E M E R G I N G 2 0 2 0

ADAM DOUGHTY

R Y

N L E E

J S O N

G ORGIA FREW

G O S F O R D R E G I O N A L G A L L E R Y | 2 8 M A R C H - 1 0 M A Y 2 0 2 0

The Emerging competition is a vibrant exhibition of cutting-edge contemporary art by early career artists. Entries were received from artists across New South Wales, aged from 18 to 30, who proposed a body of work for consideration. The four selected finalists represent excellence in their chosen area and are all to be congratulated. The resulting exhibition gives the audience a fresh insight into the future of the visual arts. This year the range of work includes digital media, textiles, sculpture and conceptual art exploring a variety of challenging social and political issues.

Emerging is different to most art competitions as it gives the finalists an opportunity to show their work within context. The artists have space to create an immersive installation. The ability of the artists to convey meaning through the relationship between works, and the physicality of the gallery space, is an important aspect in how the prize is judged.

2020 is the ninth time the Emerging competition has been held and we are pleased to offer this $5,000 prize to continue our commitment to provide opportunities for young artists.

Tim Braham | Team Leader, Gosford Regional Gallery

Don't Tell Me To Calm

Down

Archival systems and institutions continue to marginalise, censor and erase Queer narratives. This body of work engages with a queerness and political drive characteristic to handmade and machine crafted textile objects. It reconciles the emotional work of Queer identification and navigates the development of a personal archive. These works seek to step outside traditional systems of archive to promote Queerness loudly and free of heteronormativity, documenting the personal lived experience of the artist.

As a Queer identifying person, one’s lived experience is often fraught with anxiety and the sense of alienation from community. This is due to a lack of visibility or representation, particularly within mainstream institutional contexts such as archives. This marginalisation is characterised by an erasure of Queer histories and artefacts often making it difficult to historically contextualise the experience of LGBTQIA+ people. This is due to the ephemeral and subversive nature of Queer artefacts, and the grassroots, anti-establishment activism that Queer Liberation was founded upon. This incompatibility has led to the development of a sidestepping of mainstream systems by Queer artists, such as LJ Roberts and Paul Yore who promote the visibility of Queer histories and identities through their work.

Working across constructed textiles, digital and archival video, embellishment, everyday objects, spray paint, text and screen printing, my work imagines new systems of personal documentation and suggests that Queerness and the emotional pressure that comes with that term is best dealt with through aesthetics of protest, emotional vulnerability and the reclamation of systems of stereotypical oppression.

Adam Doughty

Queering the Archive, video still (detail) single channel video, 8min.

Adam Doughty is an interdisciplinary textiles artist. He is currently studying B.F.A. Honours at the University of New South Wales and holds a B.A. in Theatre & Performance from the University of New

South Wales. He was a finalist and People’s Choice award winner in the Kudos Emerging Artist + Designer Award (2019)

Don’t Tell Me To Calm Down

Georgia Frew

Pitt Street Body-sculpture (2018), calico canvas, acrylic wool, steel welding rod, porcelain.

Feel This is a series of intuitive performances that explore the relationship between objects, movement, place and emotion. The movement-based performances are influenced by the Japanese art of Butoh (the dance of darkness). They critique the concept of contemporary ceremony and sacredness amidst the pressures of three different social, geographical and personal environments.

The first performance takes place in the country surrounding Wilcannia, where the slow death of the Darling River has had a devastating effect on communities. The body-sculpture was designed to force the body into a hunched position and cause physical discomfort. It represents my personal sense of fear for the future of these communities, the landscape and my displacement and guilt for being a white woman experiencing these things on unceded indigenous land.

The Pitt Street performance is in reaction to the intensity of the city and the glaring face of capitalism and consumerist culture in the CBD of Sydney. The body-sculpture is reminiscent of something holy or sacred with the wide, white cloak as the clean façade, and beneath it the dirty truth of my experience writhing in an anxious dance with the city and passers-by. The headpiece covers my face entirely, removing any individual identity and inducing a kind of claustrophobia. The porcelain spines surrounding my face rattle and shake like something poisonous sending out a warning.

The Home performance directly relates to my experience of family, my personal narrative and history. The Home body-sculpture comprises of many long strips of different fabrics found in various forgotten garbage bags under my mother’s house that have been cut and sewn together. They hang from my mother’s front veranda and the performance thattakes place there is reflective of the simultaneously comforting and constricting nature of “the family”.

Georgia Frew is an interdisciplinary

performance artist. She holds a Bachelor of Fine

Arts – Honours (Visual Arts) First Class Honours

from the University of Sydney. She was awarded

the The University of Sydney Academic

Merit Award in 2018. She has been exhibited

in a number of group exhibitions in Sydney,

Newcastle and Mittagong NSW.

Feel This

Wonnarua

Wonnarua aims to provoke discussion around themes of Indigenous ways of living in juxtaposition with the unsustainable, damaging ways of the Western Settler-State using stolen lands. In today’s current global state of climate emergency, the need to embrace traditional Indigenous environmental knowledge is more crucial than ever before. The traditional custodians of these lands have sustainably looked after country for 90,000+ years, yet in the short 231 years since colonisation these lands have been raped, pillaged and sold for profit while the Aboriginal culture along with their vast knowledge for country and sustainable land management methods have been suppressed and put to the side. This is the second wave of genocide in this country, things must be changed now before it’s too late.

Ryan Lee

Wonnarua (2019), video still (detail), 2 Channel 4K UHD video, Dolby Atmos Stereo Soundcscape, 1:44 sec.

This work is a push for cultural and climate action; a plea for politicians to listen and act on climate change, to put their ego and wallets aside and to listen to the knowledge of First Nations people here in this country who know this land best. The video diptych juxtaposes cinematic living portraits of five Aboriginal members of the Wonnarua tribe in comparison with provoking drone shots of the vast Musswellbrook coal mines; which are situated within the heart of the Wonnarua nation. The powerful expressions of these Indigenous men sharing a direct gaze with the viewer creates immediate connection and conjures up deep and profound inquisition into the veiled events and resulted impacts that have taken place on this country in the 231 years since colonisation began in Australia.

Ryan Lee is an Indigenous Director of Photography and video artist who holds

a Bachelor of Media Arts - Honours (Digital Media) from the University of

New South Wales. He has exhibited in the Sydney Fringe Festival and contributed

to a number of projects in the film and television industry.

EJ Son

(Left) Kimchi in My mouth 5eva (2018), video still. (Right) I‘m a warm tone, I don’t look good in pink (2018), video still.

This is not a self portrait is a recreation of my private space. I was taught to occupy as little space as possible, to be a lady, to close my legs, to lower my voice, and so forth. Thus I find great joy in occupying and dominating space, to open and reveal, exposing myself, rebelling against the stereotype and assumptions of me.

In the video I’m a warm tone, I don’t look good in pink I appear ‘armoured’ in pink ‘torture’ devices. The objects are East Asian beauty inventions I have purchased online. The results are proven to be quite ineffective, but the placebo effect is powerful enough for their existence. There’s a product for all insecurities. The colour pink seems to be an attempt at ‘cutifying’ the absurdity, making it palatable for the grim ‘functionality’ of these objects. Later I endure a suffocating feeling as I attempt to blow bubble gum while wearing a nose clip that limits the oxygen coming through. One needs to wonder if their daily practices to look ‘beautiful’ are to empower oneself, or if it promotes low self-esteem, imposed by misogynistic standards of beauty.

The idea of branding my ‘Asian-ness’ and cultural specificity provoked the work ‘Kimchi in My mouth 5eva’. I am sitting on the floor, with my back to the camera. The reflection from the mirror is obstructed, the viewers are curious, as the buzzing sound of the tattoo machine and my “unlady- like” position, is suggestive of masturbatory act. Thus, making the actions of branding myself, an act of self-pleasure. The masochist act of tattooing the word ‘kimchi’ on my inner lip is my way of reclaiming my subjectivity; from the days I called my self a banana, yellow on the outside, white on the inside. I am Korean inside and out. I count to three in Korean and say “Kimchi~~” which is the Korean equivalent of the West’s “1, 2, 3, say cheese!”, coming full circle from my internalised racism.

EJ Son is a ceramicist, sculptor, video and installation artist. She holds a Bachelor of Visual

Arts (First Class Honours) from the University of Sydney, has held three solo exhibitions and

participated in a number of curated group exhibitions in Sydney.

This is not a self portrait 2.0

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