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Two Victorian artists have dominated this year’s Copyright Agency | Viscopy John Fries Award for emerging artists with the $10,000 award winner Eric Demetriou, while Jessie Bullivant was Highly Commended for her work.
Eric Demetroiu’s works incite a thrill-seeking experience flirting with trouble, danger and pleasure through outcomes of kinetic sound-based sculpture and performance. Demetriou’s installation piece, An Afternoon with Herb Jercher, is a work combining the sounds of whip cracking with the impact of the whips’ contact on a surface. The work was developed with sound artist Herb Jercher.
“Demetriou’s body of work investigates the application of noise, partnered with a mischievous demeanour”, says John Fries Award curator, Oliver Watts. “This exciting and strong work seems to reference the drover through the sounds and effects of lashing whips. Its duality is what makes it appealing, as the sound of the whip evokes the Man from Snowy River, but it’s mediated through pop culture, art and technical recording devices.”
Jessie Bullivant produces socially responsive works that interrogate the subtle ways power manifests and operates in different contexts – across the political, social and personal.
Bullivant’s Highly Commended work, In the Event of Winning, is a video of an acceptance speech which is not to be viewed unless the artist wins (‘Lucky!’). “This is a work that can win but not be judged and sums up for me that terrible anxiety we all have of being measured, examined, put into boxes by an ordered society and our desperate attempts to wrestle back some agency. Bullivant’s work somehow breaks the bind of the award’s rules while still, paradoxically, remaining in the game”, says Watts.
Fourteen finalists, selected by the judges from 1000 entries, are featured in the John Fries Award exhibition at the award’s presenting partner UNSW Galleries until 1 October 2016.
Picking one’s nose in public doesn’t seem so wrong anymore. Thanks Eric!
UNSW Galleries
Until 1 October, 2016
Sydney
www.viscopy.org.au
www.copyright.com.au
www.johnfriesaward.com
Eric Demetriou (with Herbert Jercher), An Afternoon with Herb Jercher, 2016, performance still
Photograph: Christo Crocker
Courtesy of Lindberg Galleries. © Eric Demetriou / Licensed by Viscopy
Artist Eric Demetriou after his win at the John Fries Award exhibition opening and announcement at UNSW Galleries
Courtesy Artist Profile
