12.30pm – 1.30pm Sunday 4 December 2022
Hear from artists whose works have been recently acquired by the Curtin University Art Collection.
Nathan Beard is a Boorloo-based (Perth) multidisciplinary artist. His artwork unpacks the influences of culture, memory and authenticity, drawing on his Australian-Thai heritage for inspiration. He examines the experience of inheriting a nuanced relationship to a culture from which one is biographically and geographically distanced. The fleshy limpness of Beard’s sculptures represents his childhood feelings of shame and anxiety surrounding the ‘authentic’ performance of his Asian heritage through traditional hand gestures. Through his Queerness, Beard reframes this cultural Otherness; in particular the adolescent self-consciousness around projecting effeminacy through expressive or limp-wristed hand gestures. He reclaims this precariousness in his artwork through evocative excess.
Katie West is an artist and Yindjibarndi woman based in Noongar Ballardong Country. Their current work revolves around installation, textiles and social practice. Using found and naturally dyed textiles, sound and video, they create works and happenings that invite attention to the ways we weave our stories, places, histories and futures. Underpinning their practice is the process and notion of naturally dyeing fabric – the rhythm of walking, gathering, bundling, boiling water and infusing materials with plant matter.
JOHN STRINGER PRIZE
7 October – 4 December 2022
The John Stringer Prize was inaugurated by The Collectors Club in 2015 in celebration of the memory of one of Australia’s most acclaimed art curators, the late John Stringer. A long-term friend and mentor to its members, he established The Collectors Club in Perth in 1996 to promote informed collecting and patronage of Western Australian art. The John Stringer Prize strives to continue his important legacy and since 2018, the John Curtin Gallery has been proud to present this annual exhibition celebrating artists making a major impact on contemporary practice in Western Australia.
Each year, a panel of three leading arts professionals are tasked with selecting six Western Australian-based contemporary artists whose practices they deem worthy of recognition. The panellists for this year’s prize were: Helen Carroll, Manager, Wesfarmers Arts; Jane Chambers, Revealed curator, Fremantle Art Centre and Sarah Wall, curator, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA). The six artists are invited to produce a new artwork in any medium for inclusion in the exhibition. In the months leading up to the Prize, members of The Collectors Club visit each of the nominated artists’ studios and intimately come to know their work. Club members then vote at this exhibition by way of secret ballot to decide on the Prize recipient.
John Stringer Prize 2022 finalists are: Amanda Bell, Bruno Booth, Jacky Cheng, Guy Louden, Katie West and Holly Yoshida.
