ART

FELIX ASHFORD
”INVOCATION FOR CLOUT IN THE SYDNEY ART SCENE 2K21”

ARTIST STATEMENT

In late 2021, the work was lain upon the floor of a garage rave, and appropriately trampled upon, swept up under the frenzied heels of some pseudo-Shamanic bacchanal. More recently, it was hung during an inter-art school party at the Burdekin Hotel on Oxford Street. Today, the filthy satin cloth becomes a sacred shroud.

BIO

Felix Ashford is a Sydney-based artist and third-year student currently studying Visual Arts and Studies of Religion at Sydney College of the Arts. By interrogating nothing, his work seeks to surrender at the wing'd feet of Rāzīʾēl.

MOHAMMED BAJRAI
”EOLIA”

ARTIST STATEMENT

Eolia is a photographic series that tells a story about Mother Nature’s struggle in the past 100 years. They are set at the beginning of the Industrial Age and go through three stages of growth and destruction. The work aims to communicate a sense of urgency to protect the environment.

BIO

Mohammed Bajrai was born in 2002; a Saudi film photographer fascinated by nature’s beauty. He also loves travelling to new places and interacting with their people. Through photography, he hopes to capture the essence of a place and time. Mohammed also loves using photography as a medium for storytelling, curating moments that tell beautiful, touching stories.

BLAKE BRIDGEWATER
”VIEW D8-56”

Blake Bridgewater, View D8-56, 2022, Virtual Reality, headset and remotes, 4 mins.

ARTIST STATEMENT

View-D856 considers the reformation of our psychophysical environment into new modalities of virtual experience. It imagines the potential virtualisation of the physical world in reaction to future ecological disasters. By disrupting and editing the video data that enables the seamless recreation of spatial environments, the viewer is challenged to consider the virtual in its abstracted, mediated form and the pixel as a new ecological building block.

BIO

Blake is currently studying a Bachelor of Visual Arts with Advanced Studies majoring in Art History, living on Dharug Land and working on Gadigal land. He is interested in analogue processes and their translations to digital spheres as well as the relationship between land-based practice and virtual environments. His work centres around a process-oriented approach to virtual reality installation, image making and sound.

OLIVE BURGESS
”MORE OR LESS”

ARTIST STATEMENT

The Matchstick, a nod to decision, risk, ignition, and ambition. The chair, a trope for familiarity, peace, home, and comfort. These things exist in relationship, both conceptually as well as within their materiality. More or Less is both a conversation, and a place to reflect. It celebrates less, while understanding that more is always there, begging for attention.

BIO

Olive Burgess is a multidisciplinary artist who currently works predominantly within the modes of printmaking and sound.

Her practice involves investigating her coastal rural upbringing, in pursuit of drawing threads between individual and collective experiences in order to investigate her relationship to broader cultural contexts. Her delights outside of art making are sports, kinokuniya, and any new culinary adventure.

ASHLEY CAGAUAN
”EMERGING”

ARTIST STATEMENT

Emerging challenges the idea of photography being a reliable form of recording a memory or the past by addressing time and change. This is achieved by manipulating darkroom chemicals and materials to capture live chemical reactions on paper, essentially transgressing conventional photographic processes to try new possibilities of image making.

BIO

Ashley Cagauan is a second-year SCA student exploring alternative modes of image making through camera-less photography and the manipulation of darkroom processes.

FRANCIS CAI
” SUNNYRAIN”

Francis Cai, 2020, Sunnyrain, video, 2:05.

ARTIST STATEMENT

“Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuang Zhou. Between Zhuang Zhou and the butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.” — Zhuangzi, On the Equality of Things.

Incarnate as a butterfly, shuttles back and forth between the fragments of leaving, obstacles and emotions that suddenly emerges in memory. 

BIO

Francis Cai is a Chinese visual artist currently based in Sydney and Auckland. He focuses on individuals’ confusion and self-awareness arising from the post-pandemic era. 

Continuing from his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photo Media, Francis is a recent graduate of the University of Sydney, Master of Moving Image program.

TAHLIA CURNOW
”A TRILOGY OF FABLES”

ARTIST STATEMENT

A Trilogy of Fables represents three fairytale worlds inspired by illustrations from 19th century children's literature. Each piece is individually shaped from the stories of Alice in Wonderland, The Little Mermaid and Rapunzel. When viewing these works, the audience are encouraged to immerse themselves into the worlds of magical detail.

BIO

Hi! My name’s Tahlia, I’m 19, and a first year student studying Visual Arts at the SCA. I’ve always had a passion for storytelling. Every person enjoys a story differently, so my goal is to create works that tell a story where everyone can enjoy looking at a little of everything.

EMILY GREENWOOD
“TROLLEY HERDER”

Emily Greenwood, Trolley Herder, 2022, video, 3:48 min.

ARTIST STATEMENT

The performance explores the commodification of physical labour. The role of the trolley collector is a commodification of the mundane and tedious. Though without their work there would be no order in our society. The performance intends to lighten trolley herders' burdens and assist in maintaining order in our society.

BIO

Emily Greenwood is a mixed-Tongan, multidisciplinary artist and writer living in Eora. Their work explores themes involving body dysmorphia, intergenerational trauma, loss of culture, sexism, racism and classism. Their most significant work to date is their self- written, produced and published intersectional feminist zine ‘GRRL ZINE’.

NISHTA GUPTA
”BUT WHITE ISN’T A RACE, RIGHT? AND OTHER ONE-LINE JOKES”

ARTIST STATEMENT

In my installation, I explore the history of the modern ‘clown’ as having been underpinned by racist practices such as brown and blackface. I reflected on my childhood viewing of the 1986 film “The Party”, where Peter Sellers applies brownface in order to enact the bumbling misguidances of an Indian man; a physical comedy routine that later inspired Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean and Apu in The Simpsons (the latter of which was voiced by a white man). In any case, brown and black bodies have been consistently appropriated and exploited in comedy, and have never been the writers of the jokes in which they are the punchline. In my work, I embody visual motifs of the modern clown including whiteface and white gloves, which were historically used by blackface minstrels. On my female and brown body, the poorly applied facepaint and oversized gloves form unnerving caricatures of the clown archetype.

BIO

I am a third year Visual Arts student, and use my practice to continually understand, dissect and evolve my identity as a woman of colour operating in colonial Australia.

BONNIE HUANG
”JESUS CRUCIFIED ON THE CROSS”

ARTIST STATEMENT

Where do we find salvation and community? Recognisable items of queer nightlife are crucified to the wall- nailed and bleeding. It is a disembodied attempt to invoke what it would be like to regularly get ready for the club. This work captures the duality between the life-affirming qualities provided by queer nightlife with the underlying physical and emotional pain that is often endured to be a part of it all. Despite being a critique on the way we contort ourselves to fit in, it is also an act of prayer and yearning.

BIO

Bonnie Huang is an artist of Chinese background living and working on unceded Dharug and Gadigal lands. Their work interrogates the narratives and imageries of personal and collective spheres to create a playful intersection between the saccharine and the deviant.

RAYMOND HUYNH
”FAMILY PORTRAIT (HUYNHWARE)”

ARTIST STATEMENT

Using the iconography of moon jars, Family portrait (Huynhware) aims to reflect and interrogate representations of the figure’ via the ‘figural’, by touching upon aspects of identity, memory and representation through the timeless iconography of the vessel form itself, ‘makers mark’, and the unique firing process of Raku, allowing me to incorporate the distinct materiality of hair into my ‘family portrait’.

This is conveyed by incorporating hair collected from each of my family members being scorched or ‘marked’ into the surface of their respected vessels, to create a tension between ‘portraiture’ and ‘object’, through the distinct materiality of hair and its associations strengthening and affecting the ‘reading’ of this artwork. Interestingly, due to the ‘essence’ or DNA of my family being absorbed into the vessel form, the ‘family of pots’, further suggest a ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ of individuals, by making the ‘unseen’ ‘seen’, through traces or remnants of my family members.

Therefore, creating abstracted representations of my family or 'figures' through the 'figural' denoting a 'family portrait' or collection of vessels and interrogating representations of the figure through the transformative properties of ceramics.

BIO

Raymond is a developing Australian artist who primarily works in ceramics and photo media. Exploring reoccurring themes of absence/presence, botanicals or 'wherever the conceptual idea or research leads me', Raymond utilises the transformational and distinct processes or properties of ceramics, photo media or any other materials to have a conversation with these mediums, and to materialise conceptual ideas into artworks.

ZAK KALIVAS
”ANTHROPOID”

ARTIST STATEMENT

Representing the exploration of "photography" and its artistic collaboration with CGI - becoming something rather its own medium, as well as the evolution and augmentation of the human body as merely an aesthetic till it becomes something rather distant, perhaps extraterrestrial. The two dominant dimensions of my work (medium and subject) are supposed to work alongside each other by complimenting the extremities that they have become.

BIO

Zak Kalivas is a contemporary Artist, based in Sydney, Australia, working within fashion photography, video art and 3D Art - experimenting with blending photo media and CGI. Zak Kalivas was a selected artist to showcase their video artwork titled 'CTRL+C' in ARTEXPRESS, 2019 at the Art Gallery of NSW.

LUKAS KALOS
”UNTITLED (WATCHING HOW ALL THIS PLAYS OUT) (THE CRESCENDO SKIPS A BEAT, MY HEART, ITS ONLY TRUE UNDERSTUDY, PLAYS THE NOTE ALL TOO LONG, BUT I KNOW YOU LIKED IT LIKE THAT, THE ACOUSTICS ARE GREAT IN HERE) ((I WAS) THINKING 'BOUT YOU (THAT WAS) BEFORE THERE WAS YOU, (I PROMISE) I ONLY HAVE EYES FOR YOU, (DON'T TELL ME THAT! THERE'S NO WAY!) AM I LOSING YOU FOR GOOD (?, BUT NOW) YOU'RE NEAR ME (, BUT AT LEAST RIGHT NOW ANYWAY,) YOUR MINE) (LOVERS INTERLUDE)”

ARTIST STATEMENT

Replacing bodies with stereo speakers, looking down on an infinite make out, both whispering The Best of Sade in perfect symmetry. Blurring the lines between a pondered metaphor and perverted scene, the work tries to capture a fleeting sensuality and extrapolate a moment of connection; being machined to love eternally.

BIO

​​Lukas is an artist working on Gadigal Land. His work mediates cultural phenomena to create systems of emotional experience through curated sound installations.

SONAL KAMBLE
”MULCH”

Sonal Kamble, MULCH, 2022, Video, 55 sec.

ARTIST STATEMENT

MULCH mediates depression independent of a defined inner world, constructing the experience solely in a decaying outer world. Against the backdrop of the NSW flooding event, MULCH presents the natural world— traditionally represented as a space ‘removed’ from the psychological— as an expression of it.

BIO

Sonal Kamble is a Media and Communications student who has interests in things that can make her cry.

LILE KHAJAVI
”HER PORTRAIT”

ARTIST STATEMENT

Empty of remorse, the Devil gave Lile a rose

She smelled the rose and decided to close the doors

Later, they had a feast involving Billy’s horse

The horse had a hoarse voice

And asked us not to have him as our main course

We laughed as he cried in a closet full of oaks

The oaks were in love with Lile’s ghost

But now the ghost is mad and doesn’t want to be our host

BIO

Lile Khajavi is a Visual Arts student at the Sydney College of the Arts.

LAURANNE LEUNIS
”METAMORPHOSIS”

View the video

ARTIST STATEMENT

Lauranne explores the boundaries of femininity and the idea of ​​'the perfect female body'. By making herself vulnerable to the camera, she questions her male/female body characteristics. She playfully shows her personal struggles without passing judgment.

BIO

Lauranne is 23 year old documentary photographer and filmmaker. She is born and raised in Belgium. What she wants to say with her work and how she develops as an artist are two very important things for her. More and more she is trying to experiment with the medium of photography. She finds it the most interesting as projects start from a personal matter. Now she is experimenting in how to tell a story in a more abstract and creative way.

ZUNI MENDEZ
”STILL”

ARTIST STATEMENT

Within a bustling world finding stillness is essential. Stillness is a state which is very often underappreciated and frowned upon, although vital in the roadmap of life. These photographs aim to capture and celebrate stillness within a period of my life which was defined by constant movement and chaos.

BIO

I am a current first year student at the College of the Arts at Sydney. My focus in the arts lies heavily on graphic and photographic works, and in the future a hopeful intersection between the two.

FRANK LIN
”THE MOON IS A BEAUTIFUL BEAST”

ARTIST STATEMENT

The moon is conventionally the opposite to the sun’s light and power, yet the moon is itself a light in the dark. The moonlight is soft and welcoming to deviancy. As a private and introverted person, it is during the darkness of night I felt safe to express myself.

BIO

I am an amateur artist using art to uncover ideas and secrets about myself, hoping to connect to others or elicit curiosity/confusion with my experiences.

BLAKE MALONE
”TO LEAVE THE CAVE INTO THE SUNLIGHT”

ARTIST STATEMENT

Blake’s practice involves a critical form of painting. He consciously changes his techniques and styles from painting to painting, in an attempt to critique contemporary art’s tendency towards the marketable brand and commodifiable object.

He often uses the internet as a resource, seeing it as a democratising tool, allowing artists to revolt against traditional artistic genres, and instead draw upon the vast repository of images from art history and the everyday.

BIO

Blake Malone is an artist living and working in Sydney, Australia. His works have been exhibited in numerous exhibitions both nationally and internationally, including Japan, Finland and Sweden.

ELLA MCGAW
”FOCUS”

ARTIST STATEMENT

Completed amid the stressful and crazed final exams, Focus expresses my own encounter with the universal experience of an inability to focus during these high-pressure times. My intent with the diptych was to materialise this and establish a feeling of support for others through the solidarity of these struggles.

BIO

I am a first-year uni student majoring in visual arts. I've been involved in the 2021/22 ARTEXPRESS at the Art Gallery of NSW, Tweed Regional Gallery, and virtual gallery, and a finalist/winner in the 13-18 category in Northern beaches environmental prize 2022 and selected artist for involvement in Eden Unearthed 2022.

JENNIFER JIA LI VAN RATINGEN
”LABOUR OF LOVE”

ARTIST STATEMENT

Tablets read from left to right:

家和万事兴 .( house divided against itself cannot stand)

I don’t care.

不要⾃私了. (Stop being selfish.)

How am I being selfish?

你應該更體貼點 (you need to be more considerate.)

I don’t want to talk about this.

你要⼀些⽔果嗎？(Would you like some fruit?)

ok, thank you.

These contradictory themes of familiarity, meaning, mundanity and the Quotidian are elaborated on in the artist’s plaster and brick sculpture. The precarious display of text, resolutely carved into plaster and balanced on house bricks, aims to uncover the monumental quality of everyday language and interaction. However, despite all of the instability, the intergenerational conflict, the implicit anger and frustration, these everyday interactions are still ultimately imbued with a labour of love and intimacy. The final tablet culminates in the all too familiar peace offering in Asian households; “Would you like some fruit?”. Both a representation of the seemingly mundane in everyday dialogue and how our explorations of such dialogue can reveal greater dynamics and meaning.

BIO

Mixed media artist working around themes of The Everyday and the complexities of familiar relationships. Drawing from my own multi-cultural background, my work is often semi-autobiographical. However, I aim to transform the intimately personal aspects of my life into more monumental and universally relatable works for the audience.

JORJA RYNNE
”162 NEPTUNE HOUSE”

ARTIST STATEMENT

162 neptune house offers itself as a prayer flag to a divine botanical alien life form, functioning as a sculptural interface for the transmutation of consciousness. The channelled image nurtures a sustained energy: from formless into form and form into formless, from non-visible light into visible light, and condensed matter into vaporisation. The diaphanous portal is purposed to deconstruct low vibrational energetic structures into higher vibrational ones, existing to hold those who allow themselves to be held by it.

BIO

Jorja Rynne is a Sydney-based artist and third-year student at the Sydney College of the Arts, who in working across digital mediums and sculpture, explores intertextual knowings of pan-psychic becoming and processes of alchemical transmutation.

ARYAN SETHI
”THE GIFT OF INDIA”

ARTIST STATEMENT

Embracing an art form iconic to Indian art, my wheel-thrown pots aim to immerse my audience into an authentic, cultivated, and sensory experience of India - a country where significant diversity permeates culture, religion, architecture, landscape, and language. My pots retain information inherent to each respective region of the country, with manifestations of temples, landscapes and languages achieved through distinct carving and surface treatment techniques.

BIO

England-born but equally proud of his Punjabi/Gujarati heritage, Aryan is driven by a strong vision of integrating sub-continental history, culture, and music within his art and within the Western world. His individual art practice primarily focuses upon ceramic wheel-throwing and hand building, but also demonstrates a keen interest in experimenting with underglazes and painting prominent figures.

CHELSY VICTORIANO
”NOSTALGIA”

Chelsy Victoriano, Nostalgia, 2021, video, 9:03 min.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Nostalgia delves into the accumulation of one’s memory and one’s past; how it both evolves and deteriorates. Here, memory occupies both realms of time; past and present within the same space. In exploration of this, memory becomes matter, this organic and animate substance that builds and fades over time.

BIO

Chelsy Victoriano is a practicing multidisciplinary artist who is currently completing a Bachelor of Visual Arts at the University of Sydney. She specialises in experimental video art, typically exploring themes of nostalgia, memory and time.

JENNIFER LARA WHITE
”I CAN OWN THIS MEMORY FOREVER; IT'S ALL GOING TO COME DOWN”

Jennifer Lara White, I can own this memory forever; It’s all going to come down, 2022, Video, 2:54 min.

ARTIST STATEMENT

The home movie exists inexplicably between decentralised film-making and narcissism. The boundary between author, auteur and actor is fluid; and so is the boundary between reality, fiction, memory and projection. There is a longing to be reunited with a moment so corrupted through constant rehearsal that it is completely distinct from the real moment it signifies. The power of the camcorder lies behind the lens; it’s the power to make you feel nostalgic for the worst times of your life.

BIO

Jennifer Lara White is an emerging artist living and working on Gadigal Land in Darlinghurst, Sydney. Her practice investigates the experience of nostalgia, time, conceptual and spiritual existence by adopting and modifying vintage photographic and film technology as a medium for artmaking.

SOPHIE XIAO YUE ZHOU
”ELONGATED PUPAS WITH METAL IN OUR BODIES”

Sophie Xiao Yue Zhou, elongated pupas with metal in our bodies, 2021, Video, 6:32 min.

ARTIST STATEMENT

To manipulate my drawings, I attached metal-looking armatures. Like me, my drawings had bones. What I found when animating their movements was a sadistic play because I had to literally break their bones. The animation is a conscious reflection of my emotional and physical process of creating the piece.

BIO

Sophie Xiao Yue Zhou is an Australian-born Manchurian-Chinese artist. He is currently enjoying the series "The Owl House".

ESTELLE YOON
”HALMEONI 할머니”

ARTIST STATEMENT

Halmeoni 할머니 is a series of 35mm photographs of Estelle Yoon’s grandmother and their younger sister’s hands. The work encompasses both familial love and struggles, where expressing love can be difficult especially in a lot of Korean families. Estelle explores their own cultural identity, diasporic experiences and the discovery of intergenerational love.

BIO

Estelle Yoon is a queer, Korean-Australian visual artist currently based on Gadigal land. Estelle’s artistic practice through the analogue photographic medium explores how time can be arrested, created and sculpted. They are passionate about the visual poetry that photographs taken on film and developed in the darkroom can offer.

ANASTASSIA ZUBKOVA
”HER BIRTH, LET IT COME NOW”

Anastassia Zubkova, Her Birth, let it come now, 2022, Video, 35 sec. Audio by Surrender by Jhene Aiko (feat Dr. Chill).

ARTIST STATEMENT

An otherworldly aura blossoms through the performance, portraying a metaphorical self portrait of my experience with spiritual awakening - silk taking on an emotive tangibility to express escaping pre-enlightenment notions. We are malleable, like sand, until we allow growth to mould us into awakened and free spirits.

BIO

I am currently an undergraduate student at SCA exploring my artistic individuality on the journey of becoming an art curator. Visual arts has been my passion since I can remember - my family recalls me picking up a paintbrush at the age of two - and since then it has been a mode of self expression and an environment I surround myself with constantly.