Tuesday, June 22, 2010

undergraduate research award down under!

I know...It has been a long time since I've posted on here, but it doesn't mean I haven't been doing anything! During this time I have been working hard at Uni and I'd like to say that I just found out that I received Honorable Mention for my application to the UC EAP Undergraduate Research Award for my Art HIstory project here at La Trobe University in Australia. I will receive $500 dollars as a reward as well as a published article in a issue of Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad. http://www.frontiersjournal.com/

The title of my project was "Surfacing the Australian Desert: The Local Environmental Art of John Wolseley."
John Wolseley at Work in the Desert
Abstract:

"Australian identity is a complex conversation of ownership, language, myth, and environmentalism. Landscape art is a powerful way to access the core of Australia’s complex national identity. In each painting there are several narratives, dissolving and overlapping with one another, some dominating and some repressing a desire to reveal the beauty and fear of the Australian landscape. John Wolseley’s contemporary landscape art, unlike traditional landscape painting, addresses the discomforts and ambiguities of the Australian landscape by using a multiplicity of styles and mediums. His local environmental art becomes a microcosm for the shifting identities and environmental diversity embedded in the layers of the Australian desert. Through a discussion of Wolseley’s desert landscape art, issues of colonization, archeology, and environmentalism become visible and the complex consciousness of Australia's identity becomes perceivable. The paper will also discuss the following questions: How were British ‘ways of seeing’ transferred to Australian landscapes? How did this contrast with Aboriginal conceptions of land? How can artists synthesize the European conception of the land with Aboriginal beliefs to make true “Australian art”? With this is in mind, this research paper will open up discourse for different ways in which Australia’s contemporary identity copes with preserving and archiving the Australian environment through art. `

Through this project I was able to visit the Australian desert and speak to the artist, John Wolseley himself, about his goals with art and how he aims to synthesize European and Indigenous ways of understanding the landscape through art.

John Wolseley,"Dunes Climbing A Mountain," 1992-3, Pencil, Chalk, Ink. Australian Galleries

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