John Fries Award 2017

John Fries Award 2017

The 8th John Fries Award is an initiative of

Presenting Partner

Foreword

Copyright Agency | Viscopy

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Exhibition open 11 August 2 September 2017 johnfriesaward.com

From twisted steel and timber to gold-piqued crowns, tactile textures to iconic outback imagery and much more, the John Fries Award is back and the art is mind-bending.

Our 12 finalists are alive with the energy of creativity. The works, which reflect personality and place will provoke and inspire viewers of the John Fries Award exhibition at the UNSW Galleries, from 11 August to 2 September.

The John Fries Award, which came about after the tragic loss of Viscopy director and honorary treasurer John Fries, has become an award and exhibition of distinction for emerging artists, with many of its finalists continuing to generate tremendous excitement as they build and develop their careers – moving from emerging to established.

A necessary backbone of any artists’ success is the ability to be able to sell their work and to retain control over future reproductions of the work through copyright.

We’re here to support artists.

When a work is reproduced in exhibition catalogues for instance, or on merchandise or in fashion, our organisation negotiates the licensing arrangement between the artist and the client. We make sure a fair payment is made and the artists’ work is reproduced respectfully under an agreement.

Our Cultural Fund supports visual artists too, through both grants to individual artists and arts organisations.

Finally, Australia’s forwardthinking resale royalty scheme is another way that artists earn revenue from their work throughout their careers. Instituted in 2010, the scheme is a great success story, delivering more than $5.2m to about 1440 Australian artists from resales of their work.

I extend my gratitude and thanks to this year’s John Fries Award curator Consuelo Cavaniglia, the judges Melanie Oliver, Clothilde Bullen, Fiona Lowry and Kath Fries, the John Fries Award team members Tristan Chant and Jenelle Dellar, and our fantastic event partner UNSW Galleries.

I’m sure this year’s exhibition will delight and thrill you as much as it did me. Enjoy.

— Adam Suckling CEO Copyright Agency | Viscopy

Foreword

Introduction

UNSW Galleries

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In Australia and internationally, art awards are important indicators of art’s capacity to speak to the times and engage audiences in ideas and issues that resonate beyond the gallery walls.

Earlier this year, British artist John Akomfrah, whose work was shown at UNSW Galleries concurrently with the 2016 John Fries Award, won the prestigious Artes Mundi Award, in an acknowledgement that the artist’s practice embodies current humanist themes of great relevance to us all.

The year before, a group of designers and architects known as Assemble won the Turner Prize in England, awarded annually to artists under the age of 40. In selecting Assemble’s work as the winning entry for 2015, the Turner judges confirmed the important role of cross-disciplinary practice in a 21st century defined by a breaking down of boundaries between art, architecture and social activism.

Increasingly, young creatives like Assemble are leading cultural change across the world, including rapidly changing perceptions of art’s place in society. As the 2017 John Fries Award reflects, art is no longer an add-on to a comfortable bourgeois life, but crucial to how society understands and defines itself in times of social and political uncertainty.

The John Fries Award is one of Australia’s leading art awards for early career artists, and unique in its inclusion of New Zealand artists.

The Award has been running for eight years: winners of the John Fries Award since UNSW Galleries became an exhibiting partner four years ago are Bridie Lunney (2014), Ben Ward (2015) and Eric Demetriou (2016). All artists, together with their exhibiting cohorts of each year, have since confirmed their place in Australian art as emerging artists of substance and notability.

John Fries Award 2017

UNSW is pleased and proud to play a part in supporting the practice of early career artists, which includes providing a platform for the John Fries Award. This continued partnership reflects both Copyright Agency | Viscopy and UNSW Art & Design’s desire to build a professional and resilient creative economy in Australia by recognising outstanding talent in the emerging arts sector.

The 2017 Award has been ably curated by Consuelo Cavaniglia, to whom UNSW Galleries is grateful for her insight, diligence and commitment to creating a meaningful and thoroughly engaging exhibition that brings to UNSW Galleries work by some of the brightest new artists from across Australia and New Zealand.

We are also tremendously grateful to Tristan Chant who manages the Award each year, and last but not least to Kath Fries and her family for their dedication to and ongoing support for this important Award.

— Dr Felicity Fenner Director UNSW Galleries

The John Fries Award was established in 2010 in memory of my father, John Fries (1943–2009), who was a director and honorary treasurer on the Viscopy board.

Although not an artist himself, John supported the arts and valued their contribution to society. He understood the importance of artists being acknowledged and fairly remunerated for their work. As an accountant, John knew that even artists have bills to pay. Through his work with Viscopy, John could see the pragmatic importance that copyright can play in balancing creative output with economic income. He believed that the passion and curiosity that drives art practice should be supported and rewarded.

John’s realistic and forwardthinking attitude actively touched the lives of many around him through his practical and benevolent support of his close and extended family, as well as his friends, colleagues and community; assisting them to develop their skills, explore opportunities and pursue their dreams. Fondly remembered by many, John’s embrace of life and empathetic generosity is warmly commemorated by this annual award.

When I decided to pursue a career as an artist, my father supported me on the condition that I gain a university degree; his appreciation of culture was underpinned by his belief in education. John studied accountancy at the University of New South Wales and it was to the same institution that founded my art practice. I completed my Bachelor of Fine Art with Honours there in 2001, so it has felt like a fitting return that Viscopy has partnered with UNSW Art and Design Galleries presenting the John Fries Award since 2014.

The importance of education institutions and organisations, like Viscopy and Copyright Agency,

within the meshwork of our creative and cultural communities should not be overlooked. No artist really works alone; there are always partnerships, collaborations and relationships forming and changing, connecting artists and other creators, integrating their practices into wider fields of education, research, cultural and social practices, as well as public engagement. This generative approach to art practice is diversely reflected by each of the twelve finalists in the 2017 John Fries Award. Congratulations to them all and I wish them all well with their artistic careers.

— Kath Fries Artist and John Fries Award Committee Chair

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Curatorial Statement

John Fries Award 2017

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Fiction, narrative, re-telling, re-enacting, documenting, performing, re-animating, re-embodying, interpreting, re-presenting are the focus, approach, tactics and methodologies evident in the practice of the twelve artists selected for the 2017 John Fries Award. It’s tempting to see the work by these artists as portraying a cross section of current contemporary art practice, however the open nature of the Award means that the net is cast much more loosely than a survey would require. It’s inevitable though that connections are made across the works presented in this exhibition, gaining a sense of how the twelve practices are situated.

What is not immediately evident, but surfaces when looking closely at each of the artists’ biographies and backgrounds is their connection to the communities and spaces they operate within. Either as part of their practice or outside of their studio work, they are extraordinarily engaged, undertaking activities that are both reflective and generative. Between them they manage artist studios, artist run spaces, work as directors and staff members of art centres and community centres, are founders of cultural clubs, independent publishers, film and text editors, contributors to publications, researchers, writers, lecturers.

They work collaboratively, make connections across disciplines, and take up roles within their communities, from dancers of ceremony to facilitators, mentors and enablers.

Each of these practitioners are heavily invested in the work of other artists and contribute to their practices by 7

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writing about their work, assisting in its production, featuring or performing in it, documenting it and installing it. This group of artists is active, dedicated and highly dynamic.

Collectively, they present a snapshot of a mode of operating that takes artistic practice beyond the studio and gallery space, and considers the investment in practice – in terms of what it requires and what the returns are – in a more collective manner, extending the definition of what it means to work in a cultural context and also what it means to be part of a community.

Perhaps it’s not surprising then that across the field, there is great clarity in how these early career artists position and locate their practices. In relation to an art historical context, a specific cultural, sociopolitical, familial or close community context, there is a keen understanding of how their works are informed by, slot into, react to and extend from a lineage. From the preoccupation with modernism found in the work of Amanda Williams, Ben Leslie and Kuba Dorabialski, to the engagement with landscape seen in the work of Bridget Reweti, Kathy Ramsey and Barayuwa Munuŋgurr, all twelve artists are aware of how they contribute to a conversation that started before them and will continue on after them.

In their practices we see a retracing of the steps of their predecessors, but a retracing directed and effected by the present condition. Through their work they reflect and comment on what it means to be positioned where they are at this point in time. In his work, Ben Leslie revisits the tropes of modernism and through it critically assesses the modernist frame of artistic practice in connection to the state of studio production today. His sculptures dwell on the undeniable appeal of modernist aesthetics, but his work does not glorify either the forms, or the masculinist attitudes that

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defined a period of art production. There are hints of defiance in the work, as in the sculptures in this exhibition titled Mum and Dad (both 2017) whose anthropomorphism tests the call to purity of form that eliminated personification in the modernist object.

These two works, and his practice more broadly, have a strain of humour running through them that makes light of the positioning of his predecessors, and ultimately also his own. This attitude is not derisive or one of parody or antagonism, neither is it driven by the impetus of deconstruction evident in revisionist practices of the ’80s and ’90s. It identifies with a description by curator Massimiliano Gioni of contemporary practices concerned with Massimiliano Gioni.

‘Ask the Dust’ in Richard Flood, the legacy of modernism that ‘open up new paths Unmonumental. London: and possibilities. It is about viewing history not as Phaidon in association with New Museum, (2007): 74. a monolith but as a field open to interpretation.’1 It is an attitude evident in each of the artists in this year’s Award, that gives them permission to be both ironic and earnest. The engagement with history is a layered one, for Ben it allows a return to a modernist attitude to materials, making, and the studio, while re-framing this through the parameters of a contemporary practice. This spirit of collaboration with history, of borrowing, re-framing and re-interpreting, is present in all twelve practices.

A layered engagement with history is evident in the work of Anwar Young. Like Ben, his practice is also grounded in the language of materials and making and is deeply connected to history, one that extends beyond what comparatively can be seen as the blink of an eye of modernism.

Anwar engages with traditional men’s punu (wood) crafting mediums. Taught by his grandfathers Willy Kaika Burton and Frank Young, he is part of a young generation of men 9

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in Amata Community, learning from elders to handcraft traditional kulata (spears). Embedded in the making of kulata is not only craftsmanship but the connected cultural knowledge. Making kulata is the basis of Kulata Tjuta (many spears), an important ongoing cultural maintenance project that shares the skill of spear making across generations.

Anwar carries the tradition of kulata making forward and embeds this tradition in the experimental work he has been developing using photography, film and installation.

In the Award exhibition Anwar’s work is a line of kulata. This fence-like installation speaks of lines of definition, of access and prohibition, of belonging and trespassing, of vigil and warning, protection and containment. He brings a traditional element to speak of his observations on country and culture and how he is positioned in relation to both within a contemporary context.

Kathy Ramsey and Claudia Nicholson’s works presented in this exhibition share a similar foundation to Anwar, one that is built on tradition and history and that values skill and technique in production. Kathy follows a lineage of important artists – her mother Mona Ramsey, father Rammey Ramsey and grandfather Timmy Timms. Claudia follows the folkloric practice belonging to her Colombian heritage. Kathy, is a Gija artist based in Warmun in the East Kimberley region of Western Australia, and paints her ancestral country around Bow River, incorporating more recent stories of station life. As a new generation of artists, she extends the distinctive use of ochre of Warmun painters, into new techniques that test different approaches to surface, and innovative composition.

Claudia’s work is intricate and detailed, requiring great skill and patience. The alfombras de aserrín she has been

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making recently, and seen in this exhibition, are highly coloured, layered sawdust ‘carpets’, produced throughout Central and South America at times of ritual and celebration.

Claudia’s process is almost a reverse of Kathy’s, who comes to painting from a connection to country, she instead re-enacts the ritual of making to identify her culture. Distanced through adoption and relocation to Australia, her heritage is one of discovery and reclaiming. Claudia brings a complex mix of symbols to the alfombras, straying from traditional Toby Chapman.

‘Claudia Nicholson’, iconography to represent the contemporary culture The National New Australian Art, she inhabits, embedding imagery from logos of exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of counterfeit labels and quotations from popular New South Wales, Carriageworks, Museum culture, ‘a palette across which marginalised and of Contemporary Art Australia (2017): conflicting narratives coexist’2. These incredibly 116–117 intricate works are then swept away in an instant - the patterns dissolving into piles of sawdust - speaking to the layers of identity, and questioning authenticity through ephemerality.

In his work, Kuba Dorabialski similarly explores cultural narratives, however these narratives are located in the migrant experience – of a history that is known but not experienced, one that is remembered, yet never lived. Like a longing for the other you that travelled a different Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths, road in Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths 3, staying in Editorial Sur, (1941). the country of origin, living another possible life. This splitting is evident in the complex layers of narrative in Kuba’s work.

Exploring the tradition of the documentary-style ‘essay film’, Kuba’s films are set in real locations – always beautifully shot and reliant on the ordered aesthetic of modernist architecture.

The narratives however are uncertain, at times surreal.

Politically orientated, as is often the case, the work for this exhibition is based on the trials of satirical writers Sinyavsky and Daniel in late ’60s Khrushchev Russia. The factual 11

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underpinning is masked through the layers of storytelling techniques themselves, from the Sprechgesang “opera” style, to the mock language of narration that Kuba describes as a ‘pan-Slavic quasi-language that is part Russian, part Polish, part Serbo-Croat, and part Bulgarian’.

The re-interpretation, re-telling, re-enacting in Kuba’s work functions on many levels to test sincerity and question authenticity. The very act of narrating is complex, and interpretation and translation lead meaning and fact to both marvellously and problematically unfixed ends. This is the territory Fayen d’Evie and Ella Sutherland find themselves in – the open ground of language. For Ella the language of graphic design, for Fayen language in almost every interpretation of speech – from spoken to sung, embodied to written.

Ella researches the communicative language found in the built and print environment - text, line, sign, shape investigating systems of reading and navigation. She calls into question the underlying structure that determines the rationale for these systems. I’m drawn to thinking of her process as one of ‘unflattening’, to use a software term, pulling the layers apart, to imagine a more open language system. The work in this exhibition is based on the research of the ‘queer’ section in various university libraries. Ella extracted the typography from the spines of books, without rearranging them, presenting these as printed works that lay bare the banality and shortcomings of this categorisation. And again, questioning the underlying structure that restricts language to describe ‘queer’ as an easily contained category that complex identities resist being reduced to.

Fayen also calls to task the structures that bind language and communication systems. She looks to find elasticity in communication, and focusing on the gallery and museum, identifies infrastructural norms that limit the potential

for exchange. In response to a degenerative eye condition Fayen has increasingly been considering blindness as a generative principle that radically shifts her position within the parameters of visual art. Without the reliance on vision, the terrain for communicating is forced to become more inventive.

In her work, objects are scripts for a choreography of reading, experienced through touch, audio-description and complex embodiment. Reading becomes a collaborative act, where between seeing and vision-impaired person, the role of reader is exchanged, making the potential for comprehension of the object infinitely more complex. Fayen’s performative work centres around the exchange, the conversation, the choreography of gesture and sound, that constitutes the experience of an object. Through this process, language becomes fluid and communication is possible through unrestricted means.

Inscribed on the body, the Samoan female tattoo, the malu, is a text that is culturally coded. While the malu is understood as an inscription reserved for the private rather than public domain, Angela Tiatia explains a more composite history, one that sees religion and colonisation contributing over time, to the concealment of these inscriptions, quoting modesty and sacredness. Reclaiming a history that predates Christianity in Samoa and the ownership to her own body, in Dark Light (2017), the artist reveals her malu surrounded by rich foliage. The site however can still be read as private, a small, secluded clearing that denotes a tended if not domestic setting. And Angela’s gaze, back towards the viewer, is one that is not easily understood. It is a complex glance that reaches across a series of interrelated histories. Like a medieval painting, replete with symbology, Angela’s work in the exhibition is layered with connections to histories tied to 13

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colonisation, the exoticisation of the Pacific Islander body, the history of the female nude and feminist tactics of reclaiming ownership of their bodies.

Barayuwa Munu gurr describes a land on which history is inscribed. The inscriptions, as with those on Angela’s body, are culturally specific and constituted by symbols that can be read by those who have the language. The body is inscribed on the land and the land is inscribed on the body. Barayuwa’s work in the exhibition tells many stories. Two finely carved sets of wooden sculptures are Napunda - the storm front, the lightning, the boomerang-shaped clapsticks, the message; and Ŋaraka, the bones of the whale under the sea in his mother’s Yirritja moiety Munyuku clan country Yarrinya. Ŋaraka is referred to as ‘the bone of the land’. Will Stubbs explains: ‘Memorial poles are used to return the bones of a person to the land, as it is conceived that this is where they originate from. The land would be less complete if the bones were disposed of any other way. Scientists can now find out where ancient, or indeed any people, grew up and lived by the chemical signatures left in Will Stubbs, Coordinator, their bones and teeth. This would not surprise Yolŋu.

Buku-Larrnggay The mineral composition of the land where you grew Mulka Centre, email conversation, 22 June, up becomes a part of your physical identity’.4 (2017).

Bridget Reweti’s work looks at the connection with the land through representations of landscape. Informed by knowledge of Maˉori names and narratives, she explores the relationship through the experience of the everyday. In contrast to Barayuwa’s almost visceral connection to the land, Bridget’s attitude could be described as detached. Her video and photography document actions that are banal and mundane, performed across breathtaking landscapes. Her work has a sense of humour that echoes that of Ben Leslie, but again as in his case, it is not derisive. Carried out in real time, her videos are

disarmingly uneventful, breaking the spell of the sublime to show the landscape as it is experienced and lived, challenging colonial positioning. The work in the exhibition, Tauutuutu (2016), consists of a series of vignettes showing the artist engaged one-to-one, in a process of exchange with other people.

Tauutuutu is a term for reciprocity and here the landscape is the background to these exchanges. The work is layered, and speaks as much to a colonial history where the terms of exchange were wildly unbalanced (with dire consequences), as to the portrayal of multiple contemporary Indigenous realities.

Film and performance are the means through which Tina Havelock Stevens experiences landscapes. Not dissimilar to Bridget, her work often finds its setting in the everyday, but far from being mundane and uneventful, the moments that Tina frames are extraordinary. Her works are not narrative in nature, they consist of isolated moments that connect to the surreal quality in Kuba’s work, though Tina goes further into the fantastical, as in a scene from a Federico Fellini movie. Her encounters with the landscape are generally staged but the relationship between action and set is complex as the landscape is more than a frame but an entity, a site of energy that Tina responds to through performance. The landscape is almost a collaborator and there is a symbiosis between the action and space it is carried out in. She dwells on sites that are abandoned, decaying, deserted and vacant, to speak of survival and fragility. An enduring project sees her incarnation as White Drummer, here she locates a full rock ’n’ roll drum kit in various sites that she responds to in often explosive and high energy durational performances.

The wonder in the work is in the encounter between the performance and the site.

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In the work of Amanda Williams, the encounter is explored in the superimposition of images - the archetypal site of the natural architecture of the cave in connection to the abstract space of an undefined geometric form. In past works Amanda has referred to the archetypal forms of the spaces of Le Corbusier’s architecture in particular, and modernist architecture more broadly. In the work presented in this exhibition she explores this encounter in a large scale installation.

The connection established between the two images is a formal one but the exchange is fluid. These are fleeting images, as the very act of recording that is associated with photography is called into question, as Amanda interferes with the technical processes that give the photographic image its relative fixity. In her work, exposure to light continues to effect the photograph’s surface so the image rather than fixing a representation, is in constant state of becoming. The image is not an object but an action – not a noun but a verb. The images are not only of unknowable spaces, but are themselves unknowable in their constant state of flux.

The space of the encounter and exchange is one that emerges over and again across the work of the twelve artists in this year’s John Fries Award exhibition. Poet Albert Albert Wendt, quoted by Wendt states, ‘important to the Samoan view of Penny Webb, in ‘Jacob reality is the concept of Vaˉ … not empty space, not Tolo curates works of Pacific Island artists in space that separates, but space that relates … the Tino i le Va’, The Sydney Morning Herald, August space that is context, giving meaning to things’.5 22, (2014).

This space is one that is open, active and expectant. It is here that through diverse mediums and outcomes these artists consider and contest their contemporary position, driven by their divergent histories.

— Consuelo Cavaniglia

The Finalists

Sydney, NSW

Kuba Dorabialski

Invocation Trilogy #1: Floor Dance of Lenin’s Resurrection 2017 Single channel video Production still © Kuba Dorabialski | Licensed by Viscopy

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I Have Some Regrets/I Have No Doubts 2015 Single channel UHD video 6 minutes 19

Muckleford, VIC

Fayen d’Evie

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Myopic reading // Janaleen sings, and hides // Re-calling From One Body to Another 2017 (Myopic digital photograph of unique state screenprint with debossing printed by Trent Walter, Negative Press; image translation from photographic documentation by Pippa Samaya of forming/un-forming of rawhide by Janaleen Wolfe. // Recalling the exhibition “From One Body to Another”; a responsive installation by Sophie Takách and Fayen d’Evie, co-created with Janaleen Wolfe, Ben Phillips and Bryan Phillips, at Casula Powerhouse, April–July 2017 // ) © Fayen d’Evie | Licensed by Viscopy

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Sydney, NSW

Tina Havelock Stevens

READING THE RIVER 2017 Single-channel HD video, colour, stereo sound Production still: Jackie Wolf © Tina Havelock Stevens | Licensed by Viscopy

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Adelaide, SA

Ben Leslie

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Work in progress Fontanelle Studios Port Adelaide 2017 Š Ben Leslie | Licensed by Viscopy

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Napunda (snake/lightning/cloud/clapsticks) 2017 Maypiny (ironwood), gony’dju (beeswax) 87 × 40 × 7 cm Image courtesy of the artist and Buku-Larr gay Mulka Centre © Barayuwa Munu gurr | Licensed by Viscopy

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Sydney, NSW

Claudia Nicholson

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All I Have Are Dreams Of You 2017 Performance documentation featuring Azahares de SLASA Artwork commissioned by Carriageworks Photo: Zan Wimberly Š Claudia Nicholson | Licensed by Viscopy

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Warmun, WA

Kathy Ramsey

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Dick’s Yard (Bow River Country) 2017 Natural ochre and pigment on canvas 120 × 150 cm

Darrarroo (Jack’s Yard) 2016 Natural ochre and pigment on canvas 120 × 150 cm Images courtesy the artist and Warmun Arts Centre © Kathy Ramsey | Licensed by Viscopy

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Wellington, NZ

Bridget Reweti

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Nipple Stretches 2016 HD moving image Bridget Reweti in collaboration with Ange Loft and Rachel O’Neill Production still

Hotline Bling 2016 HD Moving Image Bridget Reweti in collaboration with Suzanne Kite and Intergalactic Ma¯ori Production still © Bridget Reweti | Licensed by Viscopy

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Sydney, NSW

Ella Sutherland

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Queue 2017 Process image © Ella Sutherland | Licensed by Viscopy

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Sydney, NSW

Angela Tiatia

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Dark Light 2017 Face mounted pigment print 103.2 × 215 cm Image courtesy the artist and Alcaston Gallery, Narrm Melbourne Š Angela Tiatia | Licensed by Viscopy

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Sydney, NSW

Amanda Williams

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Untitled 3 (A deltoid from the Book of Shapes series) 2017 Unique gelatin silver photogram 25 × 20 cm

Untitled 1 (A circle from the Book of Shapes series) 2017 Unique gelatin silver photogram 25 × 20 cm © Amanda Williams | Licensed by Viscopy

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Warmun, WA

Anwar Young

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Kulata Tjuta (Many Spears) 2016 Punu (wood), malu pulykungka (kangaroo tendon) and acrylic Dimensions variable Image courtesy the artist and Tjala Arts Š Anwar Young | Licensed by Viscopy

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Biographies

Kuba Dorabialski (born in Wrocław, Poland, lives and works in Sydney, New South Wales)

Fayen d’Evie (from Aotearoa New Zealand, lives and works in Muckleford, Victoria)

Tina Havelock Stevens (born in Sydney, lives and works in Sydney, New South Wales)

Through video and video installation, Kuba develops works that explore the event of modernism.

Kuba’s works often observe traditions, habits and gestures tied to Eastern Europe and looks at these through the lenses of landscape, language and politics. The works use subtle absurdist humour to critically respond to complex themes.

Mysticism, poetry and the uncertain border between nostalgia and sentimentality find their places in his works, which are often narrative and documentary in nature.

Recent exhibitions include All of Them in There, Firstdraft, Sydney, 2016; That Time I Held Your Hand in the Glow of a Burning City, (with Katy B Plummer), Borderline Art Space, Ias¸i, Romania, 2016; Stuck in the Mud, Verge Gallery, Sydney, 2016; and Monumentalism, Kudos Gallery, Sydney, 2016.

Fayen is an artist and writer whose practice engages with installation, performance, conversation, publishing and writing.

Her work is increasingly interested in shifting the focus of exhibition making from prioritising the sense of sight, to more embodied encounters. Often collaborative, her work operates in the space of shared production and active, participative audience reception. Fayen’s work includes performative scores for tactile encounters with artworks, responsive installations that treat artworks as choreographic objects, and archiving of ephemeral and/or neglected practices.

Recent exhibitions include ee// hm, Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco, 2016; Beyond Exhausted, Physics Room, Christchurch, 2016; […] {…} […] handovers + translations, Gertrude Glasshouse, Melbourne 2016; Human Commonalities, V.A.C. and the State Museum of Vadim Sidur, Moscow, 2016; and Endless Circulation – TarraWarra Biennial, Healesville, 2016.

Fayen is the founder of 3-ply, an independent publishing initiative that focuses on publication, writing, editing and translation as an extension of art practice.

Tina is multi-disciplinary artist whose work is defined by a meditation on the relationships we have with each other, the places we inhabit, and ourselves.

Often depicting landscapes, she dwells on sites that are abandoned, decaying, deserted and vacant, to speak of survival and fragility within urban, environmental, and emotional spaces. She works across video, sound, performance, music, print and experimental documentary.

One of her performance projects, White Drummer, sees her enact spontaneous, high-energy and durational performances. Using rock’n’roll drum-kits, the work unfolds as a spectacle that responds and tunes into the frequencies of a specific site and place. These performances are often recorded for future video installations.

Recent exhibitions include Double A – Side, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney, 2017; Disco Infirmo, Airspace, Sydney, 2017; Techstyle (with Cao Fei, Dara Birnbaum, Sputniko!), MILL 6 Foundation, Hong Kong, 2016; and Thunderhead, Performance Space, Carriageworks, Sydney, and Dark Park DARK MOFO, MONA, Hobart, 2016.

Tina is a musician who has played in a number of rock’n’roll and post-punk bands as a drummer.

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Biographies

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Ben Leslie (born in Portland, Victoria, lives and works in Adelaide, South Australia)

Barayuwa Munu ŋgurr (born in Wandawuy outstation, Yirrkala, lives and works in Yirrkala, Northern Territory)

Claudia Nicholson (born Bogota, Colombia, lives and works in Sydney, New South Wales)

Kathy Ramsey (born at Bow River Station, lives and works in Warmun, Western Australia)

Bridget Reweti (from Tauranga Moana, lives and works in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand)

Ella Sutherland (born in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, lives and works in Sydney, New South Wales)

Ben is a sculptor whose practice is concerned with the studio’s connection to art historical contexts.

He explores a recent return to art-making that prioritises firsthand experience with forms and materials. Ben’s work turns to the tropes of modernist sculpture – the stack, the column, the phallic, the yonic – adopting these with a touch of humour and hint of parody whilst maintaining regard for the ideals, aesthetics and values therein.

He explores the relationship with this past. In his work he teases out issues of sexuality, gender and the idiosyncrasies of our ongoing material culture.

Recent exhibitions include Versus Rodin, the Art Gallery of South Australia, 2017; Racks 2: a solid workout, Firstdraft, Sydney, 2017; Mothership, grand opening of the new Port Adelaide Fontanelle facility, 2017; The House of Vulture, Fontanelle Gallery, 2016; Endless Golem West Space, Melbourne, 2015.

Ben is Co-Founder and Director of Fontanelle Gallery and Studios Bowden / Port Adelaide.

Barayuwa works primarily in sculpture and painting. He is a skilled maker of yidaki, gal pu ˉ ˉ (spear-throwers), gara (spears) and

Claudia is a multidisciplinary artist working across ceramics, installation, video, performance and painting.

Her work explores issues around multiple identities, belonging and separation from homeland informed by her personal history as a Colombian-born Australian artist, adopted and raised in Sydney.

Through her work, she looks for the potential to connect to her heritage by incorporating established modes of artisanal practices from Central and South America and cultural representations found in popular culture. Recently she has been making alfombras de aserrín, sawdust works made in various Central and South American countries, whose Spanish heritage speaks to the idea of complex points of origin, and whose ephemerality links to the unfixed nature of identity that the artist explores.

Recent exhibitions include The National, Carriageworks, Sydney, 2017; Me Time, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, 2017; Women Of Fairfield, C3West in partnership with PYT, STARRTS and MCA, Sydney, 2016; PASSING/ PARADES, Success Gallery, Fremantle, 2016; and The Decline of Western Civilisation, Blackart Projects, Melbourne, 2016.

Claudia was the recipient of the Freedman Foundation Travelling Art Scholarship in 2015. In 2014 she undertook the 4A Centre For Contemporary Asian Art Beijing studio residency with Shen Shaomin, and she was the 2016 winner of the sculpture category, Fisher's Ghost Award, Campbelltown Arts Centre. Claudia is currently an artist in residence at Carriageworks Clothing Store.

Kathy is a painter, dancer, carver and a key cultural figure in the new generation of artists emerging from Warmun Art Centre. She paints her ancestral Country around Bow River, incorporating rich Ngarranggarni stories with recent histories of station life, as well as religious iconography from her strong Catholic spirituality.

Kathy’s cultural tradition and knowledge extend beyond her painting practice to include her role as a dancer of ceremony, specifically the Marnem, Marnem Dililib Benuwarrnji (Fire, Fire Burning Bright), Joonba and Waanga.

In her artwork she shares aspects of her Country − the meaning of place and their associated stories which have been passed down to her by her mother (Mona Ramsey), father (Rammey Ramsey) and grandfathers (Paddy Bedford and Timmy Timms Snr). Kathy is a prolific artist whose paintings develop new approaches and interpretations of both ancestral and contemporary stories, building on the tradition of strong practices emerging from Warmun Art Centre.

Recent exhibitions include Warlbowinj and Jumulunj (River Wallaby and Boab Tree) – Paul Johnstone Gallery, Darwin, 2016; Warmun Then and Now, Berndt Museum, The University of Western Australia, 2015; Revealed, Perth Cultural Centre and Gallery Central, Perth, 2015; and Warmun Aboriginal Art, Art Images Gallery, Adelaide, 2014.

Bridget is a video and performance artist whose work explores contemporary Indigenous realities and focuses on the varied perspectives taken to landscape.

She is interested in creating works that move beyond identity politics and into the complexities of relationships between people and place. Bridget’s practice is located within an exploration of various Ma¯ori world views that in her work extend beyond the local to the global, becoming relevant to multiple cultural perspectives.

Recent exhibitions include This Time of Useful Consciousness— Political Ecology Now, The Dowse Art Museum, Wellington, 2017; Kiko Moana documenta 14, Kassel, Germany with Mata Aho Collective, 2017; Tauutuutu Pa ˉ taka Art and Museum, Porirua, Wellington, 2016; and What are you looking at?

Plymouth Arts Centre, U.K. 2016, Bridget is part of Mata Aho Collective, a collaboration between four Ma ˉ ori women artists who produce large scale textile works, commenting on the complexity of Ma ˉ ori lives. She is an active member of Kava Club, a Wellington-based collective of Ma ˉ ori and Pacific artists, performers, activists and supporters.

Kava Club produces thematic public events that disrupt formulaic modes of essentialist representation.

Ella is an artist and graphic designer whose work is concerned with the analysis and activation of text and visual language.

She investigates systems of reading and navigation within the built environment and printed spaces. Looking at the complexity of graphic language outside of commercial endeavours, she identifies gesture and narrative as elements tied to our interpretation of text and visual language. She employs these elements to coax a graphic sensibility to operate in a different register and shift the ‘typical’ readings of spaces and information.

Recent exhibitions include: Slow Seeing and Attention to Make, The Dowse Art Museum, Wellington, 2016; Beauty is in the Street, Objectspace, Auckland, 2016; Boring month start to finish, the whole month, North Projects, Christchurch, 2015; Speaking places: How to Work (with Matthew Galloway), Ramp Gallery, Hamilton, 2015. Recent publication projects include: with a body always but but still drying, designed for the Biennale of Sydney and Artspace, Sydney; Pale Like a Fish, edited and designed for North Projects, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2016; Speaking places: Hamilton 2015, artist publication for Ramp Gallery, Hamilton, New Zealand, 2016; Home & Away, artist publication for RM Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2014.

Ella was co-founder of Dog Park Art Project Space and codirector between 2012-2014, and she is a current board member of The Physics Room, both contemporary art spaces located in Christchurch, New Zealand.

bilma (clap-sticks). ˉ His work depicts his own Djapu clan designs as well as his mother’s Munyuku clan designs. Extending on traditional designs through his own interpretation, Barayuwa’s work shows an experimental approach characteristic of a younger generation of artists now working at BukuLarrnggay Mulka. Barayuwa’s paintings refer to stories focused on the Munyuku waters at Yarrinya.

They describe the water passages, wind and cloud formations reflecting into the water and the powers within the salt waters for which he is custodian.

Recent exhibitions include Today Tomorrow Yesterday, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2016; 32nd Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award, Museum & Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, 2016; Dark MOFO – Raft, Hobart, 2016; Living Waters, Monaco Oceanographic Institute, 2016; and Rambangi Together as Equals, with Ruark Lewis, Northern Centre for Contemporary Art, Darwin, 2015.

In 2017, Barayuwa’s wall work Yarrinya was acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Barayuwa is a long-time staff member of Buku-Larrnggay Mulka, in Yirrkala, providing great assistance to artists of the community.

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Biographies

Colophon

Angela Tiatia, (born in Auckland, Aotearoa, New Zealand, lives and works in Sydney, New South Wales)

Amanda Williams (born in Sydney, lives and works in Sydney, New South Wales)

Anwar Young, (born in Alice Springs, lives and works in Amata, South Australia)

Angela is a multi-disciplinary artist working across film, photography, video installation and performance.

In her work, she seeks to draw attention to the relationship between the construction and the representation of identities, to confront the commodification of the body, place and gender.

Often using her own body in performative actions, she enacts tactics of resistance towards structures imposed upon her body and her environment, to highlight systemically upheld inequalities.

Through the lens of contemporary culture, she considers neocolonialism’s impact on socio-political, cultural and economic displacement.

Recent exhibitions include: Personal Structures – Time – Space – Existence, 57th Venice Biennial, Venice, Italy; IMPACT: New Media Works by Michael Cook, Fiona Foley, Taloi Havini; Angela Tiatia, University of Technology, Sydney; and Darklands, Alaska Projects, Sydney, 2017.

Angela’s work has been published in Bodies That Matter, Indigenous Art: New Media and the Digital, Public 54, York University, Toronto, 2017. In 2017, she was a finalist in the Maddocks Art Prizes – (NSW/ACT & VIC) and the Paramor Art Prize, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, and the winner of the Best Artist Award at the FBi SMAC AWARDS, Sydney.

Angela is represented by Alcaston Gallery, Narrm Melbourne.

Amanda is an installation and photomedia artist whose work explores the history of photography and architectural modernism.

Her work investigates the way our natural and built environment embodies the thoughts, practices and feelings of another time and place. The work evolves out of the photographic documentation of select locations – often iconic modernist buildings and ‘brutal’ landscapes.

She challenges the very medium of photography by altering standard procedures of developing gelatin silver prints to produce photographs that are active and changeable rather than fixed. In her work the photographic image is an event in itself, not simply the witness to, and recorder of, events.

Recent exhibitions include An elegy to apertures at the Centre for Contemporary Photography Melbourne, 2017; Silver & Salt: Experimental Photography, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, 2016; and Towards a new architecture, Firstdraft, Sydney, 2015.

In 2015, Amanda was a finalist in the Bowness Photography Prize, Monash University Gallery, and the Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award.

Anwar works across traditional punu crafting, contemporary sculpture, new media and photography.

He engages with traditional men’s punu (wood) crafting mediums to create contemporary works that explore the challenges faced living in a remote community. Anwar was one of the first younger generation of men involved in the Kulata Tjuta project, initiated by his grandfathers, Willy Kaika Burton and Frank Young in Amata Community. This crossgenerational project was a cultural preservation initiative developed by the senior men of Amata to spark economic, artistic and cultural value in the traditional craft of making Kulata (spears). The Kulata Tjuta project has subsequently spread across the APY Lands. Currently Anwar is pursuing his interest in film and new media in a project supported by state funding for the production of a short film that explores his own cultural identity and place in traditional and contemporary Amata.

Recent exhibitions include Nganampa Kililpil: Our Stars at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, 2016; and LORE: Visual Language of Cultural Identity, Raft South, Hobart, 2016; Anwar was nominated for the 33rd Telstra National Indigenous Art Award at the Museum and Art Gallery of Northern Territory for his work Kulata Tjuta Warmala (Army of many spears). This work saw Anwar handcraft and paint thirty-three spears representing the thirty-three young men in Amata community who are continuing to learn the traditions of Anangu Watti. Anwar is the youngest Director of Tjala Arts Centre and is the founder of the Tjala Arts Watti Yangupala Cultural Club.

Published on the occasion of the John Fries Award 2017 Finalist Exhibition Curated by Consuelo Cavaniglia

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UNSW Galleries 11 August–2 September 2017 johnfriesaward.com ISBN 978-1-925404-02-9 Publication design Elliott Bryce Foulkes The 8th John Fries Award is an initiative of Copyright Agency | Viscopy

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