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Each year, the Judy Wheeler Commission supports an Australia-based artist to create a bold new work that responds to Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts’ (PICA) architecture and history as one of Perth’s first schools and now a contemporary art space.
Art Almanac congratulates Gadigal/Sydney-based artist Diana Baker Smith who was recently awarded PICA’s 2024 Judy Wheeler Commission. Working across performance, moving image, and installation, Baker Smith explores the relationship between art history and its institutions through a feminist lens.
She is also a member of the performance art collective Barbara Cleveland. Selected from forty-two submissions across the country, Baker Smith’s winning proposal will feature
a text-based score and live performance created specifically for the mezzanine level above PICA’s Central Gallery space, launching in February 2024 and remaining in place for one year.
Diana Baker Smith. Photograph: Anna Hay. Courtesy Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Western Australia
The score will be made up of performative instructions inviting audiences to consider the history of the site (as a space of art, education, and incubation), their relationship to the building’s architecture, and the ways in which they move through its spaces.
The 2024 selection panel, consisting of Stephen Gilchrist (Senior Lecturer, UWA School of Indigenous Studies), Melissa Keys (Curator, Heide Museum of Art and former PICA curator), and Sarah Wall (Curator, PICA), commented: “Diana’s site-specific choreographic installation stood out for its sophisticated multi-disciplinary approach – something she is well known for in her practice and a characteristic that sits in synergy with PICA’s unique industry position as a leading presenter of exhibition and performance.
Diana Baker Smith, She Speaks in Sculpture, 2022, two-channel 4K video, 09:35 minutes. Photograph: Lucy Parakhina. Courtesy the artist and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Western Australia
“By occupying the space between performance and visual art, Diana’s work will enliven visitors’ experiences of PICA.” The commission builds on Baker Smith’s fifteen-yearlong
artistic practice which is collaborative, research-driven, and underpinned by feminist methods. Her recent projects engage with art historiography and its fictions, spanning moving image, performance, photography, and text. They include She Speaks in Sculpture (UTS Art Gallery, Sydney, 2022), The Lost Hour (Contemporary Art Tasmania, Hobart, 2022), Tasks yet to be composed for the occasion (Artspace, Sydney, 2021), and Opening Night (National Gallery of Australia, 2020).
Baker Smith is currently working on a solo exhibition for Penrith Regional Gallery in Western Sydney, engaging with the archive and former home of late Australian modernist artist Margo Lewers.
