Exploration 18

We are delighted to announce that the Winner of the 2018 Emerging Artist Award is Jasper Jacobsen! Judges for Exploration 18 Award are Juan Ford (artist), Alfred de Bruyne (architect and collector), Claire Harris (Gallery Director).

The inaugural People's Choice Award winner is Brett Ferry! FLG presents our highly anticipated annual showcase of emerging and unsigned artists. Exploration was created to provide a platform for emerging artists to successfully exhibit their art within a commercial gallery context.

Now in its 18th year, this tightly curated exhibition will showcase the art practices of nine talented artists from diverse backgrounds and working across various mediums.

Featuring:

Archie Barry Archie Barry’s practice incorporates both video and performance to articulate their research and concepts surrounding identity. Barry completed a Masters of Contemporary Art at the VCA in 2017 and was the recipient of the Fiona Myer Studio Residency in Berlin (for 2018), the Winner of the NAVA Ignition Prize for Professional Practice, and was twice the Winner of the Deans Award for Academic Excellence through the University of NSW. Most recently they were curated into the Here We Are exhibition at the State Library of Victoria, and also into the ground breaking group exhibition Unfinished Business by Max Delany staged at ACCA in November 2017.

Tatsache (2017) is titled after the German loan-translation for the English phrase “matter of fact”, and is a devotional poem written for quantum field theory – a worldview that describes all matter as perpetually disintegrating and reforming. This idea has been embraced as a position from which to view psychological and physiological transgender states of becoming as a super-natural phenomenon, in alignment with the existing state of all material substance.

These elements are present across Barry’s practice, which often returns to the tensions between quietude and articulation, self-portraiture and opacity.

Tiffany Cole Tiffany Cole is an artist who explores her world through painting, and is currently living and practicing in Canberra, ACT. She focusses mainly in the field of still-life painting. Her work explores ideas about collecting, and the value we assign to objects in terms of their ability to hold memory and represent connections between people. Cole is interested in our bodily experience of viewing painting, and how materiality and scale can evoke sensations such as tactility for the viewer, which can make the painted world 'come to life'. Recently Cole has also been exploring ways to present her paintings as three-dimensional displays, using laser cutting to play with the boundary between represented space and actual space.  

Tiffany completed a Bachelor of Arts (Visual) with first-class Honours and the University Medal. Cole also won a number of prizes and scholarships at the end of her degree through the ANU EASS Scheme including the Canberra Contemporary Art Space Residency Award, and the Spanish Embassy Young Australian Artists' Travelling Scholarship. Cole was also the recipient of the QANTAS Foundation Encouragement of Australian Art Award in 2010, which took her research to South America and Northern Europe.

Cole has exhibited in a number of solo and group exhibitions in the ACT and NSW, and is currently a PhD candidate at the ANU School of Art.

Farnaz Dadfar Farnaz Dadfar originates from Tehran, Iran, and there she completed her Bachelor of Painting in 2008 before completing a Grad Cert in Visual Art and a Masters of Contemporary Art from the VCA in Melbourne in 2017. She was a finalist in the Churchie Art Prize in 2017, and in the same year was also the recipient of the Galloway Lawson Prize from The University of Melbourne.  She has exhibited widely between Tehran, Brisbane and Melbourne. She is currently returned as a research candidate in the Master of Fine Art (visual art) in VCA program.

Dadfar's work is comprised of kaleidoscopic and highly saturated imagery presented in psychadelic and ornamental symmetrical configurations. In offering the viewer unexpected visual correlations, Dadfar seeks to speculate upon the construction of new imaginary worlds. Her work provides a playful ambivalence that oscillates between a visionary sublime, an apocalyptic spectacle, and a ridiculous fantasy. Such experiences demand a juxtaposition of expected and unexpected colour palettes—an oblique reference to the post-dialectical entanglement of Eastern and Western cultural values that is rapidly redefining the ground of human subjectivity in the twenty-first century.

Brett Ferry Brett Ferry's paintings challenge the tradition of landscape, teasing viewers' perceptions and stimulating the imagination. His bold use of colour and unique style are both confronting and beautiful. His most recent work explores the "post-digital landscape" derived from observation, photography and digital manipulation. Using a variety of techniques, Ferry places high importance on traditional acts of drawing, printmaking and painting. "For me, these techniques provide a response to time and thought, and a discourse within art history. This enables me to build conceptual layers of ideas and meanings, within each piece of work." he states. Brett Ferry has completed a Bachelor of Fine Art Printmaking at Victorian College of the Arts, and a Diploma of Education at The University of Melbourne.  He recently was curated into the 2017 NotFair Exhibition, and was a finalist in the 2017 Bayside Art Prize. Ferry is currently working within education, living and working in Melbourne.

Jasper Jacobsen- Winner of the 2018 Emerging Artist Award Drawing upon a background in psychology and philosophy, Jasper Jacobsen’s practice revolves around ongoing examinations of time, absence, memory and mortality. Utilising found elements as raw material, his conceptual sculpture renders the familiar as the foreign, with a quiet yet disquieting touch. Lost and forgotten objects resurface as precarious ciphers through subtle material intervention and fusion, with no simple reading immune from distortion, drift, or collapse. After studying philosophy and psychology at the Australian National University, Jacobsen received a Master of Contemporary Art in 2017 from VCA, University of Melbourne.

Rose Jiiwu Lee Currently Rose Jiiwu Lee is exploring the idea of space within her work, with a particular focus on what constitutes the modern landscape. Traditional landscape painting conjures thoughts of sweeping plains, rolling hills and coastal views - and while that may have been the subject matter of Streeton and Williams - Lee seeks to more accurately present the modern, urban, world that we live in - a world of interiors, of technology. A world we long to escape from but rarely do. 

The pieces in her recent work depict landscapes that are free from traditional expectations, and show the modern world through a crisp, clear lens. There are voids in her compositions, creating a delicate balance between the other elements that are at play within her structured environments. It also allows us as viewers the space to ponder these landscapes more deeply – where are we now, in this modern world we have created around ourselves?

Rose has exhibited in group exhibitions in London, Paris and Melbourne, and was a finalist in the Agendo Emerging Artist Award in 2017.

Mohsen Meysami Mohsen Meysami is an Iranian artist who works between Tehran (Iran) and Melbourne (Australia). Meysami is interested in utilizing a variety of mediums and techniques to communicate complex political ideas. His artworks range from intricate bead-works on found Persian Kilims to digital illustrations and public art projects. Through his artworks, Meysami explores impacts of recent wars in the Middle-East and challenges people’s indifference to the suffering of those whose lives have been affected by wars.

He completed a Master of Graphic Design at the Azad Art University Tehran, Iran, and was awarded the Australian Postgraduate Award to undertake a PhD. Currently studying at RMIT University, he is conducting a practice-based research project focused on portraying impacts of war using Persian traditional arts.

Mohsen Meysami’s works have been selected as finalist in a number of awards including the ArteLaguna Venice 2018, Wangaratta Contemporary Textile Award, and Incinerator Art Award. In 2017, he won the Footscray Art Prize 2017 Tertiary Award.Claire Mooney In her practice, Claire Mooney explores concepts relating to pattern and abstraction, creating vibrantly coloured paintings that make reference to text and textiles, encoding and craft, landscape and technology. Her most recent work explores colour, pattern and the landscape, weaving together geometric and organic structures to create dynamically fragmented compositions.

Mooney uses a form of collage as her starting point, employing print transfer methods to layer photographs of nature and geometric patterns onto to the surface of the work. These are then edited, partially erased, and painted into and around. The resulting splintered structure presents a collision in process, a clash of nature and culture, showing passages of harmony, intersection and interruption.

Mooney recently completed a Bundoora Nebula Artist Residency at Bundoora Homestead Art Centre and was curated into the 2017 NotFair exhibition. She has previously been a finalist in the City of Albany Prize, and the Substation Contemporary Art Prize.

In 2008 she was a recipient of a NAVA Janet Holmes a Court Grant, and in 2004 was the Winner of the Athenaeum Club Visual Arts Award.

Belinda Wiltshire With a recent shift to a more expressive approach to form and colour, Wiltshire has sharpened the focus on her abstract sensibilities and is moving toward further bridging the gap between representational and nonobjective art. Born in Geelong, 1980, Wiltshire is a visual artist working mainly as a figurative oil painter. After studying Costume Design and Clothing Industry, and with no formal art training, Wiltshire has been exhibiting in solo and group shows since 2002. She was a finalist in the 2004 Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, the 2012, 2016, and 2017 Black Swan Prize For Portraiture, the 2015 Manning Art Prize, the 2014 Benalla Nude Prize, and a semi-finalist in the 2014 and 2017 Doug Moran Painting Prize. Wiltshire was also curated into the 2017 NotFair exhibition.