Anna Bligh, MP, Deputy Premier, Treasurer and Minister for Infrastructure, on Friday announced the winning art work of this national award for emerging Indigenous artists was Genevieve Grieves’s Picturing the old people 2006–07.
The selection committee described Picturing the old people as ‘an exquisite and thoughtful exploration by a contemporary Koori of the ways Aboriginal people were portrsayed in the past’. The committee said about this work by Genevieve Grieve: ‘This year’s winner has raised the bar for Aboriginal artists working in new media’.
‘Using twenty-first-century electronic media, she has investigated nineteenth-century photography, which was the “new media” of those times‘.
‘Those photographs were in black-and-white or in sepia, as some of these videos are, but the difference here is that the Aboriginal people in Grieves’s portraits are alive, moving and quite clearly looking back at us in the present moment . . . This sensation for the viewer of looking into the past is extraordinary’.
First held in 2006, the Xstrata Coal Emerging Indigenous Art Award identifies and promotes highly talented emerging Indigenous artists from around Australia. This year the exhibition of short-listed artists’ work includes painting, photography, glasswork, video and weaving.
Work by the nine finalists will be on display at the Gallery until 11 November 2007. Admission is free.
An exhibition catalogue is available from the Gallery store.
|