New annual award for visual arts students announced at TRANSIT opening

The 2010 TRANSIT: Southern Cross University visual arts graduating students exhibition opening was a great success with an estimated 500 people attending and 50 artworks being sold on the night.

Director of the Lismore Regional Gallery, Brett Adlington, officially opened the event and announced the inception of a new initiative, the annual Lismore Regional Gallery Graduate Award.

The inaugural recipient was Joshua Smith, in response to his TRANSIT exhibition installation, The Intention Engine.

Curator of the Lismore Regional Gallery, Kezia Geddes, said the award was intended to encourage students in the daunting transition from art school to professional art practice by providing them with an opportunity to exhibit new work.

“Joshua Smith’s work is an ambitious site-specific work which reflects on and challenges notions around the exchange of values while providing a space for audience participation. As viewers we can actively participate in and contribute to the work as well as being able to manoeuvre, switch, slide and turn various components,” Ms Geddes said.

“It is intelligent, fun and well made. It has a refreshing feeling of having been made by a big kid.”

As the award recipient Joshua will have the opportunity to exhibit a new work in the Lismore Regional Gallery’s upstairs contemporary space next year. He will also be awarded an artist fee, layout and production of an exhibition catalogue as well as funding for exhibition invitations and promotion.

Joshua said he was speechless and very grateful to the gallery when he found out he was this year’s winner.

“There were tears welling up and there was an overwhelming sense of relief actually,” Joshua said.

“I gave it more than my all for this project. I have aspirations to do similar projects in the future, and this result means I will be much more likely to be able to work on projects like this again and hopefully again. It is a breakthrough for me to have the opportunity to exhibit my work in a prestigiously peer reviewed context like the Regional Gallery.

Joshua’s installation has a number of physical components made up of a range of materials including found corrugated iron, steaming coal from Wollongong, around 60 cardboard boxes, some glass jars, plastic elements and two video screens where the viewer can learn about the construction of the installation and the various way’s they can interact with The Intention Engine.

“The work is a 3D interactive installation and it is designed so that if someone does something with The Engine, it responds. The viewers are invited to participate in contributing to the internal flux mechanics of the machine,” Joshua said.

“The Intention Engine can only work if it is constantly evolving and being added to. At the exhibition opening and in the few days since, The Engine has gathered up many intentions. The gallery participants have actually interacted with it and added to it, so there is this huge concentrated intention in the machine.

“The big intention of The Intention Engine is to swap the intention charge in this beautiful Wollongong steaming coal from the intention to burn it, to the intention not to burn it. You could consider that this change of intention creates a vacuum in the future of expelled energy.

“That space is really what is exciting for me. It is also relevant on a broader scale because it plays with the idea of how we can find value in the spaces we may have considered void,” Joshua said.

Joshua describes himself as an emerging contemporary artist with a passion for using his art making as academic research. He has some exciting opportunities lined up over the next 12 months including: exhibiting in the Southern Cross University Synergy exhibition at the next Art Gallery in November; he and his partner Prudence Lawrence have been commissioned to contribute a collaborative interactive work to the Woodford Folk Festival at the end of this year; his Lismore Regional Gallery exhibition will be scheduled in 2011; and he has been invited to deliver a paper and exhibit a work at a Praxis conference in Amsterdam in March 2011.

Joshua is one of 46 graduate students who have their work on show at TRANSIT, the University’s premier art exhibition. John Smith course co-ordinator for the Bachelor of Visual Arts, said this year's exhibition included a broad range of visual arts media including painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, ceramics, installation and film and this reflected the diversity of visual arts studies that was available at the University.

Most of the artworks included in the exhibition are available for sale with a pricelist available at the exhibition entry. Prices range from $25 to $3,000 with most works selling below $500.

The TRANSIT exhibition opening event was held on Friday, October 15 and the exhibition continues until Saturday, October 30. The opening hours are 10am to 4pm from Monday to Saturday and closed on Sundays.

For more information call 02 66203831 or visit http://scu.edu.au/creativeartsshowcase/index.php/87.

Photo: Visual arts graduate Joshua Smith with his installation, The Intention Engine.