Currently logged in. Logout
The winners of the 2015 Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize were announced with Mikala Dwyer awarded the $25,000 established artist prize for her sculptural work Untitled (2014) and Coen Young awarded the $10,000 emerging artist prize for his photographic work Study for a mirror 1, Study for a mirror 2 (2015).
Established artist award judge Lisa Havilah, Director of Carriageworks, commented: “Mikala Dwyer is one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists and this work is a brilliant example of her ‘empty sculptures’; that at one moment look like it could drift away and at the next, holds all the gravity and weight of the world.”
Dwyer explains her ’empty sculptures’ further: ” I have been making ‘empty sculptures’ in various versions over the last 10 years. They came from thinking about architecture, cubby houses, biospheres and caves. This particular plastic has heat mouldable properties, which allowed me to create the forms I was looking for. In a sense they are musings on the traditional notions of sculpture; form, volume, weight, gravity, physicality, and three dimensionality. Here however they might owe their being to painting in their transparency, colour, their looking – throughness as well as their walking aroundness (sculpture.) They are, in a sense, also drawings. An idea of a hollow work containing a void (perhaps where content should be located) is misleading. A void is forever being filled with our imaginings and projections. So the hollow work is really full, almost solid.”
Emerging artist award judge Fabian Byrne of Redlands School has described Young as a “highly innovative emerging artist.” She adds, “his background in painting and increasing skill in photography exemplifies both originality and innovation. This work becomes part of the environment it is inserted into and presents a truthful reflection of the surroundings. It invites the audience to project their own meaning and appreciate Young’s technique and unusual process.”
Young describes the engagement with notions of photography, sculpture and installation his work incorporates as a means of critically exploring our relationship with visual culture. “I am concerned with what lies between these areas and how they interrelate. I am interested in the cross cultural equivalents or slippages occurring between the media representation of the deserts of Australia and those of the USA. I am curious about the parallel visual narratives which are often common to them and which inform our mythic imagination as scientific fact, historical spectacle or pop cultural fiction. Our understanding of and relationship with these landscapes owes much to a rich vein of photographic and film culture in regard to their creation in the mind of the viewer as remote, strange and transformative metaphysical places. Places both real and imagined.”
The winning artworks are acquired into the permanent collection of Redlands, in accordance with the Prize tradition.
NAS Gallery
26 March to 23 May, 2015
Sydney
Mikala Dwyer, Untitled, 2014)
Coen Young, Study for a mirror 1, Study for a mirror 2, 2015
