KAREN BENTON, JESSICA MEI CHAM, HARRY SEELEY, AND JUSTYNA STANCZEW
’A STUDIO BASED PRACTICE’
CURATED BY KIM NGUYEN AND BETHAN COTTERILL
18 JANUARY – 24 FEBRUARY, 2018
A studio based practice, installation view, dimensions variable, 2018. Photography by Document Photography.
ARTIST STATEMENT
A studio based practice unites works by four recent Sydney College of the Arts graduates who challenge art academy traditions through thoughtful subversions of studio-derived boundaries, expectations, and hierarchies. The traditional art academy model of studio based teaching divides students into studios based on their technical skills; students are then assessed based on ideologies and standards unique to their studio. A studio based practice positions the studio model as a fixture worth questioning by alluding to its roots and ongoing relationships with power, patriarchy, and class hierarchies through trans-disciplinary investigations of ideas and materials that are de-privileged by academy standards.
‘Post-photography,’ the term used to articulate photography’s current crisis of meaning amidst image over-saturation and the advent of technologies that can fabricate photorealistic images from scratch, rendering familiar understandings of photography as an expressive medium outdated, is an central point of interest within Kim and Bethan’s own art practices. As the meaning of the medium of photography shifts within a changing cultural landscape, so, too, should we adjust our understanding of the role of the photographic artist. And, accordingly, we should question the role of art academy systems. What philosophies, methodologies, and politics do they preserve by privileging the educational structures of generations past? Which of these are congruent with our present cultural surroundings, and which aren’t?
A studio based practice, installation view, dimensions variable, 2018. Photography by Document Photography.
The artworks featured in A studio based practice explore these questions through material study, remixing long-familiar visual vocabularies into new vehicles for communication. Each work indexes traces or transformations of objects at various points in time, but they are also without any doubt sculptural: they are tactile, textured, and move according to their size and weight; they are bodied. The exhibition presents studio based artistic practice as more diverse, critical, and ambiguous than traditional academy structures represent.
A studio based practice, installation view, dimensions variable, 2018. Photography by Document Photography.
We would like to acknowledge and pay respect to the traditional owners of the land on which we meet; the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. It is upon their ancestral lands that the University of Sydney is built.
As we share our own knowledge, teaching, learning and research practices within this university may we also pay respect to the knowledge embedded forever within the Aboriginal Custodianship of Country.
Bethan Cotterill and Kim Nguyen, 2018.