Hatched eggs in many stylistic baskets
A clutch of exciting new talent has emerged from their Australian art-school nests to be showcased in a major exhibition in Perth.
Hatched features 35 of the nation’s most promising graduates at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, where the $35,000 Dr Harold Schenberg Art Prize for best-in-show was announced at the opening tonight.
Newcastle artist Andrew Styan received the award for his dual-channel projected video The Bell Buoy, in which a spinning lump of coal becomes a disaster-film asteroid as a metaphor for climactic catastrophe.
Styan, 56, graduated from the University of Newcastle after retiring from a 30-year career in the steel industry in 2008 to take up a part-time role as a climate change researcher and to pursue a passion for landscape photography.
Andrew Styan’s The Bell Buoy in the Hatched exhibition at PICA.
The artworks in Hatched range from paintings, prints, video and ceramics to cricket-bat tribal carvings, electric appliances turned into religious shrines and a pack of yapping robotic dogs randomly scribbling on the floor with their tails.
Curator Nadia Johnson said the annual exhibition encompassed a wide span of cutting-edge art and was a critical platform for the next generation of Australian artists.
“This years Hatched is quite bright and striking, quite playful with really serious undertones,” Johnson said. “It has something for everyone. You can engage with it on a whole lot of different levels. You don’t always have to understand the theories behind the work.”
The artists’ ages are as diverse as their work, with several graduates apart from Styan in their 50s and 60s, and one artist from Tasmania in her 70s.
Queensland artist Alex McGovern said Hatched was a tasting plate of the latest contemporary art trends for the public and an opportunity for artists to get national exposure to advance their careers.
“It is also an opportunity for the public to understand,” the 25-year-old artist said. “Contemporary art is sometimes a bit hard for the general public to understand.”
In the installation Don’t Paint the Power Plugs, McGovern has re-imagined the elements of a painting into a framed, playful arena of scattered coloured balls, boxes and video devices.
“It is moving the idea of painting into an installation,” McGovern said.
“The work is quite childish. It is opening it up to chance and the incidental. When I set the work up I kicked the balls everywhere. I was just playing.”
PICA is hosting the annual exhibition for the 23rd year. Hatched runs until June 21.
