VAEF 2022

Eddie Abd, Chun Yin Rainbow Chan, Cindy Yuen-Zhe Chen, Joe Wilson and Chanelle Collier, Emily Parsons-Lord, and Genevieve Felix Reynolds.

OPENING NIGHT Wednesday 24th August, 6 - 8pm.

National Art School Gallery. 156 Forbes Street, Darlinghurst, NSW 2010

Presented in partnership with NAS and exhibited at the NAS Gallery in Darlinghurst. Curated by Scott Elliot, Alexie Glass-Kantor and Elyse Goldfinch. NSW VAEF has evolved over the past 100 years into a key exhibition for profiling the dynamism and breadth of emerging contemporary artistic practice in NSW. A $30,000 Fellowship is offered by the NSW Government through Create NSW to enable a visual artist early in their career to undertake a self-directed program of professional development.

Congratulations to Fellowship recipient Eddie Abd.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Kites, streamers, and banners fly above the gallery entrance to form a parade of colour. The fabric is printed with sloganeering texts, such as ‘work never’, introducing opposing themes of protest and play, unrest and urban escape. Refashioned from French tent canvas produced in 1968, a significant time in history for civil rights movements around the world and a peak in recreational camping. 

The physical materials borrow from a language of resistance while concurrently, a soundscape of field recordings can be heard, each taken from different museums. Over the duration of the exhibition, experimental mixtapes are hand delivered by the artist's peers to be played as a gesture of active participation.

Wilson and Collier are interested in the role that historical art movements have had on social change, and how artists are implicated within institutional power. This series of work considers the agency of artists in the exhibition-making process; what it means to hand over art into the gallery’s care, and the requisite exchange involved in this process.

MIX TAPES

It's sound experimentation for procrastination and escape. No Work. Work never, never works. A situationist refusal, the resistance is agency. The mental fog of anxiety gone into.

A process of audio collages, akin to Burroughs or Acker, as in, made in the styling of cut poetry. Paying no attention to any particular reference and treating everything as noise without signal. Taking sound, inputing rather than outputting, consuming and not giving. Finding voice.

The voice, and each voice, as a position, as a presence. The reminder of a presence that's slipping away. A representation, capable of being heard and being seen. An action of mechanical reproduction, it is work; viral; both relentless and ephemeral; an eternal recurrence; without matter. It's time based and it's analogue. The position of the voice is in the living agent of the sound.

Not for the listening. For the making only. There is no viewer and no listener, there is no audience. It is participation only, and each participant is a subjective body invited by name. Outputting only,  in actions of release and capture.

An aesthetic free of judgement and free from uselessness. This on this, rewriting, a palimpsest of moments connected by effort alone. A work flow of cables, capable of building a world. The authority fixed entirely within the body, in space. Consenting adults catching the wind and the noise. Time passing over,  a death.

Heavier than a death in the family, in the neighbourhood, the street, the house, the garden. My colleague, my Nephew, my Sister, friend, neighbour, the cat. Sickness, disorder, nature, overdose, suicide, euthanasia. 

Freedom from silence, from grief, leaping forward and being enveloped by fog and feedback. 

Resistant to obligation and mandatory ambition, from explanation, from love, from kindness, from friendship. 

Mixing tapes.