The annual John Fries Award for emerging artists has been won by Eric Demetriou. The Victorian artist took out the $10,000 prize with his installation work, An Afternoon with Herb Jercher, which was made with the assistance of the eponymous sound artist.
Oliver Watts, curator of the award exhibition and one of five judges of the 2016 prize, said of the winning work, “This exciting and strong work seems to reference the drover through the sounds and effects of lashing whips. Its duality is what makes it appealing, as the sound of the whip evokes the Man from Snowy River, but it’s mediated through pop culture, art and technical recording devices.”
Jessie Bullivant was highly commended for her video, In the Event of Winning, an acceptance speech which no one was allowed to watch unless she won.
Works by all 14 finalists, selected from 1000 entries, are showcased in the John Fries Award Exhibition.
The Copyright Agency | Viscopy John Fries Award is sponsored by Fries family in memory of former Viscopy director and honorary treasurer, John Fries.
John Fries Award Exhibition
UNSW Galleries
19 August – 1 October
In a new collaborative exhibition at PS Art Space, in partnership with Cool Change Contemporary, five artists with process-lead practices contemplate material ethics through actively engaging in slowness and reuse.
Isaac Julien’s 2022 video work Once Again…(Statues Never Die) exposes the unseen emotional registers inherent to the struggle for colonial repatriation by mapping the places where poetics and politics intersect.
A new exhibition at the Australian National Capital Artists Inc (ANCA) asks 12 artists—including Dan Powers, S.A.Adair, Emma Beer and Lisa Sammut—to explore scale: from the miniature to the monumental.
In The Rites of When, Angelica Mesiti considers the rituals that may mark the seasons in our burning planet. The Tank has been waiting for art like this.
Developed in 2022 by Artback NT as part of Apmere Mparntwe—the Australian Ceramics Triennale— touring exhibition Clay on Country, showing now at New England Regional Art Museum, showcases the diversity of ceramics in the Central Desert.
In his latest exhibition at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Jack Ball challenges the extractive history of the archive while searching for shapes that can articulate the complexity of trans life.
