For many, it’s been a long year, longer than most. The balancing act of student life is ever-tenuous, with ever-mentioned and ever-affecting cost-of-living pressure. Loneliness pervades. We seem to have no time for each other and never have enough time for the things we want to do.
Maybe that’s the inescapable truth – we all walk around holding so much and still move forward. The University of Sydney Union’s (USU) Creative Awards exemplify this notion. In her curatorial essay, Beatrice Waller acknowledges this, paraphrasing Australian potter Joan Campbell and concluding “she was struck, as I am, by the way, that people have the ability to undergo stress and pain and come out unjaded by the cruel things they experience”.
Another truism comes to the fore in my reading of the Awards. Amidst this pain, there’s beauty in our community and our relationality; intertwined, and often surprisingly-related worlds. Through words, art, film, and music, we find ourselves similar. We find our worldviews extended, challenged, or comforted.
The show is dense, providing 72 works of visual and material variety, across four categories; art, word, short film, and music. Verge Gallery displays the finalists of the art category, and lends a listening space for music and word, as well as a cinema space for the short film finalists.
Amidst the qualms and trials of student life, we see these students approach the word through gentleness and curiosity. Through art, they implore us to live more softly, to eke out the sentimental, whimsical, or record the minutiae. Works are playful and contemplative. As Waller discusses, their social critiques aren’t obvious, but they are searing in their softness. We are reminded that there isn’t one way, method or strategy to cope with the demands of student life.
Verge is hidden in plain sight, amongst the nothingness of City Road and greyness of Jane Foss Russell Plaza. Its sliding doors and immediate windows appear almost foreboding. JFR is a place no-one wants to hang around, dominated by thoroughfare and olfactory sensations, setting the scene for a gallery where it should be hard to connect.
Through their compilation of student works, the Awards conquer the physical and psychological distance imbued in student life. The artworks connect the audience to artist and artist to artist. They reveal the lenses through which students view the world, or in Berger’s words, ways of seeing. We see what ideologies fellow students learn, how they think, and what they think matters. It’s an invitation to connect with these students’ private worlds and perspectives.
It’s not just an(other) ‘art school show’. Sure, some works have the SCA-rigour of conceptualism and relational aesthetics, but the Awards collect works from all disciplines, undergraduate and postgraduate. While the show exemplifies students’ conceptual and material practices and offers insight into the future of contemporary art production, its offering from non-art students represents a resilience to retain a creative practice, or find solace within it amidst busy working and studying lives. The students’ works are either informed by their study or an escape from it.
The show reflects the USU’s commitment to supporting artistic communities — a total of $2550 is up for grabs for each category. This largesse is driven by yours truly, SSAF. The show extends its student focus beyond content, to curation. The curator is picked from the Masters of Museum and Heritage Studies program, this year it’s first-time curator Beatrice Waller. The art finalists are chosen by Verge staff and Waller, while the other categories are selected by a panel of industry judges.
The 26 artworks presented were chosen from the 150 submissions. Shelley Waters’ lumen print, Transforming Matter VI, foregrounds all promotional and advertising material, reflecting Waller’s main curatorial thread of ‘gentleness’. But the above is one of Waters’ two prints of compost on photographic paper. The other print is unfixed and has been decomposing throughout the exhibition.
Upon entry, the audience is greeted by several ceramic sculptures. Ella Thompson’s Creatures On Hills From Places In The Tunnels Up There plays on our subconsciousness, fantastical brain tunnels of expanding foam are topped by thrown and hand-built ceramic forms. Keziah Duguid’s Every night’s another reason why I left it all could act as a gentle commentary, capturing the precarious safeness of gay clubs and queer nightlife spaces, through hot blown, sculptured and flame worked glass and organza. Upon these fragile glass forms, a slowly changing light falls, and reveals shadows. Raymond Huynh glazes ceramics with sea kelp with From Fronds to Minerals (Beached Kelp), playing with the interstices of earth and science.
On the back wall, three handmade urns, Ryan Ouyang’s To whom I hold dear, hold cremated letters. Things unsaid and undone are forever said in these letters. Once they are burnt, and sealed within the urn, have they been let go of? Mana (Maro) Sugimoto deploys two obvious objects – IKEA wall clocks – in Move forward! dreamer. Sugimoto then adorns them with a complex materiality of pencil, eyeshadow and pastel. The adjoining labels “Someday, someday,” and “I’ll do it.” manage to capture something beyond the obvious. Perhaps our knowledge of the passage of time is marked equally by a desire to look beyond.
The show contains many more ceramic works, showcasing the form’s capabilities, Next to Verge’s doors stands Abigail Jarvis’ bountiful pile of fruit, Fruitlful. Elsewhere, Sascha Noble’s 3 Venuses, Jingrui (Moira) Mai’s Boat and Mikayla Kitto’s Return Me to My Mother, play with the ceramic form and its associations of femininity and fragility.
Images of home emerge with Shirley Huang’s Hey Orchid, Hey Grandma!, an acrylic still life, and Estelle Yoon’s chiaroscuro-like photographic work Abeoji (아버지) .
Video works complement the sculpture-dominant show. Betty Guo’s 1-minute video work Reverse captures a journey from uni through Victoria Park to Broadway, and then in, as the title suggests, reverse. Guo’s portrait orientation entices interpretation – maybe it’s an iPhone video, especially with its TikTok sounds, or it’s a tombstone, unveiling our endless cycles. Connor Chen’s chair video archive (reupload) is a single-channel video composed of “found object chairs, a nondescript room, palpable tension”. The video imagines how two chairs would make love – an odd and uncomfortable watch, but a highlight.
All these works are shockingly intimate. In a traditional view, they showcase technical skill, material exploration and conceptual investigations, borne from art training or rigorous practice. But here, together, the artworks somehow become more than a combination of themselves.
The Awards are not just limited to contemporary art. In the short film category, Jiaxi Li’s Obsession runs through Sydney’s streets. Alone and together, the three protagonists smoke, kiss, drink, play and desire. Frames in frames, washed out screen upn washed out screen, Ira Friedberg’s the hottest day on planet earth gives us a slowing atrophying environment, in pretty colours and duotones. Friedberg questions “are these images nice, do they make what’s coming palatable, even pleasurable?” Lauren Maccoll’s personal narrative, My Moving Vlog (Seabird Seabird), presents home, reclining into the sentimentality of leaving the family abode behind. Home becomes a house with stairs “chipped all the way up”, and “unfamiliar blankets”.
SHAPE, created by Yi Su, Sida Wang, and scored by Mckenzi Scott encourages us to examine our memory of place in built environments. Elijah Seto’s The Job is Mine! follows an alien masquerading as a human, his internal monologue is a pink/orange shape with a grating voice – the rabidness of social anxieties.
Wendy Thompson’s One of us won’t make it to their 30s moved me. It is an obituary, an homage to those now and those who came before. In silence, Thompson connects vignettes of university spaces, and friends, acknowledging the ‘precarity in the queer community’. On another note, Jiyang Zhang’s Jiyang Gambit offered humour. Shot in China during their 2022 lockdown, Jiyang Gambit revels in its low budget to become a ‘Chinese Pandemic Version’ of Geri’s Game.
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When writing this, I was reminded of Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay Against Interpretation. Sontag took art criticism to task, railing against its tendencies to focus on the exposition of content rather than sensory experience. Such interpretation renders art “manageable, conformance”. Instead, one should focus on emotion and form. There’s no doubt it’s difficult to go past exposition, but my reaction was primarily emotional and personal — a fact I believe should be embraced, not hidden, within art writing.
I find comfort and connection in this array of student perspectives and their materialisation. Through student art, we connect; we find the faces we pass and the one’s we don’t. We see the friends we make and the friendships we could. We gather and embrace, in ways we can’t otherwise.
What do you see? And how do you feel?
The USU’s Creative Awards runs from 14 October to 15 November at Verge Gallery, with an adjoining public program. Winners were announced on 31 October 2024. Verge is open weekdays from 10am to 5pm. If you can’t make it in person, view the online exhibition here.
