The Grad Show opened with more questions than answers as thousands gathered on Thursday 21 November to assess the work of the latest crop of art students at the Victorian College of the Arts.
Opinions were heated and trends were identified as 160 students showed what they’d been doing for the last three or four years.
The Grad Show is an institution for gallerists, reviewers and artists keen to see what the next crop is thinking. This puts the pressure on students to perform – for many are picked up by galleries on the strength of their work at the show.
Honours graduate Chelsea Rosenbrock’s I come here every day is a bitter-sweet recount of commitment to study and a practice of blowing-up images in house paint on canvas.
The street aesthetic of Michael Kennedy in Despair Spring was also modest, casual and real.
The bottom line is that these students will graduate after an intense period of support and study to an art world that is competitive and driven by fashion.
Non-objective painting has been cool for some time, yet there was little evidence of it at this year’s show, apart from Samual Woodman’s introspective studies of line and curved shapes in watercolour on paper.
Woodman won an award from Five Walls in Footscray with the promise of a show and representation at a gallery that is making a name for itself in this genre.
More flamboyant work made its presence felt at the opening with I’m starting to look like my father by Parker Lev Dupain dominating the sculpture department.
Dupain brought together tilted seats, half-body moulds, black cats and a bronze male statue in an installation that could not be ignored.
All bums were on seats for an investigation of trans uncertainties, hierarchies and dominating fathers. People loved the work as Dupain’s hairy half-bodies mingled and his cats got underfoot, looking up for guidance.
“To be except; apart from; other than is a condition of mourning only for those who value and expect arrival,” the artist quotes eloquently from a trans theorist.
In the reprocessing of old genres, new models are emerging. If might take years for an artist to find just the right pose.
Hazel Walker-Walsh’s series of six paintings Untitled were superb, representing the contours of bodies in a range of poses and patterning, suggesting a searching for a totem that shows a cross-over in thinking from First Nations work.
These new conceptual artists are using words and imagery that stick in your mind and question old terms such as “figurative” and “statue”.
The half-bodies of Dupain are milk and sawdust casts of their maker that ask more questions than they resolve.
2024 VCA Art Grad Show
Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, Southbank
Exhibition continues to 29 November 2024
Free entry
For more information, visit: www.unimelb.edu.au for details.
Images: Chelsea Rosenbrock, I come here every day, house paint on canvas – photo by Rhonda Dredge | Parker Lev Dupain, I’m starting to look like my father, milk and sawdust – photo by Rhonda Dredge
Words: Rhonda Dredge