Memory and introspection: A reflection on the Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Scholarship Show

What seems to be now a Sydney College of the Arts highlight, the Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Scholarship, proudly showcases the work of its alumni as they leap into research and material experimentation. Each work is a charged enquiry, leading the audience through the gallery as a form of personal research into the changing scope of contemporary art.

With both emerging and mid-career categories, the scholarship enables professional development through travel. The awards comprise $10,000 and $30,000 respectively, a major stipend which urges recipients to undertake travel both domestically and internationally. The show’s strength lies in its ability to create a level playing field with no marks of hierarchy between categories. Each work seemed to be a conversation with another aspect of each other, and in turn with the audience, with me. Walking through the space, it is no wonder how the Fauvette exhibition has earned a strong reputation for showcasing high-quality contemporary art.

In the exhibition, there was a clear connection between looking backwards to move forwards. Immediately it becomes a museum. The audience is met with The Complete Works of Pieter Bruegel (Working Title), a work by  Leigh Rigozzi, recipient of the mid-career/established prize’ which ) reimagines the weirdness of mediaeval Flemish paintings. It is cartoony in its study of Bruegel’s works, as Rigozzi suggests it’s a truthful imagination of “the chaotic world of Bruegel, full of lumpy peasants and fantastical demons, [it] is a place where I feel at home”. What was most interesting is this play between Bruegel’s own output from etchings and paintings, compared to Rigozzi’s square formatting, allowing him to copy a comic strip in recreating alternative readings from the illustrations. Rigozzi also inserts himself in each scene, from lazily observing beekeepers to scrolling on his phone while off-duty knights siesta — it is an aesthetically charged work that now with the scholarship can grow into around 140 artworks.

Just opposite is Andrew Hazewinkel’s Athenian ruins. Anafi Figures and accompanying print Untitled (forever young) bring Ancient History textbooks to life. The small cast lead figures appear as washed up ancient artefacts, presented to the audience like a museum display, they frame a bright orange and yellowing print, a found photographic slide blown up which acts as a window into their past life. In front sits a table of various materially rich objects, using terracotta and marble as well as antique 17th century cannonballs and concrete cores from the Acropolis in Athens. Hazewinkel plays with this relationship of the contemporary social legacies of ancient objects, using a wide range of materials to show that there is a major crossover between the human and the supernatural, the now and then.

Similarly is Anna John’s body of work, influenced by a horse shaped bottle opener the small objects track Broome’s tidal swells and debris, further mimicking everchanging familial relationships. The table of treasures becomes a centrepiece in and of itself; the table top becomes another repetitive pattern of material mimicry. Contrasting John’s organic casting are Tony Schwensen’s crisp oiled woodworks. Schwensen shows immense technical skill, using shadow and scale to create seemingly moving forms out of carved wood. Most interesting is the tall plinth holding candlesticks of wood, the act of looking up diminishes the power of the audience, further playing with an idea of scale to reflect his research in the relationships and power dynamics between human bodies and trees.

Whilst there is a clear investigation of historical practices and aesthetics in the previous works, the mirrors and screens of Ciaran Begley are a matrix of reflections and skeletons. Between challenging the changing nature of image from reality, it would be interesting to see where Begley’s discoveries of the image go further — especially weaving in naturalistic images with reassembled and shadowed TV screens. 

Audience interaction goes further in Magnetic Topographies’ Soft Launch, from audience members taking posters to gradually revealing Sydney’s sandstone geology; it serves as a register of the hands behind the artwork. Their accompanying video was the exhibition’s highlight. Making use of a pre-existing manhole in the gallery’s corner, Magnetic Topographies use found video of contractors assessing the flooding in the John Woolley Building, highlighting the continued relationship between water and sandstone in the gallery surrounds.

The gallery space is bookended by large hanging textile works, Charles Levi’s Quad and Fasten. If not for its connection to socio-political activism and the use of banners and coded symbols in revolt of queer heraldry, Levi’s labour has paid off. The large bright heavily symbolic and almost cartoonish figures stand tall and proud, almost the antithesis of the softly-spoken, greyed, and unravelled garments of Elizabeth Day’s haunting prison doors. With its colours hidden behind muslin or frankensteined into quilts, the recreations of prison doors from Tasmania, Norfolk and Willow Court Asylum create a series of doing and undoing of one’s ancestral past.

Gillian Kayrooz’s three channel video, Leave Your Shoes at the Door, is a perfectly sentimental and personal narrative which slices through everyday rituals and routines as an introspective intersection of public and private spaces. Each channel weaves between mimicry and complete individuality, tracking such thoughts in separate places of home or the absence of it. There is an eerie connection to biblical scenes. Kayrooz uses the act of washing feet/shoes to show gratitude for journeys undertaken, yet the connotations of the last supper are stripped by familial warmness. 

The recipient of the emerging category was Szymon Dorabialski’s Fallen from Grace, Hungover From Divine. The lightbox altar of pearlescent Mary, the clear divine cracked by perceptions beyond us is very similar in stylisation to immigrant churches of the 60s. This may be a stretch, but with the shelves displaying further symbols of slavic pagan-gone-christian symbology and Dorabialski himself drawing on this folklore – there is a certain connection of the divine as escapism and dissociation which is leaked in the puddle of molasses under the Virgin Mary. This play of obvious symbols of materiality and religious iconography in fact ends up blurring our own dichotomies and connections.

As a show on campus and continually being upheld by the university, it is clear that the SCA wishes to showcase a rich pool of its alumni. There is a level of critical conceptual exploration being at the centre of the gallery space, a window into the collective nature of art observation and study. 

I found each work uniquely strong, but what drew me to this exhibition is this underlying theme of memory. Calling it a trend in art would be reductive, memory and self reflection is one of the many ways contemporary art is able to step back. Step back and review, redo and reimagine what previously came before – but more importantly, in stepping back and critiquing the world around us. It’s an aspect of art theory that can never become boring because it highlights the unique or shared experiences of artists, an investigative mode of self discovery and catharsis. It’s a truly immersive experience, the gallery envelops you as each work opens up a new need for understanding. That was the main strength of the whole cohort of finalists – this hunger for understanding invoked through memories.

The Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Scholarship Exhibition runs from 26 September – 2 November, at the SCA Gallery.