From a rich, diverse and fascinating field, I have been asked to select only three works for awards from this year’s prize exhibition. First, I offer my warm congratulations to all the entrants in the 2008 Sunshine Coast Art Prize. Seeing such a wealth of fine new work is always a privilege, though one tempered with the burden of decision. Given that the prize is open to all media, I was delighted to see many fine works in printmaking, in multimedia, in photography and in painting. This prize exhibition testifies once again to the power of the artists’ imaginations and to the very different roads they travel.

Sunshine Coast Art Prize

Scott Redford - Reinhardt’s Silver Instant Painting

Scott Redford’s current painting has taken his familiar preoccupation with Queensland beach culture, and the beach as a mytho-poeiac site in Australia, to a new and curiously ecstatic place. His knowingly fuses abstract expressionist paint handling with blue sea-scape references from the beach. It’s as if the visceral experience of painting is being conflated with the thrill of being inside a fine tube on a sunny day. (With tinny reference of various kinds registered on the shiny engraved frame, a reflective surface that welcomes us all into the painting.)

The Reinhardt of the title might be the name of Redford’s mythical surfer, but it is also the name of the renowned American Ad Reinhardt, great painter and great theorist of post-war art. In all of this, it’s clear that Scott Redford is privileging culture here, now, in Queensland, on the coast.  Current painting from here and now, taking its place in art history, on a world stage.

Funky, passionate, quite gorgeous, I find Reinhardt’s Silver Instant Painting to be the award winner from a highly competitive field.  And hope that successive visitors to the Gallery will enjoy it in the coming year.

Highly Commended

Peter Alwast - Clouds

Peter Alwast is an idiosyncratic multi-media artist whose distinctive vision is growing stronger with each year. His allusive, complex paintings, in dialogue with his animations, scope the skies above his native Gold Coast, while considering the life that unfolds beneath it.

Yet these skies, these clouds, are also inflected with visions Alwast culls from other fields of life and from memory. The grids recall planning half-built houses in new suburban developments, and the hopefulness of people making plans for the future; the MRI images suggest the ways that multiple imaging systems now present us with an increasable complex conceptions of our lives—all of that.

Alwast started his artistic career as a painter and his working method remains free-wheeling, experimental, and open-ended. Hopefully this Highly Commended Award from the Sunshine Coast Art Prize should encourage Alwast to continue pursuing his art.

Commended

Bronek Kozka - There’s something about…

Indeed there is something very strange other-worldly about this remarkable photograph. Rendered in the increasingly popular photographic and print media of inkjet printing, Bronek’s masterly There’s something about… appears at first glance to be a bleached and re-rendered image drawn from a pictorial publication of the 1950s or 1960s, perhaps one of the canonical mass-media magazines such as the one held by the ‘father’ figure in the image.

Yet this photograph, and others from the same series, have actually been staged by the artist himself, photographed in a period house, and then manipulated to make subtle comments on conventional life, on family relationships, even on resistance within the family. This is intriguing and original work.

Julie Ewington
Curatorial Manager, Australian Art
Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art