Life is a risk/Art is a risk

National Artists’ Self-Portrait Prize 2011: Life is a Risk/Art is a Risk

@ UQ Art Museum, Brisbane

Life is a risk/Art is a risk is the theme for the biennial National Artists' Self-Portrait Prize 2011 at UQ Art Museum. Twenty-five artists were invited to respond and take a risk, representing themselves beyond surface level imagery and meaning, through contemporary artistic practices. Each taking a risk in presenting a part of themselves for all to see and judge. The artists all reside in Australia but are varied in age, ethnicity and nationality. Some are established artists in their practice and others more fresher faced, with very different budgets and personal time constraints. The diversity produced a rich variety of work, each artist responding differently through their chosen medium, including installation, sculpture, video, painting, photography or ceramics.

Some of the works are quite didactic and straight forward, others speak of the physical or spiritual or bring universal political layers to the fold. Eric Bridgeman's photographic diptych of two painted males, brown and white, arms crossed, wearing football shorts; universalises and nationalises his self-portrait with its commentary on race in Australia, focusing on its presence in football culture. The diptych references a fight between two players, one shouting racial insults. The photographs represent a reconciliation of white and black, with the text from Bridgeman “JOEY, I’M NOT ANGRY ANYMORE. [heart] B.K (BABY)” and on the opposing photograph “BABY, IM NOT A WHITE  #?@*! ANYMORE [heart] JOEY”. The self-portrait could almost be representations of Bridgeman’s own two sides, his mother a Papa New Guinean and his father an Anglo-Australian. 

Filipino artists Alfredo & Isabel Aquililizan respond to their personal experience of migration to Australia, drawing on memory they comment on global issues such as diaspora in their installation Foreigners: Project another country, 2011 in which they filled a large closet with personal items, meticulously crammed and placed with precision. The objects are a cultural fusion, with a world music collection, a Filipino doll, Australian travel guides, placed alongside a container of dried roses and other personal items. The collection depicts a sense of longing, past memories fused with new objects from their current home. 

Rebecca Smith's video named after her current age 25, 2011 is an honest and raw representation of youth and discovery. The fractured footage invites you to be a part of her own experiences through moments like slow line of a plane cutting the sky or light flickering on a window pane. City lights, stars, cigarette smoke, family and friends also feature in fragments as torchlights search. Smith's honest response resonates a desire and appreciation for life and a sense of journey, yet leaves a lingering sense of longing and fragility in her own experience. Each one of these artists draws from their own experiences present and past, unlike this year’s winner Domencio de Clario who memorialises past, present and future.

Clario's 2047 (the immortals), 2011 consists of six chairs situated in front of six paintings spanning six decades. The large mixed media paintings and chairs start from the year 1947 and end at 2037; each with its own story. Each work seems at first like distant memories, full of emotion and feeling, yet becomes heavier and more constructed as each story becomes a prediction for a future self, immortalised by art. Clario's emotive paintings strike a different note to the winners of the previous two years (both a physical representation). His approach to voicing a part of himself in the past, present and future seems intimate, yet devoid of personal imagery. It conveys an internal self' thoughts and feelings, through his use of colour and text, each texture and colour evoking some feeling.

Sancintya Simpson