The National Art School/Dominik Mersch Gallery Award 2022 winner

Congratulations to Armando Chant, recipient of The National Art School/Dominik Mersch Gallery Award 2022.

Chant’s interdisciplinary artistic practice is founded on the act of drawing and mark-making using analogue and digital media, and the inter-relationships between gesture, surface and space. The drawn image produced through his gestural acts is used as an interpretive tool to create further iterations, thereby re-framing it within a transient context across surface, site and screen.

In deciding this award, Chant’s work stood out for its innovative and conceptual approach to drawing, its refined and precise execution, and its exceptional level of craftsmanship, as well as for the artist’s ongoing collaborative relationship with master embroiderers from India.

Armando Chant, Fractured Landscape, 2022, digital photographic print, graphite stick, wax, varnish, graphite oil stick, 86 x 70cm

The National Art School/Dominik Mersch Gallery Award is awarded annually, in collaboration with the National Art School (NAS) in Sydney. As part of the Award, Dominik Mersch Gallery invites the winning artist from NAS to stage a solo exhibition at the gallery: “Offering an exhibition space to show their works is the best way to support emerging and promising artists,” says Mersch.

“My work aims to instigate dialogue with the many environmental changes to the landscape and the way in which we engage with them through image and material transformation. The interdisciplinary, practice- based approach builds on the tension and relationship between craft and concept, image and object, local and global, dynamic relationships in a constant oscillatory state of transformation.

I explore the creation of ‘atmospheric’ work by taking the specific and making it ambiguous through processes of erasure and negation. Media and techniques traverse the technological and the handcrafted, including vintage stereoscope glass negatives depicting landscape scenes, digital photographic printing, mineral pigments, wax and varnish with graphite and cross-cultural exchange with master embroidery artisans in India, unifying the techniques and mediums. These processes continually change the nature of the ”surface” through multi-layered marking and staining, resulting in hybrid and ambiguous imagery that sits in between photographic image and materialised surface.

These materialising processes instigate a perceptual change by creating a materialised atmospheric veil between work and viewer through multi-layered scarring and staining. We witness the spectacle of a ‘spectral’ image as it sheds its geographical specificity through material intervention, placing the viewer into a form of imaginative correspondence and engagement.” – Armando Chant, 2022

Chant’s inaugural exhibition at Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney, will run from 10 March to 8 April 2023.

armandochant.com
dominikmerschgallery.com
nas.edu.au

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