Want to see something fresh? Six of the most exciting emerging visual artists in the country are currently exhibiting at Artspace in Woolloomooloo, and it won’t cost you anything to stroll on in and take a look. The long-running NSW Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging) exhibition has earned a reputation as a highlight in the NSW visual arts calendar, showcasing the diverse and exciting talent of a new generation of artists, and helping to launch many careers.
Each year, Create NSW convenes a judging panel of esteemed colleagues to assess the highly competitive pool of applications, and select the exhibition finalists and the Fellowship recipient. Gillian Kayrooz, an artist hailing from Guildford in Western Sydney, has been announced as the Fellowship recipient for 2024, with the news being announced at the official exhibition launch event on Thursday, June 4. She will use the prestigious $30,000 Fellowship to undertake a self-directed program to develop her professional practice.
Gillian’s intimate three-channel film installation titled ‘Leave Your Shoes at the Door’ poignantly interweaves personal narratives, cultural traditions and local landscapes around Darug Country in Sydney’s outer west, where the artist grew up. Accompanied by an immersive stereo soundtrack, the 4-minute and 30-second video was filmed across three locations that have personal significance to Gillian, and interrupts the everyday ritual of leaving your shoes at the front door to share a message of gratitude. Do yourself a favour, and take the time to sit with this artwork and welcome in the gentle contemplation that it invites.
The fellowship panel had the following to say: “The panel were impressed with how Gillian’s considered practice is so rooted in her Western Sydney community and her personal experience. The activities proposed for her Fellowship program demonstrate the responsibility, respect and care that she brings to her artistic practice. The proposed Fellowship will be a significant step for her career and professional development.”
The artworks on display from the other fellowship finalists – Kalanjay Dhir, Remy Faint, Charlotte Haywood, Kien Situ and Talia Smith – offer up an eclectic mash-up of forms and concepts to encounter. We’re big fans in particular of Kalanjay Dhir’s ‘Coming Down’ – a multi-pronged installation encompassing sculpture, collage, video and found objects that draws on popular culture, sci-fi and history to imagine near-future worlds to provide a “stocktake” of sorts of digital and physical avatars made over the past four years.
While you’re visiting Artspace, make sure you also check out the smaller exhibition in the Ideas Platform space – to look each other in the eye is the seventh annual Parramatta Artists Studios (PAS) presentation at Artspace. Curated by Sarah Rose and featuring artists Owen Leong, Ali Tahayori and Jodie Whalen, this edition explores the compelling relationships between desire, intimacy, personal histories, and altered states of being.
Developed by Artspace, the 2024 NSW Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging) exhibition was co-curated by Sarah Rose, Alexie Glass-Kantor and Yuanyu Li. It is open now and showing until September 8, 2024.
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