Primavera 2022: Young Australian Artists

“This art is contemplative. It’s burrowing. It’s haunting.”

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Primavera 2022: Young Australian Artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), Sydney, looks to tomorrow in a sensitive reimagining of speculative futures. The exhibition is alive, with emotions, feeling, and in sculptural form – activating the senses through textile artworks, sculptures, sound, video, smell, poetry, and documented performance.

Featuring six artists, Sundari Carmody (SA), Angela Goh (NSW), Julia Gutman (NSW), Amrita Hepi (VIC), Jazz Money (NSW), and Katie West (WA), the artworks venture into the unknown, exploring themes of personal and shared identities, making art that speaks to life, full of action anti-static.

The exhibition is the result of curator Michael Do’s interest in performative, multidisciplinary, hybrid practices while also considering a post-pandemic world, exploring the anger, the pain, and the confusion. “These are artists dealing with the ‘what now’ question,” says Do.

“Conceptually, they’ve treated it with their own lenses, bringing in their own interests, their own practices, their own cultures. We get divergent responses to the question of ‘what now?’ So, someone like Katie West, whose work is her returning to her ancestral homeland and working through issues of alienation, of forced separation of this cultural and familial wounding that happened because of the Stolen Generation policy,” says Do.

“Equally, for Angela Goh, a dancer, choreographer, and artist. Her ‘what now’ is thinking about her medium of choreography and a temporal art form, and how can it have a life beyond just being there,” Do continues. “On the other angle, we have Amrita Hepi, who has taken such a joyful, sunny, but slightly dark take on ‘what now’ with this work which demands audience participation but is probing big tech and ideas around authorship and representation.”

Also in the gallery, Julia Gutman’s Isn’t it all just a long conversation?, 2022, is the artist’s largest textile artwork to date and plays off the Western art canon’s use of the male gaze and female body – all to a narrative of family and friendship in a colourful collection of found materials.

In the mesmerising installation from Sundari Carmody, The Mountain, 2022, three brass sculptures, each containing an aperture for water, mist, or scent, draw on architectural sites with otherworldly experiences that transcend perception. Similarly, Jazz Money invites place to the forefront of her installation, hold this water in the waters of your knowing, 2022, an audio and video artwork responding to the complex history of Gadigal land under the MCA, Tallawoladah.

The works are all fundamentally quiet and reflective. Do describes that this year’s Primavera invites the audience to take something away long after they’ve left the exhibition. “It’s not this grandiose, hyperbolic declaration,” he explains. “That’s not the type of art that’s in the show. This art is contemplative. It’s burrowing. It’s haunting. It’s not bombastic and loud; it’s like a chorus of whispers trying to touch people.”

As Do reveals, Primavera provides a platform for a generation of artists – capturing a moment in their time and a moment in their career. The diversity of the works speaks to Australian culture and Australian artmaking. And, the curator adds, “It’s a celebration of that.” He continues, “[Artists] are responding to their identities and celebrating the vantage point from where they’re making art.”

“When you’re taught art, you’re taught the rules. You’re taught about the pathways to take, what this artwork should be, and what this artwork shouldn’t be. Artists are demanding more for themselves, and they’re demanding to take another route,” Do concludes. “They don’t want to go the paths that are already known; they want to venture into the unknown.”

 

Emma-Kate Wilson is an art and design writer based on Gayemagal Country (Sydney).

 

Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA)
4 November to 12 February 2023
Sydney