2016
Chris Budgeon / Anna Carey / Danica Chappell / Michael Cook / Michelle Culpitt / Ellen Dahl / Gerwyn Davies / Tamara Dean / Shoufay Derz / Michelle Doherty / Ed Douglas / Odette England / Merilyn Fairskye / Chantal Faust / Tina Fiveash / Alex Frayne / Ursula K. Frederick / Phillip George / Natalie Grono / Joanne Handley / Nina Hanley / Petrina Hicks / Samuel Hodge / Jamie Holcombe
/ Kelly Hussey-Smith and Alan Hill / Ingvar Kenne / David-Ashley Kerr / Bronek Kozka / Cathy Laudenbach / Anne MacDonald / Koji Makino / Laura Moore / Salar Niknafs / Sean O’Connell / Deborah Paauwe / Polixeni Papapetrou / Sarah Rhodes / Paul Snell / Kurt Sorensen / Jacqui Stockdale / Christian Thompson / Justine Varga / Lydia Wegner / Yiorgo Yiannopoulos / Anne Zahalka /
2016
Published by Gold Coast City Gallery on the occasion of the 2016 Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award 25 June – 21 August 2016 © Gold Coast City Gallery © All artworks the artists All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical without the permission of the publisher. Publication Design 3E Innovative - www.3e.net.au Printing 3E Innovative 978-0-9871415-9-0 Gold Coast City Gallery 135 Bundall Rd, Surfers Paradise QLD 4217 www.theartscentregc.com.au Cover Image: Justine Varga Marking Time 2016 Chromogenic hand printed photograph Courtesy the artist and Hugo Michel Gallery
DIRECTOR Foreword It is with great pleasure that I welcome you to the 2016 Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award. Last year we launched Prizing Diversity: The Josephine Ulrick Prizes 1998-2014, a publication which celebrates the Award, the Foundation and it’s legacy. This publication showcased the wonderful acquisitions made over the years which have contributed most significantly to our growing collection of contemporary Australian photography. I would like to express our sincere gratitude to Win Schubert and The Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Foundation for the Arts. Last year The Arts Centre Gold Coast acquired the administration of a one million dollar trust fund bestowed by Mrs Win Schubert AO. This generous philanthropic support will allow Gold Coast City Gallery to continue to host the much anticipated Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award and the diverse associated public programs from artist talks, music performances to the popular children’s activities. This year’s judge Professor Susan Best commented on the high level of entries. I would like to thank Professor Best for her thoroughly professional approach and decisions required. Congratulations to the 45 artists who were selected for exhibition and thank you to all of the artists who entered, for it is their contribution that gives the Award its strength. Tracy Cooper-Lavery Director Gold Coast City Gallery
2015 winner We congratulate the winner of the 2015 Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award Owen Leong
Mudra 2014, pigment print on archival paper. Gold Coast City Gallery Collection Courtesy the artist and Artereal Gallery
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INTRODUCTION The photographic medium continues its energetic evolution as a means of creative expression and the selection of 45 works by Professor Best has drawn out several strong themes within current practice. In defiance of the old adage that the camera does not lie, a number of works purposefully construct fictions - as selected artist Ed Douglas explains in his statement, ‘the photographic image carries with it a certain level of applied truth and factualness (even when we rationally know this isn’t necessarily so)’. Some are made covertly within the layers of digital files that build to make an image, such as the double landscape of Cathy Laudenbach or the restaged party scenario of Bronek Kozka, and others are more overt fabrications, where artists physically make identities such as Gerwyn Davies Prawn; or places, as we see in the rendering of the faded Stardust motel by Anna Carey. Perhaps in response to the deepening understanding of the underlying darkness of many events from the Australian colonial and post-colonial past, and the general unease around the rate of acceleration of human impact on the earth, all works featuring landscape views reflect degrees of disquiet and seek to make visible the legacies of past acts carried out within the mute natural forms. Michael Cook’s deeply personal work from the series Mother is a reflection on the impact of stolen generations where landscape once alive with colour appears cold and lifeless without family. Soufrey Derz has sited her work within the abandoned old mine-scapes of Hill End and she reads the depressions in the ground as universal metaphors, while the attractive pond within a green field that Marilyn Fairskye photographs, at first glance appears like any touristic view, but is in fact a giant depression left over from an atomic blast.
2016 judge
After a decade or more of great enthusiasm for the potential of the digital, where all that matters is the ‘clean’ image, a number of artists seek a return to materiality and assert the act of making and the presence of the final physical object, many producing unique prints to do so. Michelle Cullpit and Danica Chappell respectively revisit the ‘archaic’ processes of daguerreotype and tintype and Justine Varga and Odette England embed marks and surface texture into their works. Laura Moore and Chantall Faust bring similar physical scrutiny to the assumed inert digital process. The cycles of life, particularly the capturing of the rapid changes of adolescence are powerfully explored in the 2016 Award. Polixeni Papapetrou sites the figure of a young woman, her daughter, within exuberant floral layers drawing the parallel to growth, flowering and inevitable demise, and Sarah Rhode’s faint portraits are acutely observed and strip back all detail of context and colour to allow a focus on the most subtle and telling of age differences. The photograph has, throughout its history, claimed agency to change opinion or to make things happen. Images are now propelled even faster through instant global communication and Tina Fiveash has made a striking document of the hashtag phenomenon #illridewithyou. Less strident is Anne McDonald’s crafting of a portrait of a lonely sweet treat to comment on the growing awareness of our society’s sugar dependence. But photography is also supremely capable of capturing quiet intimacies and in so doing, bringing a viewer into an otherwise unknowable space. For artists Chris Budgdeon, Alex Frayne and Natalie Grono, such images are impossible without the implicit trust of their subjects. Anne Zahalka finds a personal intimacy in an unfamiliar place at a crossroad of the ancient and contemporary.
Professor Susan Best Susan Best is an art historian and occasional curator with expertise in critical theory and modern and contemporary art. She is professor of art theory and fine art at Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. She is the author of Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde (2011), which won the Australian and New Zealand Art Association best book in 2012. Her forthcoming book, Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing in Contemporary Art Photography (2016) to be published by Bloomsbury Philosophy, examines how women photographers from the southern hemisphere have contributed to the archival turn in contemporary art.
All the selected works for the 2016 Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award reflect the rich and complex ways in which artists embrace the medium of photography and make it one of the most compelling forms of contemporary creative expression. Virginia Rigney Senior Curator Gold Coast City Gallery page 4 / JUWSPA 2016
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Chris Budgeon Born 1955 Lives Elsternwick, Victoria Niahm 2015 Archival pigment print 100 x 66 cm 1 of 8 Courtesy the artist $1,500.00
Anna Carey After an absence of over12 years, I had returned to Canada to reconnect with family after my Mother’s diagnosis of leukemia and emphysema. I found myself resorting to an old default position for emotionally awkward situations, and began using the camera as a tool to help rebuild lost connections with my siblings, nieces and nephews. My niece Niahm’s severe Aspergers syndrome appears in stark contrast with her outlandish colour sensibility.
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Born 1987 Lives Palm Beach/Venice Beach LA, Queensland 517 North Vine Street, Hollywood... Now 2015 Giclee Print 70 x 105 cm 3 of 7 Courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer and Artereal Gallery $3,000.00
This photograph is part of a Stardust suite of images consisting of retro Stardust motels and retrofitted Stardust motels from different parts of the world resulting in ‘now’ and ‘then’ images. The ‘now’ images have been created by ‘renovating’ the ‘then’ architectural models. All of the reference images for the Stardust models have been sourced from the Internet via motel websites and Google maps. The camera lens magnifies the model and reminds the viewer that the photograph has been constructed with a miniature object which opens up a space for one to pause and reflect on their own memories embedded within the familiar spaces. The body of work looks to international examples to represent the homogeneity of the experience of a particular style of architecture within distant yet connected contemporary cultures. It also demonstrates how digital technologies such as Google maps have affected transitions within motel signage and the urban landscape.
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Danica Chappell Born 1972 Lives West Melbourne, Victoria Fermata #9 & #10 2016 Tintype on aluminium 28 x 56 x 2.5 cm 1 of 1 Courtesy the artist $2,000.00
Michael Cook Working with photography like it is a piece of elastic, I stretch the capacities of light sensitive substrates to extend my malleability of the medium. These tintype artworks present photography from the perspective of an arrested action revealing components of layers and process. Fermata is a new series of tintypes, that continues my exploration of the 1850’s process. A fermata is a symbol, positioned above a note or a rest in sheet music. A fermata looks like an eye with one lid & is used to indicate a ‘hold’ of either a note or a pause. The conductor determines the duration of the hold to amplify intensity of the music performed. The silvery shadows on the tintype reveals the many layers that are held; multiple plates that are fitted and formed, the process of pouring and sensitizing the collodion and the action that is held in the final fixed image. Throughout, surfaces are contested from the combining metals and colour. The silver and aluminium reflect light with varying intensities, neither element allowing the eye to rest completely but holds a reflexive gaze.
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Born 1968 Lives Parrearra, Queensland MOTHER Ice Cream 2016 Inkjet photographic print on photo rag hahnamuhle 310 gsm paper 80 x 120 cm AP 1 of 2 Courtesy the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer $5,950.00
Mother is a journey through 13 images of a woman in a deserted Australian landscape. The mother is always alone, her baby absent, although evidence remains of there having been a child: the empty pram, the abandoned toys on the hopscotch court, the slackness of the skipping rope and with this image, the empty high-chair and melting ice cream. These works possess an arrested stillness that implies a recently bereft status. While these images speak directly and poetically from personal family experience to Australia’s Stolen Generation, they speak also to a universal experience of disconnection between mother and child.
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Michelle Culpitt Born 1974 Lives Winnellie, Northern Territory Suspended V (diptych) 2016 Daguerreotype (one panel illustrated) 8 x 23 cm 1 of 1 Courtesy the artist $750.00
Ellen Dahl The Suspended series of daguerreotypes are of objects collected in the Chewton Bushlands, Central Victoria. The country in Chewton was devastated by the 1850s Gold Rush and is still recovering. A lot of the country is covered in rambling invasive European plants such as gorse, blackberry and rose hip. Glass and pottery pieces often appear after rain from the old mining camps. I placed these artifacts onto a sensitized silver plate mounted in a large format camera and pointed it to the sky to make an exposure. The camera captured the sky onto the silver plate and also the objects as photograms. The plate was then processed in the Becquerel daguerreotype technique. The surface remains very fragile and is mounted behind glass. The works are mounted onto powder-coated steel and at an angle over a black shelf so that the image can be viewed on the mirror finish.
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Born 1968 Lives Erskineville, New South Wales Her # 3 2015 Archival pigment print on photo rag 70 x 70 cm 1 of 5 Courtesy the artist $1,200.00
Her #3 is part of an ongoing body of work that investigates the notion of private space and female autonomy. Struggling to understand the confronting and ongoing issue of misogyny, the project aims to present images of her, as well as for her, that feel private, self-reflective and feminine.Ellen Dahl is a Sydney-based, Norwegian-born photomedia artist.
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Gerwyn Davies Born 1985 Lives Nashua, New South Wales Prawn 2016 Digital inkjet print 80 x 110 cm 1 of 5 courtesy the artist $1,400.00
Tamara Dean Combining abstract costume making and photography, my work focuses on the construction and performance of identity through dress and the body’s function as a platform for projecting an individual’s articulation of the self. By the fabrication and wearing of bricolage costumes from everyday materials, I explore the potential for playfulness and subversion in reassembling and presenting my own physical self as a range of renewable and distinct ‘characters’. My work is an ongoing series of self portraits, an inventory of selves, spinning out reinventions of the dressed body and toying with its limitations and expected forms. Current work investigates this constructed self positioned in the context of scenes of recreation, leisure and travel, highlighting these sites as painstakingly constructed in and of themselves. Bland environments formulaically dressed and reinvigorated as spaces for pleasure, they become hyper visual assemblages. It is a celebration of Australian Made Camp and a relishing in the tepid waters of our cultural cringe.
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Born 1976 Lives Cambewarra, New South Wales Cosmos 2015 Pure pigment on cotton rag 160 x 210 x 5 cm 1 of 8 Courtesy the artist and Martin Browne Contemporary $15,000.00
My work explores the relationship between humans and the natural world and the role of instinct and ritual in our contemporary lives. Natural cycles within time and space, life and death, contribute to my way of investigating and engaging with the world around me.My choice of wilderness or nature as the setting for my work represents eternity for me. A shared sense of time between our ancestors and our future. It is a space that we can imagine ourselves in as primitive beings and yet still find a place in now.
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shoufay Derz Born 1975 Lives Forestville, New South Wales Someone digging in the ground_black 2015 Pigment print on cotton paper 99 x 111 cm 1 of 5 Courtesy the artist and Artereal Gallery $4,850.00
Michelle Doherty “…This talk is like stamping new coins. They pile up, while the real work is done outside by someone digging in the ground…” - Rumi The image set in the Australian landscape is characteristically cryptic with multiple connotations of burial, of searching, of hidden depths, of excited hope, of desperation, of wonder, of bottomless longing, of eternal quest. The terrain of Hill End, the former gold mining area, is full of holes. One cannot walk long before stumbling upon a deep burrow or tunnel. The holes are blank open sites of speculation, enticing one to peer down into the darkness unknown. I think of these holes as luminous voids where imagination ferments and of one ‘prospecting’ the ground for a sense of deeper connection. The image is also a cue towards the physicality and labour that underpins abstract ideas of fortune and prosperity.
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Born 1975 Lives Belconnen, ACT Erika’s Pony Resort 2015 Digital photograph 60 x 92 cm 1 of 5 Courtesy the artist $1,600.00
As an emerging photo-media artist, I reflect on identity and place in the environments I find myself in. Erika’s Pony Resort was created in Belconnen, Canberra (where I now live) as part of a series called Juri-Chan, which playfully explores concepts of character and consciousness within specific environments.
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Ed Douglas Born 1943 Lives Aldgate, South Australia Portrait of the Parsnip as a Young Octopus 2015 Pigment Print 153 x 100.2 x 5.5 cm 1 of 6 Courtesy the artist $2,500.00
ODETTE ENGLAND From the beginning of my career I have been interested in constructing images. Initially I was influenced by artists like Man Ray, Paul Klee, and Magritte. Also, early on, I developed a strong interest in psychology and myth, along with aspects of science and philosophy. The photographic image carries with it a certain level of implied truth and factualness (even when we rationally know this isn’t necessarily so). I enjoy working at the edge of factualness where questions are raised in the viewers mind. I live a rural lifestyle and I have, over the last few years, been attracted to objects that I find in my environment. My current work is studio based. I use a large-format camera, scan the negatives, and enhance the digital files with a process akin to drawing. Scale — image sizes of a metre or more — has also influenced my vision.
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Born 1975 Lives Murray Bridge, South Australia Excavation #1 2015 One-off Archival Pigment Print (hand sanded with professional grade sandpaper) on Canson Photo Rag 18.5 x 18.3 cm 1 of 1 Courtesy the artist $5,000.00
My series Excavations explores the invisible social space of family storytelling through photography. I make c-prints in the darkroom of family pictures from expired Kodak film, as well as using original snapshots from the album, then carefully handsand them with various types of sandpaper. I aim to loosen the complexities of material encounter with intangible concepts. Mine is also a literal assault. I cross into taboo territory, the transgression and squeamish horror of destroying original personal possessions.
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Merilyn Fairskye Born 1950 Lives Newtown, New South Wales Ground Zero (first Soviet atomic bomb test, 7.00am, 29 August 1949, The Polygon, Kazakhstan) 2015 Pigment print 92 x 275 cm 1 of 5 Courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery $7,000.00
Chantal Faust This work is from the series 2002. The titles of the works from this series draw on nuclear cinema in the popular imaginary - and identify the location and purpose of each nuclear site. In response to the dropping of the American atomic bomb at Hiroshima, the Soviet Union conducted nuclear explosions between 1949-89 at The Polygon Nuclear Test Site, Kazakhstan. Located in the Experimental Field, the pond in Ground Zero is where the first Soviet atomic bomb was detonated, launching the nuclear arms race.
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Born 1980 Lives London, Victoria Plantlife Five (flatbed) 2015 Type C Print 122 x 88 cm 1 of 3 Courtesy the artist $4,000.00
There is one word in the English language that is used to describe three very different ways of seeing. A scan is a close examination, a slow and repeated sweep of the eye and also the hasty glance of a quick skim. These actions are markedly different, but they all perform the same function: an eye is searching for something. The slow careful focus that absorbs every detail, the staccato pan across a horizon and the bounce of an eyeball as it skips across words on a page are all forms of reading the surface of the visible. Slow, sideways or barely there, behind each method of observation is the one purpose: detection. For the scanner who reads the perceptible world, meaning accumulates with each shift of the gaze. Thought and vision are here combined.
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TINA FIVEASH Born 1970 Lives Ashbury, New South Wales #ILLRIDEWITHYOU 2015 Archival Pigment Print 110 X 110 cm 2 of 8 Courtesy the artist $2,500.00
Alex Frayne I created this work on 16th December 2014 - the day the #ILLRIDEWITHYOU hashtag went viral, in response to an increase of violence and intimidation directed at Australian Muslims, during and immediately following the Sydney siege. The #ILLRIDEWITHYOU movement, conceived by Rachael Jacobs, sought to provide emotional and physical support to Muslims riding alone on public transport, via commuters posting/tweeting their bus/train routes on social media, offering to ride with anyone feeling threatened. Within 24-hrs of posting this work on Facebook, as an expression of my solidarity with the movement, it was shared 900+ times and had 74,000+ hits – demonstrating the power of social media to spread ideas and potentially influence societal attitudes.
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Born 1975 Lives North Adelaide, South Australia Orgasm on a Chair 2015 Fine art print on cotton rag 70 x 105 cm 1 of 1 Courtesy the artist $10,000.00
Surely the power of photography is its ability to seize a moment. To hold a moment and reveal a truth. A frame. A singularity. It is this power that separates it from other art forms. My friend Catherine Fitzgerald is one of the most generous human beings I know; so generous that she allowed me the privilege of capturing this ecstatic moment of pleasure. Notions of trust are paramount portraiture and especially in this intimate photo of Catherine. She is a woman in total control of her orgasm, vulnerable, exposed and authentic. The moment captured here is a moment of joy that is quintessentially photographic in its form and its expression.
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Ursula K. Frederick Born 1970 Lives Scullin, ACT Losing its aura: Reading Walter Benjamin 2015 Archival inkjet print 30 x 42 cm 1 of 12 Courtesy the artist $220.00
In broad terms my art practice is an ongoing exploration of everyday materialities and the consumption and discard practices of contemporary society. To this end I find inspiration in working with objects and ideas that already exist in the world. My photographic practice is largely documentary, and focused on ordinary and vernacular experience. Most recently my work considers the relation between media and materiality and the slippage between different modes of depiction. By consciously using blur and ruptures in the flow of visual information my intention is to find a space between abstraction and representation to reflect on how people communicate, the methods deployed and to interrogate what we are saying.
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Phillip George Born 1956 Lives Bondi, New South Wales Acheiropoieta#4 2016 C type Print 160 x 120 cm 1 of 4 Courtesy the artist $9,800.00
Acheiropoieta makes reference to a philosophical/religious Byzantine concept – put simply: ‘that made without the intervention of the human hand’. The image is said to spring miraculously into existence (predicting photography 1,200 years before it is formally acknowledged in the West.) The Acheiropoieta#4 comes from a story told by a Louis de Bernières character, Georgio P. Theodoru. Theodoru recollects his life and country, apologising for his incoherence as he slowly drowns, sinking to the bottom of the harbour in Smyrna (Western Turkey). The drifting gold pigment and amulets are manifestations of his memories, recalling his life as it passes before his eyes. This work is composed underwater, its structure determined by the current and the length of a held breath. Images are made as detritus descends from the surface, landing on and unsettling the gold pigment on the ocean floor.
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Joanne Handley
Natalie Grono Born 1977 Lives Lennox Head, New South Wales Taking Flight 2015 Inkjet print 120 x 150 cm Courtesy the artist $2,850.00
Sisterhood is a scared bond. What are the delicate moments of childhood that form this invisible thread? Somewhere between the creative imagined worlds of fantasy and sacred rituals are moments and places, which give birth to love, fears and insecurities. These pictures are a testament to my daughters’ bonding.
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Lives Thirroul, New South Wales Untitled (Orange) 2016 Pigment print rag on paper 60 x 90 cm 1 of 3 Courtesy the artist $4,200.00
A recent three month residency in downtown Los Angeles enabled me the opportunity to forage amidst remote and abandoned sites of unused high-rise rooftops. This elevated world of surreal landscapes and monolithic structures appears as an alternate universe, light years away from the hypnotic pace of city life below. Untitled (Orange) is part of the photographic series When people build fences which borrows its name from Rousseau’s definition of civilisation and draws our attention to unexpected portals of illusionist spaces within the cityscape. The series reflects upon the provisions of being human in a civilised environment — the collective determination to claim, conquer and construct and its accompanying illusions of freedom.
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Nina Hanley Born 1974 Lives Canungra, Queensland Road Kill 2015 Digital Print 98 x 74 cm 1 of 7 Courtesy the artist $950.00
Petrina Hicks My photographs are of a bored teenager living in a rural country town . Nothing to do on weekends, no public transport so lets get dressed up and act like animals and have some fun. I have tried to capture a sarcastic side to this and am inspired by comic book art.
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Born 1972 Lives McMahons Point, New South Wales Serpentina II 2015 Pigment print 100 x 100 cm Artist Proof Courtesy of the artist, Michael Reid, and This is No Fantasy $7,000.00
The Unbearable Lightness of Being explores ideas relating to lightness and heaviness in relation to body and spirit. Our lightness of spirit struggles with the heaviness of our bodily existence.The human condition is ephemeral and fleeting, not permanent like stone relics of the past. I’m interested in looking at how we attempt to reconcile our impermanent nature as human beings. Of further interest is the symbolism of vessels in relation to women we have seen throughout history.
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Samuel Hodge Born 1978 Lives Elizabeth Bay, New South Wales The Imponderable Archive #8 2015 Giclée print 35 x 24 cm 1 of 5 Courtesy the artist and Alaska Projects $1,250.00
Jamie Holcombe My practice is centred on the reappropriation of what remains and the merging of images. Sometimes assisted with text, dye, play doh, beads, silk and paper. Subjects vary, and often a queerish gaze is applied to manipulate the intention of the original in order to interrogate modes of narrative and constructions of the self at play. What remains is instead submitted to a state of ambiguity; to a constant state of ecstatic and desirous resistance and conclusive representation.
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Born 1958 Lives Wagga Wagga, New South Wales Nullarbor Whale 2015 Digital Photographic Print 100 x 150 cm 5 of 20 Courtesy the artist $2,500.00
My work alludes to a quiet, slow human catastrophe, where our modern way of life is in a state of crisis, and our human condition is comfortably sedated, lost in an effortless world of melancholic bliss. This is a world shaped by a sense of loss, of not having enough; a world ultimately ruled by fear. Halfway across Australia, in the middle of the Nullarbor Plain and overshadowed by a giant petroleum company’s signpost, there sits an artificial whale. The replica whale rather ironically sports a hand-painted warning to “keep off”, which is more likely inspired by fear of litigation (should someone be injured climbing on the structure) than any protestation about the ongoing human interference with real whales in their own environment. It was a rare day when there had been a downpour of rain, which filled the fenced-off recess beneath the elevated whale. It struck me that the whale was held aloft above a meagre inland sea, conquered, replicated, owned, and could only watch as we mindlessly rush past.
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Kelly Hussey-Smith and Alan Hill Born 1982 and 1989 Lives Prahran, Victoria Wine Glass 2016 Archival Inkjet Print 90 x 72 x 3 cm 1 of 5 Courtesy the artists $1,100.00
Our collaborative practice often explores transitioning relationships between economy and community. This work from the series Aura combines photography and forensic techniques to examine mass-produced objects that have entered our home. These imported, sealed objects appear immaculate, as if untouched by human hand; an illusion created in no small part by photography. The marks found on the surfaces of the objects reveal the human labour behind their production and speak to invisible and repressed journeys and histories.
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Ingvar Kenne Born 1965 Lives Glebe, New South Wales Anonymous, Holiday Makers, Chu Da, Vietnam 2015 Type C Print 100 x 100 cm 2 of 7 Courtesy the artist $2,500.00
I have portrayed people with the same taxonomical approach adhering to strict parameters technically and emotionally for the past 25 years.By necessity there is no narrative linking those people, objects and spaces. Instead the work is connected by process alone. I am compelled to find resolve in the disordered. Looking for conclusions or patterns in what is already there and accepting the sensory and emotional end product of this search. The taxonomy in my work is never intended, yet inevitable. There is no story to be forced, no side to be on, no issue. The very act of taking photographs becomes the constant, the purpose. The finished photographs the understanding. The result is a journal of collected uncertainties that are exposed to the same applied rigour. Side by side it becomes a democratic equalizer, an opposite to to the accidental gathering of the photographs.
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David-Ashley Kerr Born 1986 Lives Weimar, Victoria Nina & Daja 2015 from the series Lux C-Type Photograph 40 x 50 cm 2 of 5 Courtesy the artist $3,000.00
Bronek Kozka Taking its name from the gauge of luminosity for modern electronic devices, Lux draws on this luminescence as a creative light source to stage traditional large format portraits of young people absorbed in these devices. By quietly introducing the phenomena of social media and the proliferation of smartphones and other hand-held devices, this series examines the effects of technology on self-perception, intimacy and the new roles of technology in forming emotional connections. These portraits carry an inherent double voyeurism - the electronic device that captures the gaze of the subject, and that of the viewer/photographer.
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Born 1970 Lives Collingwood, Victoria A successful older man talks to an attractive woman while standing by the pool 2014 Injet print on paper 90 x 107 cm 2 of 5 Courtesy the artist and MARS Gallery $3,500.00
My most recent series Remembering what never happened is set at a party, sometime in the 1980’s. Each scene is choreographed to give a hint of what the story might be. While the actors are real, the stage they appear on is not. The Californian modernist house was designed by architect Andrew Hayes in specific response to one of the characters - the owner of the property. The design was then ‘built’ in the virtual world before being photo-realistically rendered for each specific camera angle. The idea of working with this type of virtual world camera me while working on the series Perfect:Synthetic. In that series I photographed mannequins imbuing them with a sense of the real, this was in many ways a kind of reversal.
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Cathy Laudenbach Born 1956 Lives Canberra, ACT Landscapes of Desire Hallstatt See Hallstatt 2015 Digital Print 78 x 91 cm 1 of 5 Courtesy the artist $2,000.00
Anne MacDonald These photographs were taken in Hallstatt Austria, a 5th century UNESCO listed salt town and its copy, the recently built Hallstatt See in Southern China. Both places, the copy and the copied, now present a mirror to each other. Manipulating and altering the images using methods including copy, cut and paste with altered perspectives, colour and tonal range and leaving traces of the manipulation, the works draw on the idea of mise-en-abyme and duplication. Through the lens of the camera the newly created landscapes seek to challenge and unsettle usual associations and reflect on contemporary issues of landscape, place and narrative photography.
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Born 1960 Lives Fern Tree, Tasmania Candle 2015 Fine art ink-jet print 76.7 x 105 cm 1 of 10 Courtesy the artist and Artereal Gallery $2,500.00
Candle is a meditation on the ephemeral nature of life: the passage of time and the sense of loss experienced due to its’ passing. With each year in age represented by another candle on the cake, the birthday candle is a poignant indicator of the fleeting nature of time. Vanitas still lifes of all periods include slowly burning, guttering or extinguished candles in their repertoire of emphatic warnings about death and the transience of earthly existence.The sugar coated cupcake and scattered candy in Candle reference 16C desert and confectionary still life paintings. Recently the aging effects of high sugar consumption have gained media attention, highlighting the irony that life’s celebrations often center on sugary treats that subsequently hasten its passing. Photography is the perfect medium through which to investigate time. Still photographs not only stop time but also contain a realisation of loss in the fundamental sense that every photograph represents a past moment that is no longer.
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Koji Makino Born 1977 Lives Kensington, New South Wales Between regrets #3 2016 Gelatin silver 50 x 40 cm Open Courtesy the artist $850.00
Laura Moore This work is part of an on-going series, Between Regrets which stems from my desire to feel closer to people who were close to me but now passed on, in particular, my grandmother. Through the act of hand printing, I try to examine interactions between remembering, imagining, and perceiving and their role in physical experience. In making the images I aim to create avenues to revisit my notions about memories and time, and to question the idea that time is necessarily linear, in particular, a peculiar place held by the present. As a photographer as well as a print maker, I am increasingly interested in the materiality of photographic prints. The act of print making is an intimate and private process where visual information of the subject matter captured at the time of within-camera exposure is processed and re-processed, arranged and re-arranged to be moulded into an object of acutely subjective expression and intention.
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Born 1987 Lives Chippendale, New South Wales Likeness #14 2015 Gelatin silver print from phone screen 180 x 127 cm (framed) 1 of 1 Coutesy the artist $5,500.00
Likeness strives to capture both the adolescent subjects and the medium of photography during a shared period of evolution. This generation of teenagers is playing an important role in directing the future of photography through the adoption of new technologies. In turn, as these adolescents are beginning to assert their independence and form their own identities, photography is playing an ever more important role in the way those identities are established. I have captured these portraits on a smartphone then placed the phone in the enlarger to make a traditional silver gelatin print. This entanglement of photographic histories and technologies results in portraits that become more unclear and obscure the closer you get to them.
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Salar Niknafs Born 1980 Lives South Yarra, Victoria In Absence 2015 Digital photograph printed on fine art paper 42 x 32 cm 1 of 2 Courtesy the artist $350.00
Sean O’Connell All beings seem to have emerged from non-being - a state of “pulseless blur” - that spreads further than time and space. This observer-relative realm of pure possibilities can be imagined in multiple ways and different meanings can be ascribed to it. In capturing blank spaces and missing things, I was trying to imbue the viewer with a sense of intimacy, such that invites introspection. I was also trying to remind the viewer how temporary everything is in existence. We intend to create something to manifest our being, but tomorrow can cease to exist too. Looking back at these photographs, I realise that in Absence is my meditation on the notion of finiteness: the desire to concede, absorb and ultimately naturalise our closeness to nothingness.
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Born 1972 Lives Bundeena, New South Wales anthracite torus - electrical photogram 2016 Fomapan 100 large format film, scanned for digital pigment print. 119 x 84 x 3 cm 1 of 1 Courtesy the artist $1,800.00
I image the unseen flow of forces as they move through material and form, using various alternative photographic techniques. In this body of work I electrify mineral samples mined in Australia, using devices and processes I have developed myself, directly onto large format negative film. The material displayed here, anthracite – raw coal – is a material that Australia mines in great quantities. The energy required to extract such minerals, their transportation and eventual processing, embeds an intense energetic imprint upon them. This image tracks not only the inherent qualities of the mineral ore, but also the implied cost – what is required to transform the raw body of our earth into substances for our mundane use.
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Deborah Paauwe Born 1972 Lives Glen Osmond, South Australia Stolen Riddle 3 2015 GiclĂŠe print 100 x 115 cm 1 of 6 Courtesy the artist and CAGPROJECTS Greenaway Gallery Adelaide and Michael Reid Gallery Sydney $5,200.00
Polixeni Papapetrou I strive to create carefully directed poses that are both ambiguous and highly detailed that are never retouched. My work concerns itself with fictions distilled from the real. Using girls and women as subject matter arranged in tableaux form, I try to move across the shifting and interlocking world of childhood memories and their impact on adult life. I have begun research on human hair and its role in defining a woman’s personal identity. The presence or absence of hair on the human body occupies a place in social custom and order both now and far, far back into the proverbial mists of time. Central to my aims is the mixture of identity, gender roles and the underlying ambiguity of what is girl and what is woman. Portraits stripped of the personal identity of the sitters; these images carry still the marks of the self-portrait.
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Born 1960 Lives Fitzroy, Victoria Blinded 2016 Pigment ink print 127 x 85 cm
In Blinded layers of flowers envelop the figure suggesting a oneness between nature and culture as well as foreshadowing the next stage of life. The seasons of nature apply equally to our life-spans. Both flowers and girls are budding and blossoming, but are eventually consigned to wilting. The oneness with nature cancels the gloom of inevitable mortality.
Courtesy the artist and Stills Gallery $8,000.00
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Sarah Rhodes Born 1974 Lives Sydney, New South Wales 18 years and 6 months, 16 years and two months 2015 from the series Becoming Pure pigment on cotton rag 140 x 100 cm 1 of 7 Courtesy the artist $2,200.00
Paul Snell I was looking back to see if you were looking back at me to see me looking back at you. Massive Attack In Becoming, we preview the beginning of a new series of work looking at children coming of age. Aside from their gender, the only other thing we know about the young people in these pictures is how old they are. At ten, we see wideeyed innocence. By eighteen, the defences have gone up. Micro expressions reveal hidden longings. Puberty narrows the eyes. From innocence to scepticism, it’s the strangest evolution. There are no other accessories, props or external clues within the image by which to orient ourselves. The longer we look at the soft markings of the photograph, the subject appears to come of age before our eyes.
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Born 1968 Lives Legana, Tasmania NY # 40.78N_73.94W 2014 Lambda Print Face-mounted to 4.5mm plexiglas 80 x 300 x 3 cm Artist Proof Courtesy the artist and gallery 9 $6,900.00
NY # 40.78N_73.94W is a contemplative piece that presents the viewer with an image of reflection rather than representation. It is from the series Decoding New York and examines the possibilities of abstraction and minimalism in photomedia. This body of work investigates the transformation of photographic modes of production and the manipulation and exploitation of data to invent new visual forms. New York is embedded within the surface tension of each picture plane, is it image or object; is it surface or depth! My aim is to create a phenomenological experience of each location that potentially overwhelms or transcends its physicality. The linear forms are at the same time rich and void.
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Kurt Sorensen Born 1976 Lives Leura, New South Wales I Get Some Terrible Frights Here 2014 Colour photograph 94 x 116 x 3 cm 1 of 5 Courtesy the artist $1,800.00
Jacqui Stockdale On April 15, 1918 David and Emily Joel travelled to the Blue Mountains. The couple were deeply in love, yet Emily’s mental health had been gradually worsening. In fact that day, David had broken Emily out of Callan Park asylum hoping to cure ‘her affliction’. They arrived at the Grand View Hotel, Wentworth Falls at 9pm and were told there were no rooms available. Though the night was dark, the couple asked to leave their bags in the foyer as they ‘wished to take the mountain air’. The doorman would later report that the couple were displaying ‘eccentric behaviour’. Three days later on an isolated bush track, a property owner saw the figure of a woman standing in the mist. He asked the barefooted woman if she was lost to which she replied ‘I am not lost, but I do get some terrible frights here’ before she disappeared back into the mist. Two days after the woman was found nearly naked and suffering from exposure. She was taken to Penrith and identified as Emily Joel. Emily lived for seven days before succumbing. David Joel has never been found.
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Born 1968 Lives Preston, Victoria Kelly 2015 from the series Boho. Type C print 140 x 110 cm 5 of 8 Courtesy the artist and This is No Fantasy + Diane Tanzer Gallery $5,000.00
The Boho series, refers to the Australian folkloric tales of antihero Ned Kelly as well as symbols and props that represent ideas of ‘magic objects’. I grew up in Benalla (Kelly country) and have always been curious about this particular time in Australian history. As a young horse rider racing through the scrub, I would question what was missing in my history lessons; the obsession with the bushrangers, the contradictions, thoughts about what happened to the indigenous tribes of the area, etc. I returned three decades later to the Benalla Historical Society to begin my research, now as an established artist and created, The Boho (named after a small town off the Hume Highway). A creative investigation that will continue. In Kelly, singer/songwriter, Paul Kelly takes the place of Ned as ‘the fighter’, based on a historical photograph of him poised to punch. The sash in this picture, held like a sacred or sentimental cloth, is a replica of the sash that Ned Kelly was awarded as a young boy after saving a kid from drowning. It was also found on Ned Kelly when he was shot in his armour at the last stand in Glenrowan, Victoria. page 45 / JUWSPA 2016
Christian Thompson Born 1978 Lives London, New South Wales Ancient Bloom 2015 C-type print on Fuji Pearl Metallic paper 100 x 100 cm Artist Proof Courtesy the artist and Michael Reid Gallery $10,000.00
Christian Thompson often appears in his photographs and videos yet they are not self-portraits. Instead he uses his body to present ideas about identity and the collision of cultures.
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Justine Varga Born 1984 Lives Allawah, New South Wales Marking Time 2016 Chromogenic hand printed photograph 122 x 98.5 cm 2 of 5 Courtesy the artist and Hugo Michel Gallery $4250
Marking Time is a cameraless photograph that sits at the edge of forgetfulness. The product of a duration of bodily actions (in which a piece of film was, for example, drawn on and handled, among other things), each mark, action and moment slips into the next. Through a single photograph we gain access to an impossible architecture of time that continually embeds the past within the present. The palimpsistic quality of this photograph, where a drawn layer submits to, is subsumed to, the laying down of yet another – manifests the act of remembering as a kind of magic writing pad. These are the elements embodied as and in this photograph, which has become a bruised skin of emulsion supported by a fragile armature of memory.
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Lydia Wegner Born 1988 Lives Fitzroy, Victoria Red Block 2016 Archival Inkjet Print 70 x 50 cm Courtesy the artist and Arc One Gallery $1,600.00
Yiorgo Yiannopoulos My work develops through process, placement and the application of various effects. Materials and objects including wire, paper and plastics are arranged together to create intriguing yet delicate constructions that are then photographed against striking colour backgrounds. I aim to make images rather than take images and use the camera as a tool in this process. With the use of analogue techniques including lighting and reflection brings a deliberate unsettling of pictorial space, where line, form and reflection all blend to create a sense of ambiguity and weightlessness. The final images appear as abstract visual entities, bringing attention towards the formation of surface and the illusion of the image itself.
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Born 1993 Lives Redfern, New South Wales Cum Laude #9 2015 Pigment print (framed) 70 x 53 1 of 5 Courtesy the artist $800.00
Sites that facilitate queer and homosexual erotic encounters are diverse. Clustered throughout the city, toilets, bathhouses, parks and the streets themselves are sites of queer sexual resistance which, when they lay dormant, can be activated with a single glance. Cum Laude is a study of sex in the semipublic setting of the gay bathhouse. The series diminishes biological imperatives, as semen filled condoms, unsheathed on site, are presented contorted as a taxonomy of alluring sexual ephemera. At the same time biological and sensual, the objects are honoured as jewel-like globules.
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Anne Zahalka Born 1957 Lives Newtown, New South Wales Threshold (tablet, security camera) 2015 Archival pigment ink on rag paper 102 x 137 cm 3 of 5 Courtesy the artist and ARC ONE Gallery Melbourne $10,000.00
‘Standing on the threshold of paths, passages, stairwells and doorways, I am held in a state of suspension and stillness, of hesitation, temptation, desire, security, welcome and respect’ (from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space). As a visitor to Morocco, I felt both stranger and trespasser, like an outsider looking in, observing this complex country and its collisions between the ancient and modern world. Using visual tropes such as the staircase, alleyway or doorway, the viewer is taken to the threshold. In recording the spaces and traces left, I hoped to show evidence of the the quality of light and the people and objects that it illuminates. The work explores my relationship to this place and reflects on the intimacies of this experience.
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Guests at the opening of the 2013 Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award. Photo A Chomicz.
THE JOSEPHINE ULRICK PRIZES 1998–2014
PRIZING DIVERSITY
A
G O L D
C O A S T
T R A D I T I O N
PRIZING DIVERSITY THE JOSEPHINE ULRICK PRIZES 1998–2014
PREVIOUS WINNERS Previous Winners and Judges of the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award 2002 David Stephenson Judge: Dr Isobel Crombie 2003 Anne Ferran Judge: Julie Ewington 2004 2004 Cherine Fahd Judge: Helen Ennis 2005 Farrell & Parkin Judge: Alasdair Foster 2006 Jacky Redgate Judge: Julie Rrap 2007 Paul Ferman Judge: Dr Martyn Jolly
edited by
VIRGINIA RIGNEY
2008 Helen Pynor, Glenn Sloggett – joint winners Judge: Trent Parke
and
2009 Polixeni Papapetrou Judge: Naomi Cass
NIGEL KRAUTH
2010 Lynne Roberts-Goodwin Judge: Judy Annear 2011 Darren Sylvester Judge: Shaune Lakin edited by VIRGINIA RIGNEY and NIGEL KRAUTH
2012 Eugenia Raskopoulos Judge: Kon Gouriotis 2013 Liam Benson, Justine Varga – joint winners Judge: Professor Anne Noble 2014 Shaun Gladwell Judge: Natasha Bullock 2015 Owen Leong Judge : Natalie King
Prizing Diversity A Gold Coast Tradition The Josephine Ulrick Prizes 1998 - 2014 In 2015 Thames and Hudson published a history of the three prizes that the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Foundation for the Arts has supported; the Literature and Poetry Prizes and the Photography Award. This handsome 272 page publication edited by Virginia Rigney of Gold Coast City Gallery and Nigel Krauth of Griffith University, features reflections on the prizes by Frank Moorehouse, Alasdair Foster and M.T.C Cronin and presents, in chronological order, the prizewinning entries of each year. Together the volume builds to a richly layered snapshot of Australian creativity at the start of this century. The book is available for sale for $60.00. ISBN : 9780500500552
GOLD COAST CITY GALLERY