challenging the prevailing tendency for contemporary art to focus on purely visual and conceptual means of communication. She is attracted to the potential that lies in multi-sensory experience, creating immersive environments that focus on the audience’s spatial awareness. Franzmann investigates the possibilities of sensorial experience and the evocation of mystery as a way of leading the viewer to a deeper engagement with a work and to open up multiple interpretations.

In the shallow...you can still drown is an immersive environment in which visitors may experience a combination of altered sound, light, touch, smell and movement.

Whilst transforming the physical environment, the work also requests that the viewer is an active participant, paying new attention to how they feel, what they see, and how it sounds.

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With a background in urban planning, Franzmann explores parallels with architectural phenomenon — particularly the Slow Architecture Movement and Juhani Pallasmaa’s concepts of fragile architecture. Franzmann’s own work likewise privileges the intimacy and responsiveness that space can evoke.

Whether the audience experiences the work alone or alongside others, the headphones ensure that the experience is personal and a subjective one.

Caitlin Franzmann completes her Bachelor of Fine Art with Honours this year, and has shown in a number of exhibitions nationally. These include the Otherfilm Festival 2012,Test Pattern 2012 at Ryan Renshaw, and the GAS 2011 at the Griffith University Art Gallery. This year she undertook a residency with Level Gallery, Brisbane.

Laura Brown, 2012

Dale Harding Undergraduate (BoVA CAIA) b.1982, Moranbah, QLD, Australia Descendant of Bidjara and Ghungalu peoples, Central Queensland

The poem that accompanies Dale Harding’s no blame rests with them, scrawled faintly on the wall next to the work, serves as a crucial introduction, explanation, and extension of the sculpture. Indeed, it is a poignant accompaniment for a work so poetic in its visual language and approach. A wooden pole, carved in its entirety by the artist from wood, references traditional Indigenous Australians’s digging sticks and weapons. Carpentry is a skill passed down to Harding from his father, emphasising the importance of familial history that runs throughout his practice. This is a work borne of reality, of personal experiences had by the artist.

The wooden pole is suspended by builders string to whatever structure exists above it. Strong, slim and delicate, the string is anchored by two additional carved wood forms that have been treated to resemble powdered milk tins. Stacked atop each other, these tins are pinned down by the hanging weight of the pole which gives a powerful sense of balance as a precarious state, threatening to fall. The tins recall the childhood game of stilts, where tins are held to your feet with string reins, offering a chance to move like an adult with the

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no blame rests with them 2012 timber, zinc rich paint, string, pencil 240 x 60 x 15cm

added height.

Childhood memories, oral histories, and familial ties are strong themes throughout Harding’s practice, as he seeks to tell and retell a history that remains largely untold in Australian consciousness, past and present. Subtlety and silence provide strength in Harding’s work, as those things left unsaid become just as important as those included. In this way Harding’s work is able to remain open to its audience, always suggesting the stories that remain untold and unfinished business in Indigenous culture and history.

Dale Harding has apprenticed under a number of noteworthy Indigenous artists including Tony Albert, Richard Bell, and Judy Watson. This year he held his first solo show Colour by Number at Metro Arts.

He has also appeared in a number of exhibitions across the country, including a project as a part of the Indigenous Art Triennial 2012.

Laura Brown, 2012

Rachel Hazzard Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1992, Toowoomba, QLD, Australia

Required Self-discipline 2012 oil paint on board 60 x 90 x 4cm

Rachel Hazzard’s current body of work investigates the possibilities of contemporary figurative painting, combining kinesics (the study of body language) with a self-reflexive engagement with canonical depictions of the figure in Western art history. Staging visual interventions into familiar scenes that ‘cause disruption and uncertainty’, 1 Hazzard conspicuously inserts her own figure into these visual narratives.

Required Self-discipline features a line rendering of a cowboy lassoing a runaway horse, an archetypal scene of masculine strength and solitude that is set incongruously against a pale pink backdrop. In the foreground Hazzard’s own more detailed figure, dressed in bright blue onsie and striped socks, strikes a pose, seemingly interacting with this event at the same time as it appears to exist in a separate spatial field and historical time. Akin to Michael Zavros’s recent work Prince/Zavros (2011), which appropriates the work Untitled (Cowboy) by American

artist Richard Prince - itself sourced from an iconic and ubiquitous Marlborough cigarette advertisement - Hazzard’s work appropriates an image that has been repeated in Western art history and popular culture. Transformed into a potent cultural sign through this process of accumulation, the figure of the cowboy has come to signify colonial narratives and conflicted masculinity, a context full of potentials for a contemporary female artist.

While Hazzard’s compositional background depicts a copy of a copy, and has associations with a stencil or a page of a colour-by-numbers book, the figure’s curious bodily pose highlights nuanced codes that govern bodily behaviour and artistic traditions alike.

Required Self-discipline draws attention to the way in which particular gestures and posture gain meaning within the context of cultural narrative by virtue of arbitrary distinctions rather than via any meaning inherent to bodies themselves.

Nicola Scott, 2012

1 Correspondence with the artist 2012

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Ebony HORN Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1992, Gold Coast, QLD, Australia

Among the superstitious, it’s well known that breaking a mirror causes seven years of misfortune. Such an accident fractures the image of the perpetrator, prying apart their wholeness. As a result, breaking a mirror also breaches the soul.

Ebony Horn’s work negotiates anxieties related to self-representation, in particular those tensions surrounding self image.

Made of shattered pieces of mirror, Horn’s sculptures are shaped into loose geometric forms. Not only do they reflect the image of the audience, they shatter and reconfigure it, so that onlookers see themselves in pieces. Inevitably, Horn’s work 119 Years also problematises the image of the artist; as reflected in cracks, fissures and the facets of the mirrors.

119 Years 2012 mirror, plastic, silicone various dimensions

In the two-volume book The Encyclopedia of Fictional Artists 2011, editor Koen Brahms lists over 250 instances where fictitious creatives appear in literary narratives.1 As in Horn’s work, these fictional characters are often based on the fracturing of real personalities, for example, Paul Gauguin or Franz Kafka are among common archetypes.2 In 119 Years, Horn is the beholder who has encountered the most frequent and pervasive changes in her reflected image, through countless hours of piecing her objects together, encountering many different versions of her self.

Even fictional artists break mirrors. It is common for a fictitious creative to suffer a gradual disappearance through ill fortune.3 119 years allows us to imagine the absent author of the work as an illfated, perhaps fictitious, persona.

In 2012 Ebony Horn completes her bachelor of Fine Art with a major in sculpture at the Queensland College of Art, Brisbane QLD. Horn has exhibited in group exhibitions including: Homely, Unhomely at POP Gallery, Woolloongabba and Appertivo, Third Year Sculpture Exhibition at the QCA’s Project Gallery.

Kathryn Sawyer, 2012

1 Sam Thorne, ‘Works on Paper’, Frieze, Frieze Publishing, London, England, June - August 2011, no. 140, n.p., <http://www.frieze.com/issue/ articleworks-on-paper/>, accessed 16/11/2012.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

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Jason Jameson Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1973, Ballina, NSW, Australia

Jason Jameson’s practice is processdriven; concerned with an intuitive work method using found and repurposed materials. Working predominantly with discarded wood, Jameson seeks to unveil the innate qualities that might be found embedded within such material.

Approaching art-making as an act of transformation, metamorphosis, and revelation, Jameson creates meaningful objects with strong spatial presence that may affect and interact with the viewer.

With Big Bang Bubbles, one sculpture is embedded with mirrors along its sides, allowing it to directly connect and interact with its surrounding space. The work is transformed through this element of reflection, as movement and light constantly change the appearance of the object. Taking form as two large, layered shapes — one circular and one rectangular — Jameson’s sculptures cycle over and over, responding to cycles that have come before and renewing for those to come in future.

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Big Bang Bubbles 2012 two parts: cypress pine, Perspex mirror, steel 60 x 240 x 100cm overall

With an emphasis and value placed on ‘thriftiness’, Jameson approaches his medium in a way that draws connections between such discarded materials (at once natural and man-made) and broader concepts of the universe and its structure. With ‘making do’ such an important conceptual concern, Jameson is able to bring his materials back into the cycle of creation, having been used and discarded any number of times previous. Here, all things are at different stages along this spectrum of creation and decay.

Jason Jameson graduates this year with a Bachelor of Fine Art in the area of sculpture. His work has been shown at POP Gallery, Jugglers Art Space, and Love Love Studio.

Laura Brown, 2012

Gregory Jessup Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1987, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

Mostyn Bramley-Moore 2012 oil on canvas 60 x 45 x 5cm

Gregory Jessup’s portrait of artist and Queensland College of Art Professor, Mostyn Bramley-Moore, captures a fleeting gesture in fine detail. The small act of checking your watch might be read as a still-life of sorts, where the watch symbolises the passing of time. The immediacy and strength of presence that Jessup conveys is a testament to his skill, which privileges his subject rather than the laborious process of faithfully depicting likeness.

Jessup’s art has explored portraiture and figuration through drawing and painting, both directly from life and from photographic sources. In the case of Mostyn Bramley-Moore, Jessup worked from a photograph and zeroed in on a little known fact – that Bramley-Moore has a fascination with watches – to evoke the depth and character of this man. As a teacher, Bramley-Moore is esteemed as a well of knowledge, and Jessup takes care to represent his particularity of stance and detail of his shirt.

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Jessup has also worked on portraits of his contemporaries, mainly people that he knows, to explore the way in which males are characterised in society, in flattened and superficial stereotypes. His project aims to give insight to masculinity as having depth, but importantly, his paintings work to bring to light the particularity of his subjects, their personalities, sometimes their issues, but always with respect for individuals and their deep inner life.

Gregory Jessup graduates this year with a Bachelor of Fine Art majoring in Painting, Queensland College of Art , Brisbane. Previously, he completed a Diploma of Visual Arts, Southbank Institute of Technology, Queensland between 2008-10, and also completed the QCA Creative Short Course: Introduction to Fine Arts, Queensland College of Art, 2008. He has participated in a number of group exhibitions in Brisbane.

Naomi Evans, 2012

Jeanette LEE Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1964, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

In her 2011 autobiography, Just Kids, American musician Patti Smith recalls the inception of her debut album, Horses.

Performing the tracks on this album was a right of passage for Smith. Moments when her creative identity was established and her practice transformed.1 Like Smith’s Album, Jeanette’s Lee’s work marks a transformative moment in her practice.

On the occasion of her graduation, Lee undergoes a structured initiation into the world of the emerging arts and work toward the coalescence of her creative identity.

Coping Mechanisms 2012 is a well crafted, dream machine, powered by the energy of the participant turning its handle. The sculpture represents both the turning of the mind and the mechanics of the art institution, as Lee has encountered it.

Coping Mechanism 2012 perspex, copper, tin, wood 29 x 60 x 45cm

The horse motif, adorning the sculpture, draws parallel between the rhythmic motions of Lee’s work, and the rhythm of her creative practice. In her 2012 artist statement, Jeanette Lee explains the relationship of her sculpture to the pace of creative life, imploring audiences to ‘slow down, analyse, question, challenge, be inspired and wonder’.2 Such idealism seems out-of-step with a contemporary art institution such as the Queensland College of Art. Griffith University graduates undergo critical training and are partially educated about the challenges of sustaining an arts practice — which can be difficult at best. Instead, Lee’s attitude embodies the youthful energies of a different time, when young creatives like Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe dared to seek out a practice, which was truly about chasing a dream.

In 2012 Jeanette Lee completes a Bachelor of fine arts, with a double major in Jewellery and Small Objects, and in Sculpture and Intermedia. In 2011 Lee received the Fine Arts Convenor Award for achievement in Interdisciplinary sculpture and co-curated two exhibitions in Queensland College of Art library.

Kathryn Sawyer, 2012

1 Patti Smith, ‘Just Kids’ Bloomsbury, London, England, 2010 p. 245 – 248.

2 Jeanette Lee ‘Artist Statement’ 2012

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Brighde Lewis

The Chimera 2012

Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1992, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

sterling silver casting 6 x 7.5 x 4cm

The term, ‘chimera’, emerged in Greek mythology to describe a creature made of different animal parts. As mentioned in Homer’s Illiad, this creature was monstrous, having the body of a lion, a goat’s head emerging from its back and a tail that ended in a snake’s head. In the field of science, particularly in genetics, the term is understood as an organism that contains populations of two genetically distinct cells, and study is continuing on instances of animal, human and plant chimerism.

Since 2010, Brighde Lewis’s art practice has explored this notion as way to rethink the hierarchies of human and animal relations. She explains:

Lewis’s 2010 series of prints reveals the influence of Patricia Piccinini and the way in which medical science tries to improve on God or nature’s design. There is an ethical imperative here, which raises questions about how normalised our anthropocentric world views have become, which can have devastating impacts on animals. In Lewis’s The Chimera, a human and dog skeleton is reorganised and presented together as a new species. The relationship between dogs and humans has a long history and also proposes an interaction that has profound, emotional and positive dimensions – we hear the phrase ‘Man’s best friend’ often – a testament to this powerful link. By positing humans as just one among a range of organisms, Lewis reminds us that we are animals too. She explains:

My art practice has predominantly focused on the relationship between humans and animals, the imbalances between the rights of different species, and the potential for the creation of chimeric species. Working with my hands I create unique figures, moulding and bending […], before casting them in sterling silver to be forever frozen as examples of the beautifully tragic consequences of playing God.1

While I dream of a Utopian type of future where all creatures are considered equal and human/animal hybrid chimera are no different than the other races of our people, for we are all animals, I do not believe that we as a race are ready for the moral and ethical implications that we would face on the path to such a sciencefictional future.2 Naomi Evans, 2012 1 Brighde Lewis, artist statement, 2012 2 Brighde Lewis, email to the author, 17 November 2012

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Louis LIM Honours (Photography) b.1989, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

Anthony from the series ‘Strangely Familiar’ 2012 C-type prints, text 250 x 250cm overall

In a recently published essay titled Memento Mori: Collective memory and the wounding image (2012), Sydney based writer Naomi Riddle discusses a mingling between public and private life as a product of modern times. According to Riddle, mainstream media sources make the private lives of their users increasingly public and redefine those individuals at the centres and margins of society.1 Louis Lim’s work gently untucks a number of pernicious, marginalising attitudes driven by conventional media: that the able-bodied are to be celebrated and that the differently able-bodied are the subject of pathos, ideas reinforced through photographic images in news programs or papers.

Lim’s images show the way the camera’s reach can touch the body. As opposed to Roland Barthes idea that the image performs the function of a wound or incision,2 Lim’s camera is poised on the sensitivities of its subjects, healing by

peeling back pervasive media images of disability, which can have scarring effects. Lim gives his private and intimate experiences with Anthony over to the public realm. Lim describes the nature of this project as a shared process.

Over the past twelve months I have worked collaboratively with Jocelyn, Finbar and Anthony. The stories presented are not concerned with their physical limitations, nor are they celebrations of ‘inspirational achievements’. Instead, each collaboration seeks to share with an audience, a glimpse into the personal and intimate aspects of love, belonging and identity.3 In 2012 Louis Lim completes his Bachelor of Photography with Honours in Social Documentary Practice. Over the course of his degree, Lim has worked with a number of organisations including Lifeline, Uniting Care Community, Access Arts and Art for Spine. Recently, Lim was awarded the 2012 Queensland Festival of Photography Portrait Prize.

Kathryn Sawyer, 2012

1 Naomi Riddle, ‘Memento Mori: Collective memory and the wounding image’ Das 500, Das Platforms Emerging & Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia, 2012 pp 1 – 5, <http://www.dasplatforms.com/das_five_cent/ memento-mori-collective-memory-and-the-wounding-image/>, accessed 14/11/2012 2 Ibid.

3 Louis Lim, Artist Statement, 2012

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Dan McCabe Honours (Fine Art) b.1990, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

photographic print on synthetic fabric, pine, acrylic and oil on board 250 x 750 x 0.4cm

Dan McCabe’s work shifts perpetually back and forth between photography, sculpture, and installation. In his work, mediums are combined, confused, and crossed over to compelling effect. Strongly evident in Untitled, photography is printed on lustrous fabric then stretched over a frame like a painting. The difference is; the frame lies at an odd angle and is propped up slightly by a small but essential red block. Indeed this red block is where the work begins and ends: drawing attention to the gesture that brings a deliberately postponed and destabilised comprehension in the viewer.

By pushing and pulling, literally through medium and then with the audience’s engagement, McCabe’s physical object turns to become, to an extent, more tangible than the supposed reality depicted in the photograph before us.

This fissure allows the viewer to become aware that they are forever only engaging with the surface of an object. Or rather, with the absence of something else. In this way, McCabe opens up a space for the audience to reconsider what it actually is to see.

With such visual and material ambiguity, the audience can hardly resist but to immediately try to pin down some kind of representation. It is this very desire that exists in the tense space between the audience’s perception and what a work gives that McCabe wishes to expose and manipulate.

McCabe does this by creating a certain tension so that the work cannot be instantly taken as a precise representation. In Untitled, the strong presence of folds and creases ruptures the surface, combining signifiers for photography, painting, and sculpture.

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Untitled 2012

Dan McCabe graduate this year with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours. His work has been featured in a number of solo and group exhibitions across numerous galleries and artist-run initiatives. He was featured in last year’s GAS and held a solo show, One the edge, at A-CH Gallery.

Laura Brown, 2012

Dennis McCART

Edgeland 2 2012

Postgraduate (Fine Art) b.1957, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

mixed media, oil on canvas 76 x 50 x 6cm

Between urban and rural stands a kind of landscape quite different from either. Often vast in area, though hardly noticed.

— Marion Shoard 2002

Edgeland 2 is created in a way that echoes the dynamic overwriting, clearing and erasure that occurs within these areas. Starting with a photo documentation of a place, the image is compositionally cleaned up using digital technology, and then overpainted. The surface is then hosed back and painted over again, so that residue from each and subsequent layers occupy the canvas.

The nuanced colour gives a suffused light and density to the air in the work, offering a contemplative and melancholy view of post industrial landscapes in their beauty and treacherous relationship to land.

Dennis McCart’s series Edgelands proposes a distinct space neither urban nor rural. Often overlooked and unregulated, structures like transmission towers announce the presence of these powerful and evocative zones. In McCart’s treatment, these functional structures become monumental and totemic. He explains: My artwork investigates the post-industrial landscape through exploring these edgelands — the liminal zones at the fringes of urban habitation. The project explores whether the ostensible emptiness and ugliness in which we perceive these edgelands can be transformed to reveal a contemporary notion of the sublime; a paradoxical beauty that reveals some unpalatable truths of modern day consumer society.1

Naomi Evans, 2012

1 Dennis McCart, artist statement, 2012 2 Ibid.

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Carol McGregor Undergraduate (BoVA CAIA) b.1961, Hastings, Hawkes Bay, New Zealand Wathaurong descent, Victoria

Carol McGregor is an artist of Wathaurong descent whose current practice explores ‘estranged artifacts’, drawing on traditional Indigenous rituals and motifs and rearticulating these through new mediums.1 McGregor’s works resemble historical artifacts frequently associated in Western culture with an ‘authentic’ Aboriginal identity, however they contradict the relegation of Indigenous cultural life to the past that this classification implies. Resisting reductive, homogenising categorisations of ‘traditional’ or ‘contemporary’ Indigenous art, McGregor’s work instead brings together materials and customs, demonstrating their continued significance in the formation and expression of collective and individual identities. journey cloak consists of multiple composite construction boards covered with paint and seeds. Referencing Indigenous possum skin cloaks, a tradition ‘where panels were added on from childhood and you were most often buried in your cloak’, this work similarly functions as a record of McGregor’s experiences.2 As the artists states,‘personal patterning on each panel frames my life journey’,3 connecting her reflections on the cultural past with the particular landscapes, people and memories that

journey cloak 2012 recycled boards, acrylics, seeds 250 x 450 x 1cm

comprise the artist’s autobiography as she navigates it in the present. Making the work involved a gradual process of discovery and experimentation with recycled boards, found rather than bought commercially, of different shapes and material structures.

She states: With the symbolic re-emergence of the possum skin cloak, significant expression of Indigenous identity is revealed, potently emplacing people in their culture and on their land. Replacing the possum skins with composite construction boards and unindigenous seeds mimics the colonisation process of Australia.3 By colliding pre-colonisation tradition with materials associated with the enforced estrangement of Indigenous peoples from land and customs, McGregor’s cloak enacts a dialogue between past and present. Charting the journey of Indigenous peoples alongside her own life story, the work in these ways is ‘reigniting a resilient identity’4 through the contemporary restaging of cultural ritual. In this way, the work demonstrates how Indigenous culture is not static or extinguishable. Rather, it exists in a state of constant and dynamic flux—narratives from the past always enfolded in the making of identity in the present, and contemporary cultural expressions able to continue and expand cultural lineages.

Nicola Scott, 2012

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1 Artist statement, 2012 2 Ibid 3 Ibid 4 Correspondence with the artist 2012

Kate McKAY Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1992, Glenelg, SA, Australia

Kate McKay’s practice addresses the long-standing philosophical problem that is the location of the ‘I’. Combining abstract forms with fragmented figurative imagery, McKay’s paintings comprise an accumulation of ambiguous but related personal signifiers, producing an incomplete, shifting narrative of self.

Autobiographical narrative, whether written or visual, is a genre founded on the idea of a unified, stable subject. It has therefore existed historically as a means by which to delineate and define boundaries of experience. As art historian, Amelia Jones, states, in the ‘portrait image of any kind, a subject is apparently revealed and documented’.1 In the self-portrait, the representation of the artist’s material body has historically been central to fulfilling ‘the promise of the artwork to deliver the artist in some capacity to the viewer’.2 In this way, self-portraiture has historically functioned to both reinforce the body of the artist as a unified, bounded entity and

Remnants 2012 five panels: oil on board 40 x 29 x 2cm each

fix the self in a supposedly unmediated way through the image of this body. In contrast, McKay’s contemporary practice is driven by the idea that such a conflation of experience with the image of the body does not adequately encompass what ‘the self’ refers to: Remnants releases my own self-image from the entrapment of mimetic representation…This collation of diverse images drawn from my unconscious reveals how the self cannot be experienced as a cohesive entity, but rather through fleeting experiences. What results is an amalgamation of fragmented imagery or collected traces of selfpresence….Behind the human body’s illusion of wholeness is the immateriality of the mind, which will always resist containment and definition.3 Oscillating between readable image and tactile material, Remnants locates the self simultaneously within as well as beyond the body. The artist explains her practice is ‘determined ultimately by sensorial responses’ rather than realist bodily likeness, a process in which ‘chance and accident… are outcomes which are embraced’.4 Nicola Scott, 2012 1 Jones 2002: 951 2 Artist statement 2012 3 Artist statement 2012 4 Correspondence with the artist

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Llewellyn Millhouse Honours (Fine Art) b.1990, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

Gold Mattress 2012 readymade canvas, single foam mattress, acrylic paint

150 x 200cm

Llewellyn Millhouse’s work stems from an estrangement felt toward popular culture, which for the artist holds little real relevance or connection to his personal experiences or those of his community.

A disappointment and alienation that lies with the prevalent archetypes, mythologies, and fetishes found in our contemporary mass-marketed culture, largely standardised and normalised through the popular media we absorb on a daily basis.

Millhouse’s work asserts the continuing relevance of 20th century Marxist cultural theory in relation to the ideological landscape of our own time. Drawing on numerous critical theorists in this area, Millhouse builds on these theories with an aim to undermine the ‘regressive appeal of popular cultural texts’. Through a sustained consideration of the means of the production of meaning through particularly contemporary mediums, Millhouse navigates his materials with a directness and deliberateness.

Millhouse began studying as a painter, producing either very large or very small works that are always remarkably sculptural and seductive in their tactility.

In his Honours year he has shifted to work more in the area of sculpture, often combined with new media, as a means of perhaps even more directly interpolating the means and language found in daily life that he seeks to deconstruct.

Golden Mattress is a deeply personal object, marked literally with traces of moments of desire and decay. Seeming to both cling to a wall and float at its own volition, this irretrievably blemished object is weighed down by a golden square, making metaphorical allusion to prevailing ideologies around value and its surrounding narratives of purity and beauty. Here the human body is seen for its undeniably impure and unclean state — though rather than resisting the body in this state, the artist resists the narratives that bring us to believe we should be repulsed by it.

Llewellyn Millhouse graduates from a Bachelor of Fine Art with Honours this year. He has been shown in a number of exhibitions, including the 2011 GAS. He is also a member of Addition, a local Brisbane ARI. Laura Brown, 2012

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Mika Nakamura-Mather Honours (Fine Art) b.1963, Fukushima, Fukushima Prefecture, Japan

The world outside the palace walls 2012 oil on wood 98 x 180 x 2cm

Interested in the way cities evolve over time and the changing and static aspects of urban environments, Mika Nakamura-Mather draws from her lived experiences of Tokyo, Japan to create works that explore the relationship between the historic and contemporary cityscape. A city with a long rich history, Tokyo is steeped in both tradition and progress. Like other Old World cities its architecture and layout, have been in a state of constant flux spurred by development and modernisation.

Abstracting and overlaying maps dating from the Edo Period til the present day to reveal the variations between them, Nakamura-Mather builds up thin layers of paint representing residential, commercial, and spiritual buildings using a colour-coded visual language.

This results in a complex, multilayered representation of specific geographic regions; in The world outside the Palace Walls, the area that surrounds Tokyo Imperial Palace.

As the residence of the Japanese Emperor the Palace is one of the few unchanged aspects of inner city Tokyo; skyscrapers now stand where minka and machiya did hundreds of years ago.

In The world outside the Palace Walls, Nakamura-Mather contrasts the frenetic and perpetually rebuilt city blocks against the persistent stability and comparative calm of the Palace grounds, stating that â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;this contrast of extremes, between tradition and progress, is what gives Tokyo its true sense of placeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.1 The work further emphasises the relationship between the ancient and modern by taking the form of a rakuchu rakugai zu, a traditional Japanese folding-screen painting that persists as a contemporary mode of artistic expression.

Nakamura-Mather is an emerging, Brisbane based artist with a background in advertising, who has previously lived in Tokyo, London, and Sydney. She graduated from a Bachelor of Fine Art, majoring in painting, from the Queensland College of Art in 2011.

Lisa Bryan-Brown, 2012

1 Mika Nakamura-Mather, Artist Statement, 2012

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Sarah Oxenham Honours (Photography) b.1981, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

Sarah Oxenham’s Time Study No. 10 explores the concept of time as concurrently still and moving, with the aim of generating a slowing down of time for those who engage with the work. This slow space comes in a time of instant gratification through fast consumption and easy interaction. Oxenham is interested in the limitations that such ostensible ease brings to our ability to critically reflect on our surroundings and to simply be ‘in the moment’.

By employing moving imagery, Oxenham is able to present a different version and experience of time. We witness the passing of time with shifting light and slow movement. Here, a new space opens up to become freshly aware and simply observe time as it slowly passes. In this contemplative mode of engagement we are at once drawn into an alternate space whilst experiencing a deepened awareness of our own presence within the immediate physical space.

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The Interstitial: A Slow Space 2012 digital video, 16:9, silent, looped

Oxenham draws upon methods of abstraction, in-camera manipulations, and non-digital adjustments. In Time Study No. 10, the shadow of a circular object orbits the visual plane, though never actually in sight. This emphasises the sensation of a suspension of time and place, as the circle seems to float endlessly, weightless and slow. In this regard Oxenham’s work produces a subtle sense of magic, and indeed it is this sense that is able to hold us as we may finally experience a slowing down in our frantic lives.

Sarah Oxenham graduates this year with a Bachelor of Photography with Honours. Her work has been awarded the Queensland Centre for Photography Graduate Award and exhibited in The Open Door: Selected works for the Daryl Hewson Collection at the Redland Art Gallery. It has been featured in Eyeline and Lucida Magazine.

Laura Brown, 2012

Brett Ramsay Honours (Photography) b.1983, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

LEISUR[E]SCAPES 2012 photograph (Giclée on PhotoTex wallpaper) 280 x 420cm

Interested in the different pastimes society has developed to spend their free time, Brett Ramsay’s LEISUR[E]SCAPES investigates the cultural phenomenon of amusement parks, exploring the position they and their visitors occupy in a contemporary experience economy. The Gold Coast, a city an hours drive south of Brisbane, is home to Australia’s biggest and most well known amusement parks, with Ramsay’s LEISUR[E]SCAPES taken at Warner Bro’s Movie World. Renowned for their bustling carnivalesque atmosphere, Ramsay’s image of one of the park’s dining areas is eerily abandoned, an unfamiliar and slightly unsettling view of a scene usually understood through evidence of visitor presence.

Ramsay to investigate the relationship between the simulacrum of the parks and their unattained realism.1 The nonillusion of the vista painted on the shaped wall behind the dining area is made all the more absurd by the presence of plastic garden furniture in the foreground, and the partially obscured trees of the natural environment in the background; a nonrealistic rendered landscape just as physical and present as its authentic surroundings. Ramsay further invokes the interchange between the false, real and hyperreal aspects of the amusement park’s environment by printing the work at larger-than-life size, capturing the sense of spectacle enabled through the surrender to simulation.

In the creation of his LEISUR[E]SCAPES works Ramsay attended several Gold Coast amusement parks alone, recording his unaccompanied experiences of sites intended for socialising and interaction.

His solitary exploration of these purposebuilt environments heightened the bizarre juxtaposition between the hyperreal and the everyday elements, prompting

Ramsay is an emerging Brisbane based photographer who completed a Bachelor of Photography majoring in Photojournalism at the Queensland College of Art in 2011. His photography has been included in several group exhibitions, the publication The Argus, a short film on the 2011 Brisbane floods, and installed along Grey Street as the recipient of the 2012 Southbank Public Art Prize.

Lisa Bryan-Brown, 2012

1 Brett Ramsay, Artist Statement, 2012

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Laura Richter Honours (Fine Art) b.1990, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

Laura Richter’s practice questions how objects can connect the living and deceased through an act of interpretation in the present. Collecting found objects and images and recontextualising these through techniques such as assemblage, print media and embroidery, Richter creates miniature worlds that re-examine the notion of an ‘afterlife’. Presented in a state of literal and conceptual suspension, these works make manifest the ‘liminal space’ where life and death meet, bringing the viewer’s imagination to bear on the material traces of past lives1: My work explores how collected objects can be used to realise an afterlife existence. The grouping of disparate elements appropriates the historical collection and its attempts to dually instate control and simulate escapism from mortality. I collect objects with established histories so as to evoke memorials of those who have previously owned the materials; the act of remembering the deceased enabling a symbolic reinvigoration of past lives into a present context….prompting the audience to investigate their own mortality.2

Collecting a void 2012 assemblage-based installation 300 x 200 x 200cm

This complicated distinction between presence and absence is inherent to the museological collection, a cultural phenomena which has informed Richter’s practice to date. Serving to preserve the past, such collections nonetheless reinforce the contingency of trace as it is described by Jacques Derrida, as a ‘mark of the absence of a presence, an alwaysalready absent present’.3 Appropriating the collecting and classificatory strategies of such cultural institutions, but putting them to ambiguous ends, Remembering a Void questions how such cultural institutions inform and reflect attitudes to death. These cultural practices are mirrored in the personal rituals of individuals and families, in the accumulation of items to which memory attaches: photographs, newspaper clippings, heirlooms and everyday objects.

Stripped of the context that would usually determine how they are read, these material traces take on new meanings when transformed into artworks, their narratives written not only in the past but also in the present, as the viewer interprets them according to their own experiences and associations.

Nicola Scott, 2012 1 Artist statement 2012 2 Ibid 3 Derrida 1976: 61

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Leena Riethmuller Honours (Fine Art) b.1988, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

Leena Riethmullerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s practice questions perceptions of bodily purity and impurity, and the subjective and contextual nature of conceptions regarding their dichotomous relationship. Working across both sculpture and performance Riethmuller utilises materials collected from the human body in her works, employing notions of abjection in an exploration of the constructs that inform the limits and dominance of what are perceived as societally acceptable bodily habits.

In Big Toes (Saliva Melting) a gently whirring glass-doored freezer filled with ice toes cast from Riethmullerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own saliva glows a bright fluorescent white aside an illuminated table, a magnifying apparatus invites the viewer examine the small object melting on the tableâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s clinical metal inlay. Each day one of the many frozen saliva toes stored in the freezer is placed on the table to melt, and in this way the work engages a process of continuous destruction and renewal not unlike our own bodily processes. As each saliva toe melts it undergoes a transition

Big Toes (Saliva Melting) 2012 saliva, custom built table with aluminium inlay, magnifying lamp, stainless steel and glass freezer 125cm x 70cm

from a crisply defined dismembered body part, to a glossy shapeless lump floating in a viscous puddle, finally leaving only a dried mucosal trace, thick tidal marks dull against the shiny aluminium of the table. This transition from solid and defined to liquid and amorphous embodies the notion of formlessness, which Riethmuller finds metonymic of bodiliness and analogous to the process of defining the undefinable: that is, the very idea of the contrast between bodily purity and impurity, the limits of these two perceptions, and the relationship between them.

Riethmuller is an emerging Brisbane based artist who graduated from the Queensland College of Art with a Bachelor of Fine Art majoring in Sculpture in 2010. She has since undertaken further study as an Honours student at QCA and abroad at the Edinburgh College of Art, and has participated in several exhibitions and festivals nationally as well as being a founding member of Addition Gallery, an Artist Run Initiative based in West End, Brisbane.

Lisa Bryan-Brown, 2012

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Angelica Roache-Wilson Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1991, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

oil, paint stick, stickers and glitter on vinyl 90 x 40 x 2cm

Angelica Roache-Wilson’s Apollo is composed of oil, paint, and smiley-face stickers on glittered vinyl, stretched across a wooden frame. Depicted in a messy hand is the figure of Apollo (as suggested by the title), laid over a rough rainbow pattern. The work appears at once joyous, mocking, and playful. Recalling the culture of bodybuilding — a practice seemingly spanning the centuries — as well as the classical and current rhetoric that comes with it, Roache-Wilson’s work massages the appeal for admiration that comes with such attention and commitment to the flesh.

Roache-Wilson debases these myths by presenting them, quite literally, as such.

Rather than responding to the muscled male body with the veneration it requests, Apollo celebrates and emphasises the absurdity and humour to be found in a culture that glorifies such an exaggerated physicality. Anchoring the work throughout is the rebuking of the use of classical reference as a tool for legitimisation – indeed, it is the very tool used by RoacheWilson to expose the sheer irrationality in such an extreme manliness.

The construct of the male body is a highly ideologically charged site, within which Roache-Wilson seeks to question and comment on the gendering of reason. That is, the casual and common association of reason with men – and the consequential association of womanliness with unreason. Indeed these ideologies, as well as the myth of Apollo himself, can be traced back centuries to classical philosophy.

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Apollo 2012

Angelica Roache-Wilson gradutes with her Bachelor of Fine Arts this year. Her work has been featured in Oh Video at QCA, and in GoMA’s 2009 Creative Generations, as well as in a number of artist-run galleries across Brisbane.

Laura Brown, 2012

Nicola Scott Honours (Fine Art) b.1988, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

Figure in motion (self-portrait) 2012 acrylic paint, photocopied image on paper 25 x 45 x 1cm

Nicola Scott’s Figure in motion (selfportrait) engages with the dialogue and tradition of figurative painting and its historical impact and reflection on our ever-changing understanding of the body. Bringing this tradition forward into a contemporary context, Scott employs it’s potential for suggesting new meanings around the body. Underlying this intention is the acknowledgement of the body as figure as well as the body as projection and filter.

A photocopied image comprised of combined fragments of classical figurative painting is juxtaposed with a ‘skin’ made of paint. Seeming both real and synthetic, fixed and wet, this artificial skin acts as a representation of the body that is simultaneously image, object, and event.

Wrinkling and sagging as it slowly slides down the wall over time, the work reflects the real-life experience of the viewer as their body transforms with the force of gravity and time. In this sense, Figure in motion brings about the possibility for a fluid exchange in which the artwork and the live body continually touch and transform each other.

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This temporal transformation also occurs in the realm of reference to history and the past. As the skin seems to morph with the passing of time, so too does our relationship and understanding of the figure. These materials and references to classical painting bear the traces of change over time, and we as the viewer, and live body, bear the traces of their change upon us. This occurs by way of cultural memory, psychological association, and a more direct physical relationship. Through an unconventional application of paint and the slippery location of the body as neither strictly within the boundary of the skin or the frame of a painting, the work makes us freshly aware of these elements that affect and transform us in our perpetual motion.

Nicola Scott completes her Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours this year. Her work has been shown in numerous Brisbane galleries. She has been awarded the Lord Mayor’s Creative Cities Initiative MicroGrant, and has worked as an assistant to artist Gonkar Gyatso.

Laura Brown, 2012

Kylie Spear Honours (Fine Art) b.1986, Macksville, NSW, Australia

from the series The Space Between Thoughts 2012

Drawing 2 (white sheet) Drawing 5 (thrown chalk) Drawing 6 (hand) digital video, 16:9, silent, looped Drawing 7 2012 binaural sound, looped

Kylie Spear is a contemporary artist whose practice is concerned with expanded drawing. Spear’s work seeks to broaden how the medium of drawing can be defined through a reconsideration of its traditional components, namely the point, line and plane. She approaches the drawn line from a philosophical foundation, viewing it as a conceptual tool of both connection and division.

In the series, The Space Between Thoughts, which consists of the installation of four separate drawings, Spear considers ways in which expanded drawings can communicate gesture. Her works use time-based media, specifically video and audio, to preserve and translate linear bodily movement. This translation of gesture is communicated paradoxically through a visual absence or concealment of the body. Drawing 5 consists of documentation of a gestural action, in which Spear throws chalk against a dark backdrop. Over the duration of the video, residual points and marks build up on the surface of the screen only to be erased once the video restarts its loop.

These actions are echoed in Drawing 7, a sound work that uses binaural technology

to recreate a spatial experience of the drawing. In this work, sounds of chalk colliding with the wall and floor, as well as subtle shuffling of feet and breathing act as evidence of the artist’s gestural movements and are experienced as an invisible performance over the course of the soundtrack. The two smaller works, Drawing 2 and Drawing 6, negotiate gestural traces in a more direct sense, as we observe the dynamic maneuvering of a white sheet or the subtle movements of a hand.

Formally, Spear’s works retain a sense of elegance and restraint, which is seen in her limitation of her drawings to only black and white. She presents each video on a portrait screen, and has positioned them in such a way as to encourage a spatial investigation of these expanded drawings.

As the audience walks through the space, various dynamic connections between the drawings are discovered.

Kylie Spear graduates this year with her Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours. Her work was shown in this year’s BARI Festival and the 2011 GAS. She was a finalist in the 2011 Marie Ellis OAM Prize for Drawing.

Laura Brown, 2012

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Tyza Stewart Honours (Fine Art) b.1990, Moura, QLD, Australia

Tyza Stewart’s paintings and collages imagine potential gender-related manipulations of the body. The works serve as self-portraits through a kind of self-mutilation, enabling Stewart to disrupt and rearrange the control over an interpretation of gender through the body. Stewart embraces and emphasises the split in perception between how a person is seen and how they desire to be seen by others, as well as how they perceive themselves. In doing so, Stewart is able to engage and reject popular understandings of transsexual identity and experience.

Titled Regulatory Body, Stewart’s work presents figures that have undergone a certain painterly operation in which a characteristically male body is joined with the artist’s face, which is typically perceived as feminine. These figures can be read as transsexual, as typically understood genders combine and merge to form a new body.

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Regulatory Body 2012 oil on board, pencil on paper, pen and tape on digital print 50 x 120 x 3cm

Stewart’s figures appear suspended in space on the page, and as such suspend the viewer’s perception to introduce a different perspective. Layering imagery through collage and paint, the work relocates these supposedly incoherent facets. Further, by drawing on childhood photographs and portraits, Stewart’s work also appears suspended in time. By producing these ambiguously sexed selfportraits, Stewart seeks to emphasise the seemingly incoherent aspects of identity, with a hope to foster new understandings of gender that allow people to live outside of the strong binary gender classifications that persist today.

Tyza Stewart graduates this year with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours.

Stewart’s work has appeared in many exhibitions across Australia, including: the Churchie Prize 2011, the GAS 2011, and Edition 3 at Addition Artist-Run Initiative.

Laura Brown, 2012

Malinda Swain Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1981, Gold Coast, QLD, Australia

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Blank 2012 Digitally printed book, edition of 5 21 x 21 x 1cm

Malinda Swainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s artist book Blank compiles photographs of empty and abandoned signs and billboards, taken on a recent trip to the United States of America. Poignant symbols of urban and rural decay, this en masse presentation of found blank signs emphasises the economic downturn currently affecting many American communities. However, aside from providing an astute social commentary, Swainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s photographs are primarily concerned with exploring the use of both visual and written language, analysing the systems that facilitate communication and the means by which these occur.

these structures, their encountered form contradicting their implied purpose. Even without messages, each sign is unique; some are austere and unremarkable but for their height, while others are almost flamboyant in their use of arrows, colours and lights. Despite their individual differences, the reiterative quality of their sequential presentation renders them at once generic and varietal. In Blank Swain exposes the relationship between spectacle and banality, both complicating and undermining the processes that underlie language, meaning generation and sign translation.

Reflexively utilising the absence of communication to draw attention to the act of it, the blankness of the signs serves to heighten the viewersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; awareness of the environment that surrounds them.

Positioning these quintessential devices of announcement and promotion as simultaneously monumental and derelict Swain activates the absurd nature of

Swain is an emerging Brisbane based artist with a professional background in film and television. Working across mediums of photography, installation, video, and performance, Swain is graduating in 2012 from the Queensland College of Art with a Bachelor of Fine Art majoring in Sculpture.

Lisa Bryan-Brown, 2012

Athena THEBUS Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1990, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

Athena Thebus’s work orbits a central idea that is really best described by the artist herself as ‘LA Dreamz’. The use of ‘z’ instead of the correctly spelled ‘s’ is significant in understanding Thebus’s approach to this anchor. A certain attitude and humour threads throughout her work, affected

by Internet culture and its perpetual estimation of the manufacturing of celebrity icons (largely originating in LA) through contemporary modes like reality television.

Across four screens we witness the artist in various stages of zoning in and out of a kind of personal meditation and ritual.

Stood atop a small hill at night beneath a busy concrete underpass, notions of transportation pervade both literally and metaphorically; physically and metaphysically. In this private ceremony does Thebus wish to transport herself or her audience to the dreamland? Does she perform for the camera or do we look on as voyeurs? It seems that both float unbound, perhaps co-conspiratorally, in the space between.

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Graduate Art Show

Roadside Sharman 2012 4 channel digital video, 16:9, silent, 10 minutes, looped

Tokens of pseudo-spirituality are found in the floating grey outfit; a slow seemingly loosely choreographed deliberate movement; the flickering light. Thebus is ‘trying to connect to the earth with Nike sneakers on my feet’, revealing the potential in a culture run on manufactured identity. Rather than critical of such a system, Thebus nurtures the opportunity for the artist-persona to be molded to perfection (rather than relying tired notions of God-given talent). In the 21st century anyone can be a star with the right combination of style and precision.

Indeed an obsession is not something to be taken lightly.

Athena Thebus will this year complete her Bachelor of Fine Art. She has been exhibited in a number of shows, including most recently Edition 3 at Addition Gallery and Oh! Video at the Griffith University Art Gallery. In 2013 she will finally make her pilgrimage to LA. Laura Brown, 2012

Eileen XIE Undergraduate (Fine Art) b.1991, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

Blue Constellations #2 – 4 2012 Constellation #5 – 8 2012 silver, gemstones, glass, thread, paint, twigs dimensions variable

Eileen Xie’s contemporary jewellery collections Blue Constellations (#2 – 4) and Constellation (#5 – 8) question the hierarchical relationship between different materials, and their subsequent characterisation as either precious or nonprecious. Her range of pendants, brooches and rings combine materials traditionally utilised in fine jewellery, primarily silver and gemstones, with materials typically associated with cheap costume jewellery, like glass faux-stones and thread, as well as with materials not generally used in jewellery at all, specifically twigs and acrylic paint. Each piece a functional object of adornment, Xie’s constellationlike silver structures house this varied array of materials in complex interconnected webs that deny the privilege of any one aspect, rather establishing each as equal parts of a balanced whole.

The contrast between the rough, dusty twigs and the polished, set cabochons serves to question assumptions about rarity and permanence, and the ingrained associations of these qualities with value and prestige. Xie further complicates

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the perceived relationships within this material hierarchy through the application of acrylic paint to the precious metal, in some pieces entirely removing silver as a visual cue that implies worth. In this way, the wearable nature of Xie’s pieces is highly relevant to their engagement with notions of preciousness, as jewellery predominantly functions as a signifier of the status and wealth of the wearer. In the creation of jewellery that disregards accepted preconceptions of the monetary worth of its material components, Xie positions craftsmanship and process as the primary arbiters of value.

Xie is an emerging Brisbane based artist and contemporary jeweller graduating from the Queensland College of Art with a Bachelor of Fine Art majoring in Jewellery and Small Objects. Her graduate body of work has received both the Australian Jewellers Supplies award for Innovative Use of Technique, and the Design Institute of Australia Professional Encouragement award.

Lisa Bryan-Brown, 2012