Premio Combat Prize

I am an Australian artist living and working in Amsterdam, Netherlands. After winning the prestigious Grace Cossington Smith Art Prize 2015 in Sydney I relocated to Europe to participate in multiple exhibitions and residency programs. I am currently undertaking a 3 month residency in Berlin, Germany.
My work appropriates visual, technological and ideological properties of advertising to challenge how contemporary society engages with the ubiquitous nature of advertising. Using collage as a departure point for this examination, my practice explores expanded notions of drawing through installation, photography and performance.
The artwork I am submitting for Premio Combat Prize 2016 is from an ongoing project ’Silent subject, object . Silent listen, speak.’ which documents a series of public interventions performed in the cities of Sydney, Australia and Berlin, Germany.
Select posters are removed from outdoor Adshells (corporate advertising in public space; bus shelters; billboards) using a key to unlock the cabinets. The advertisements are then collaged in the studio using multiple posters from the same ad campaign that were removed from their setting. Stripped of comprehensible text and congruent imagery; the performances,concerts or special offers announced within the posters are silenced. The manipulated collages are then reinserted back into bus stop Adshell locations during the day wearing Sydney Buses Hi-visibility safety vests. Preserving the compositional structure within the original posters, the installed collages stand in for advertisements; frequently unnoticed by commuting pedestrians.
Observing and photographing the collages I aim to document how long they go unnoticed by pedestrians and council/street furniture employers. Although the physical collages speak more to the transient nature of the poster lasting only a matter of days before discovered and removed, the documentation aims to reveal the process and function to conceptualise the collages; shifting the focus from the form of the work towards the strategic and contextual position.
My interest in image making develops from the language of painting and drawing whilst utilising the saturation of advertising material to create extended content and a critical undermining of their public placement through new usage and interventions.