Excerpts: 2019 QUT Visual Arts Postgraduate showcase

Excerpts 2019 showcases the practices of the QUT Visual Arts graduating higher degree cohort. The exhibition features a selection of creative works produced by candidates who are concluding their PhD and Masters research: Rebecca Daynes, Charlotte Tegan, Michael Riddle, Jessica Carmody, Jo Fay Duncan, Guy Lobwein, and Aden Sargeant.

As a mode of academic research, creative practice involves a purposive investigation of theoretical and creative contexts, combined with a rigorous questioning of practice itself. These seven artists also engage with the professional contexts of contemporary art and have exhibited nationally and internationally during their studies at QUT.

The diverse works presented in Excerpts embody the ethos of QUT’s open studio program with its transmedia emphasis, exploration of analogue and digital technologies and emphatically discursive approach to art-making. This open approach is reflected in their choice to work across and between media boundaries including performance, installation, moving image, photography and sculpture. The creative practice research undertaken by these candidates examines a broad range of contemporary themes including popular culture and video gaming, affect and representation, political iconography, as well as personal and cultural experiences of place, memory, materiality and social media.

Rebecca Daynes’ doctoral project aims to explore the nature of sincerity in contemporary visual culture. In video works that incorporate text, images and performed actions, Daynes explores the contradictions involved in the performance of sincerity and how they can create unexpected forms of affective engagement with viewers.

Charlotte Tegan uses photography to explore the new visual semiotics generated by rapidly-evolving social media platforms. Her doctoral project investigates how both written language and visual codes are subject to continuous re-appropriation in contemporary digital environments and how this displacement and juxtaposition can be deployed, and interrupted, in photographic practice.

Michael Riddle’s practice examines how sculpture can act as a site of slippages, interruptions and changes of state, to explore the subjective connotations of form and material. His Masters research explores the way that interwoven processes of chance and control create unanticipated metaphoric connotations that have both personal and semiotic resonances.

Jessica Carmody explores personal memories through sculptural, performative, written and videographic reconstructions. Carmody’s Masters research considers the gendered dimension of acts of preservation to present objects and videos that seek to repeat, and in so doing suspend, such moments indefinitely.

Jo Fay Duncan coordinated the Lines in the Sand festival at Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island) from 2011 to 2014, a process that has given rise to a series of ancillary curated and studio-based projects. In her Masters project, Duncan proposes a curatorial philosophy that emphasises sustained encounters with place, culture and people, informed by the affective impulses of uncertainty and repair. Guy Lobwein’s Masters project interrogates the images of military-entertainment industries through the technologies of photogrammetry, motion-capture and virtual reality. Through this process, Lobwein’s works construct reflective, infinite, inbetween spaces that challenge us to reflect on the paradox of being entertained by conflict while recognising its barbaric nature.

Aden Sargeant responds to their disillusionment with the dysfunctions of the Australian political establishment by reframing the elements of political spectacle. Through installations of sculpture, sound and video, Sargeant’s Masters project deploys the Situationist method of detournement to de-stabilise motifs from mainstream politics, activist iconography, symbols and visual cultures.

We congratulate these artists and researchers on the significant outcomes of their postgraduate studies and wish them every success with their future creative pursuits.

CHARLES ROBB Excerpts 2019 Curator