PORTRAIT OF CREATIVITY
RACT TASMANIAN PORTRAITURE PRIZE 2018 Long Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre, 77 Salamanca Place, Hobart October 21: Sawtooth ARI, 160 Cimitere St, Launceston November 30 — January 27: Maker’s Workshop, 2 Bass Highway, Burnie
This is a very refreshing show. The RACT Portraiture Prize has always focussed on emerging artists, so if this year’s finalist selection is anything to judge by, the visual art scene in Tasmania is in rude health. There’s a lot of really fine work here, but there is also a very pleasing variety of mediums and approaches that open up the idea of what a portrait is. There are some fabulous video entries, including the superb, and deserved winner, The Rest, by Sam Mountford and Tess Campbell. The Rest is a portrait of a home and the couple and dog who live in it, and it’s a precision exercise in intimate dignity. It captures lives, focuses on bodies, and allows us to see the simple rituals of two people. Everything about it is meticulous: the construction of each shot, the soundtrack — essentially field recordings from around the house known as The Rest — are expertly melded. I watched this multiple times, finding it engrossingly hypnotic.
There is so much more though: other video works, such as the sweet Autumn walk for Spencer, a sensitive portrait of a boy with the rare Cardio-Facia-Cutaneous Syndrome is notable for its direct emotional honesty, while The Italian Museum (Nonna’s House) is a captivating exercise in portraying the passage of time by allowing colour to seep through water. As a technique it’s so simple and immediate, yet the results are gorgeous.
Georgia Lucy’s Callum is doing the dishes, is notable for the strong flood of colour it uses, but also for the hilarious technique of slight but definite exaggeration it exhibits: the busy hands accomplishing the domestic task, thick eyebrows, rich eye contact, and the sense of movement. The painting, filled with small, dancing motions we all know from the kitchen, is a celebration of everyday intimacy and excitement at just being with a person you care for.
Something about the rough, expressionist influenced work of Viv Cut bush draw sin the audience. It’s not just that you have to literally read the words on the image, it’s that the almost banal discussion about pancakes is a cypher for a reflective work about ageing and how someone might deal with it, issues of consequence, agency, the idea of personal control and the sheer randomness of the journey of life are all woven in this work. It says a lot with little and does it with a wry grin.
If I have a favourite work, and this is a very hard thing to pick, it’s probably Liam James’ Portrait of Hobart Publican Gibbo. This photographic work takes a person many people in Hobart may know on some level — he runs a busy inner-city venue — and almost recasts him as a regal figure. This is the subtext James is playing with: the portrait looks and is constructed like the kind of image we might expect to be made of a politician, yet Gibbo is far from that, or is he? He’s a public figure, and this image asks why we should not celebrate the hard-working bloke at the local? There’s comedy at play, but also a point being made, while genuinely celebrating the subject himself, who, with his slightly messy hair and black t-shirt looks like a punk Shakespeare.
There’s a lot more in the 2018 prize, and there is still a people’s choice to come. My money’s on Gibbo, but really, the field is so rich that it’s anybody’s guess.