NSW-based artist, Bryden Williams, has been awarded the inaugural Chippendale New World Art Prize, the first year of a 10-year $100,000 arts initiative created by the Chippendale Creative Precinct (CCP). This July, Bryden will take his past-meets-future alterations of the material and the familiar to Beijing, to partake in a $10,000 art residency at the Red Gate Residency in Beijing, China for 3 months with all expenses paid.
The winning work entitled Techno Fire (2012/2013), integrates various multimedia sculptures and moving image works to create a simulated luminescent experience that examines the roles of both natural and artificial light in a technologically saturated environment. It also explores the relationship between our primal roots and our modern constructed reality by encapsulating the prizes 2013 theme of Revitalisation and ‘Creating a New World’ through the investigation of primal infatuations and our dependence on fire and means of progress.
Embracing this New World, winning artist Bryden Williams, who lives in Glebe, invites his audience to reflect on our evolution towards the technologically facilitated world we live in today. “To cook, to heat, to defend, to grow and to destroy. Fire is responsible for our current technological era.”
The winner and 40 other finalists are currently on show at NG Art Gallery and three other Chippendale gallery spaces (x88 Gallery, NG Art Pop-Up Gallery and Central Park Display Pavilion).
Visitors are encouraged to pick up an exhibition map at any one of the gallery locations and follow the ‘Chippendale art trail’ to visit all four galleries, taking in all of the finalists work.
Other notable works entered will be exhibited at the 2013 Beams Arts Festival that celebrates Chippendale as a cultural arts precinct of Sydney.
Image: Techno Fire (2012/2013), audio visual and sculptural installation with perspex & iPod touch
