Recently the Ballarat International Foto Biennale (BIFB) presented the GradFoto 2021, an online exhibition of twenty finalists. The annual award celebrates the artistic excellence of graduating students and is open to emerging contemporary artists from selected Australian institutions whose artistic practice includes photography.
Now in its second year, GradFoto 2021 continues to showcase the high calibre of photographic work by recent graduates from Charles Darwin University, Charles Sturt University, Deakin University, Edith Cowan University, Federation University Australia, LCI Melbourne, Monash University, Murdoch University, National Art School, Oxygen College, Photography Studies College, RMIT University, Swinburne University of Technology, TAFE New South Wales, University of New South Wales, University of Tasmania, University of Wollongong, VCA University of Melbourne, and Whitehouse Institute of Design.
Sophie Smith, The Crow, 2021
Congratulations Sophie Smith, RMIT University; recipient of the GradFoto 2021 People’s Choice Award for her series The Crow, 2021.
Smith, about her winning work:
“In the 1980s, a new subculture called the ‘crow tribe’ emerged in Japan that rejected the shoulder pad adorned, form-fitting looks of the time for all-black garments that enveloped and concealed the body. Designers such as Rei Kawakubo, Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake championed this aesthetic, thus the women who wore their monochromatic, androgynous garments were nicknamed ‘crows’.
In my series The Crow, I am dressed in pieces by said designers to become a ‘crow’ captured in the confines of her own nest due to the ongoing constraints of COVID-19. Self-portraiture provided me with complete, active control in portraying the crow character as I became both the object and subject of the series. Further, The Crow functions as an ode to imagination and the fantasy worlds or personas that I create in my head.
The rebellious aesthetic of the crow tribe allowed women to escape into a utopia where there were no expectations or pressures to become the highly gendered, Western 80s woman.
Similarly, fashion for me in The Crow acts as a form of body-sculpture and escapism against the reality of the world we are living in right now. My series The Crow ultimately explores the possibilities for artistic expression within the fashion photography medium to create a new self-representation.”
View The Crow in it’s entirety and explore the GradFoto 2021 online exhibition here: ballaratfoto.org/gradfoto-2021-exhibition/.
