Research Background:
Artwork investigates interpretations of politics & history via painterly traditions and allegorical approaches to narrative and figuration. Framed by texts on painting’s capacity to stage meaning and action; Joselit (2016) Painting-marking, Scoring, Storing, Speculating, and Bakhtinian idea of the dialogical in pictorial art using medium, gestural, bodily, and colour codes; Wall (2016) Dialogic in Painting. Work links to artists addressing themes of history & representation filtered through politics, gender, post-colonialism in Green (ed) (2000) History Painting Re-assessed, exampled by practices of Australian artist Juan Davila (MCA, Sydney, 2006) and Justin Mortimer, UK ('Tomorrow', Space K, Gwacheon, Korea, 2020). Painting researches how visual narrative is structured, asking are such principles applicable to private as well as public narratives? Research motifs are the place of the subject in painting, the role of witnessing and iconographies of the local.
Research Contribution:
Work examines the relationship between subject matter and content, beauty and horror, and figuration & abstraction. Artwork is oil, acrylic on cut-canvas. Employing juxtaposed techniques, screen printed elements, cut ups on raw linen grounds and composite figures at a large scale. Contemporary refugee figure stands within historical 1929 urban-scape of Shepparton, Victoria. The painting suggest that everyday vernacular and referents, local place and identity may all be used within allegorical frameworks, re-imaging the grounds of history in art.
Research Significance:
Work selected for exhibition by curatorial panel from a record number of 439 entries nationally. Finalists include Adam Lee, Richard Lewer, Marion Borgelt & Jahnne Pasco-White. Previous winners Dale Frank (2005), Tim Johnson (2011), Guan Wei (2015)
Bendigo Art Gallery director Jessica Bridgfoot states, ‘The Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize an important survey of contemporary Australian painting’.
History
Subtype
- Original Visual Artwork
