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Deakin University Contemporary Small Sculpture Award 2019

When: 29 May–12 July 2019
Tuesday to Friday 10am–4pm, Open only during exhibitions
Where: Deakin University Art Gallery, Melbourne Burwood Campus
Building FA, 221 Burwood Hwy, Burwood, VIC 3125

In its tenth anniversary year this annual acquisitive award and exhibition is organised by the Art Collection and Galleries Unit displaying the work of the 2019 finalists.

Image: VIPOO SRIVILASA Protection 2018, 66
 x 37
 x 23 cm, ceramic, acrylic paint, glaze ceramic flowers and mix media.

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The Kedumba Drawing Collection was started in 1990 and embodies and reflects all the elements of outstanding drawing created in Australia over more than 50 years and has acquired almost two hundred drawings.

Peta Minnici subject of her work depicts Minnici almost as a voyeur peering from outside through glass windows of Bundanon Homestead during my recent residency.
Capturing both inside and surrounding landscape in one frame, as a play on reflections, allows the internal foyer and staircase to fuse seamlessly with the mountains and trees.

Minnici's work 'Looking In, Seeing Out - Bundanon' has been acquired into this collection.

IMAGE:

Peta Minnici

Looking in, Seeing out – Bundanon 2018

ink on paper

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In 2015 Owen Craven wrote about Dan Kyle, his studio and life in the bush near the Blue Mountains —

Soon after graduating from the National Art School, Dan Kyle set up home deep within the Australian bush at the foot of the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. His paintings are translations of what he sees – the beauty, the unique forms, the colours – but also his way of reducing the density of the bush to a more approachable landscape for him to keep exploring. Back in Issue 32, 2015, Artist Profile chatted to Dan about the formal and conceptual nuances of his landscapes.

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Louise Martin-Chew writes about Sally Nangala Mulda's life and painting for Art/Edit magazine. She says:

'WHAT IS MOST DISTINCTIVE about the paintings of Sally M. Nangala Mulda is that they tell us just how it is to live in Abbott’s Town Camp, not far from the mostly dry Todd River bed in Alice Springs (Mparntwe). Many of the paintings produced by Indigenous artists working out of the region use colour and pattern to evoke the romance of their connections to Country. However, Sally’s approach delivers the gritty reality of the place in which she lives, the interactions between police and Aboriginal people, the supermarket as the source of “a feed”, the tension around alcohol consumption and people sleeping rough, all set amongst saltbush, waterholes, homes and shops.'

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On Sally Nangala Mulda's work for 'The National' at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Snack Syndicate for Running Dog writes:

'Sally Mulda’s narrative style mimics the pedantic, forensic language of the state while at the same time showing that such language tends to obfuscate its subjects—people who live and die. Mulda’s frank descriptions of the Town Camp index the countless different ways that black life is both constrained by, and always in excess of, white law.

Together, the paintings in the exhibition are quietly unsettling, staging a series of encounters that produce both minor affects (annoyance, confusion, amusement, affection) and their major implications. Engaging with the paintings, we feel the enormity of living under occupation, as well as the conviction that such enormity can never be total.'

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Curator Isobel Parker Philip talks about Sally Mulda's work for 'The National' at the Art Gallery of New South Wales:

'Sally Nangala Mulda is an artist who lives in Abbott's Town Camp in Alice Springs in the Northern Territory.

She paints scenes from her daily life. She paints people having breakfast. She paints going to the football. She paints people going to sleep. She also paints the routine and intrusive presence of the police amongst the indigenous communities in the Northern Territory.

All of these scenes are painted with the same frank and stark honesty. There is a normalisation of the police presence amongst the Indigenous community that is shocking to see at first and is amplified by the regularity with which Sally paints it and that we see it again and again across the installation.

This reminds us about what life looks like for a huge portion of our Indigenous people. In this work we see the lived effects of the 2007 Northern Territory intervention. It's a brutal reminder about what reality can really look like.

Sally paints her figurative scenes and then applies text on top of them to tether each work to a particular time and place. These are diaristic documents. They're paintings that do the job of photographs or snapshots. There's a kind of direct relationship between these scenes and the real world. We read them as snapshots. We read them as kind of episodes from life as it is lived.'

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Christopher Zanko’s depictions of classic Australian suburbia and architecture – created through carving and painting – feel happy and nostalgic, as though cementing a time in local history, while also celebrating the beauty of an everyday normal.

“These days a lot of homes and buildings are being knocked down, so the area is not going to look like this for much longer,” Chris says. “It's great to be able to capture these beautiful buildings while they’re still here.”

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Congratulations to Peta Minnici who is a finalist for the 2019 Dobell Drawing Award for her work 'Dusk Hill End'.

The Dobell Drawing Prize was originally held annually at the Art Gallery of NSW, initiated by the Gallery and the Trustees of the Sir William Dobell Art Foundation. The Prize aims to encourage excellence in drawing and draughtsmanship among Australian Artists.

The subject depicted in my work illustrate an internal thought process that is based on personal memory and focuses on an implied journey through time, i.e. Drawing at Hill End in the late afternoon . Although the drawing is based on a photograph, my aim was to deconstruct the representation portrayed, into vertical lines of tone, turning the photographic image into a series of atmospheric sensations which are reminiscent of a memory. I transcribe the image onto paper with a graphite pencil, enlarging the scale of the image then apply the tonal variations through a hatching technique of small vertical lines with black pen. My technique creates a blurring of focus and emphasises the tonal structure of each image through the loss of edges. In this work the drawn mark evokes the fragility of remembering, as the mark making creates a movement causing it to move from a past to a present. The drawn line also relates to the concept of memory consisting of a mass of marks that are designated into what we have seen, heard and felt.

- Peta Minnici, 2019

IMAGE:

Peta Minnici

Dusk Hill End 2017

pen on paper

107 x 78 cm

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Tara Marynowsky has been glowingly reviewed in Broadsheet as one of Five artists to watch, in wake of her exhibit at 'The National':

There are 65 artists involved in The National 2019. Tara Marynowsky is one to seek out:

Tara Marynowsky: the interventionist

'At a glance: A Sydney-based artist who doesn’t start with a blank canvas but builds on existing images, interacting with and subverting the past. She has appeared in exhibitions here and overseas.

What she’s known for: Her watercolour and gouache “interventions” on vintage postcards, which merge colour and surrealism with sepia-tinted images of young women. Her 2018 exhibition at Brisbane’s Edwina Corlette Gallery, Balancing Actress, featured vintage images of nude dancing “girls” with their faces obscured, bathed in pastel textures.

For The National: Her work starts with a more recent jumping-off point, and an angrier, more overtly political tone. For her piece, Coming Attractions, Marynowsky found 35-millimetre reels of ’90s Hollywood film trailers, including Pretty Woman, Shakespeare in Love, Species and Indecent Proposal, and took to the negatives with a knife, scratching each frame. It’s a labour-intensive and imprecise process. When the film is scanned and played back the result is a series of frenzied animations. Julia Roberts’s face is removed, making her almost monstrous. Gwyneth Paltrow is given a Medusa-like head of snakes. The dodgy gender politics of each film is subverted by force.

- Will Cox, Broadsheet

IMAGE:

Tara Marynowsky

Pretty Woman 2019

hand scratched 35mm film trailer

dimensions variable

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