NAVA announces the 2018 Visual Arts Fellowships

Published by: NAVA | 5-Nov-2018
The National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) today announced artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley (Vic) and Dr Alex Gawronski (NSW) as recipients of the 2018 NAVA Visual Arts Fellowships.
The prestigious Fellowships, funded by the Copyright Agency's Cultural Fund and administered by NAVA, recognise exceptional mid-career Australian visual artists.

Esther Anatolitis, NAVA Executive Director says, "These Fellowships provide crucial support to outstanding artists, affording them the time to experiment and develop new approaches to their practice. Investing in artist-led practice development is crucial to the future of the arts in Australia."

NAVA has awarded $20,000 each to:

"¢ Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley to develop their screen-printing skills and research new digital printing technologies, to create a series of large- and small-scale print works for exhibition at Neon Parc, dedicated to the texts and personae of female writers on whom they have previously focused their work (Emily Dickinson, Simone Weil, Jane Bowles, Gertrude Stein); and

"¢ Dr Alex Gawronski to create three new installations in international contexts in Tokyo, Santiago and Berlin, as well creating an artist book critically contextualising his installation practices to date. Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley are thrilled to be receiving the Fellowship as it will allow them to extend the scope, scale and materiality of their work. "The Fellowship will enable us to not only make a large scale, experimental print series which we have been thinking about for a number of years, it offers us the opportunity to experiment with new screen-printing materials and investigate a range of digital printing techniques."

"We believe the new skills and material knowledge that we will gain in making the print works for the Fellowship will feed into our future work and generate new ideas," added Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley.

Burchill and McCamley's conceptual art practice interlace feminist, psychoanalytic, filmic, semiotic and spatial concerns. Language and the language of art are often central tenets in their work.

This year's peer assessors Julie Ewington and José Da Silva, were delighted to see artists like Burchill and McCamley using new processes. "This is such an intelligent development in the artists' beautiful work with women's texts. The new work should be glorious," said Julie Ewington and José Da Silva.

Dr Alex Gawronski works across multiple media with a particular interest in the contexts of galleries and museums as cultural sites of spatial, socio-political contestation.

"The NAVA Visual Arts Fellowship will allow me to realise works across multiple media, including book publishing, and in new international contexts," said Alex Gawronski.

"The Fellowship will afford me the capacity to work on and develop a number of projects simultaneously, and exhibit them to wider audiences. It will also open opportunities for additional artistic collaborations in new contexts in Australia and farther afield," added Alex.

Julie Ewington and José Da Silva commended Alex's compelling proposal was compelling as building on the foundations of his practice, both internationally and through the publication.

"What's crucial to Alex Gawronski work is to transpose his ideas and elements from one location into another. The successive installations in Tokyo, Santiago and Berlin will enact this method and his proposed artist book will encapsulate the practice to date."

NAVA Executive Director Esther Anatolitis said "I'm excited to see Burchill & McCamley extend conceptually on the language of their long-term collaborative practice."

"I'm also very much looking forward to Dr Alex Gawronski's explorations of spatial and socio-political tensions of the art institution through ambitious installations in international contexts.

"Both of these projects involve rigorous practice-based research that extend the artists' potential as well as our understanding of the complex fields they span.

"From yet another strong field our peer assessors have made decisions with great care "“ thank you so much to Julie Ewington and José Da Silva. Thank you also to the Copyright Agency for supporting mid-career artists through such ambitious funding," added Esther Anatolitis.

This is the third and final year of the NAVA Visual Arts Fellowships

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