‘the churchie’ Curator’s Essay

Conditions of Emergence

Prize exhibitions are contingent assemblies, shaped by longer histories of access, education and self-speculation. More so than grants, commissions and residencies, prizes present particularly dramatic moments in art life, where we come face to face with our own taste, the frisson of competition, and our capacity to take genuine pleasure in another’s success and emergence. They are appreciated by artists and institutions in the way they mess with hierarchies, granting visibility, network effects and curatorial attention. For these reasons, and many others, prizes continue to proliferate globally, while broader conditions of production become more challenging.

‘the churchie’, Australia’s longest-running art prize for emerging artists registers something of these straddled aspects of austerity and extravagance through which contemporary art is taking shape. What stands out among the finalists this year is a commitment to intergenerational and infrastructural literacies. Almost every work asks how subjects and territories are produced – through various medical, colonial, bureaucratic, algorithmic, ecological, familial and migratory systems – and how artistic practice might metabolise to know those structures differently, rather than merely representing or suspending their reality. Across installation, moving image (Huiyi Xiao, The Fire That Wouldn’t Call Itself Ash (Still) pictured), textiles, painting, sculpture and drawing, research becomes both method and medium. The continuing interest of artists in video is notable, given how limited the financial return on such practices can be within both private and institutional markets.

Several artists interrogate cultures of projective governance and technology. Georgia Lucy (installation pictured) reanimates a forgotten competition, abandoned by the Whitlam government, to replace the Australian national anthem. The bathos of her favourite entry sends her in the direction of cheese samples on a North Queensland dairy frontier, while floodwaters force a more planetary reckoning. In a more confronting but equally strange register, Yanti Peng’s new.life drifts between virtual role-playing worlds and memories of Hainan before rapid industrialisation, as we process the slow reshaping of perception through platforms.

Jonny Scholes stages an Australian civic imaginary organised around a collapse of trust in generative AI. Workers surveil degraded information environments in an office space unnerving for taking so little leave from the present. Biopolitical commentary is more intimately seared in Alannah Dair’s analogue of endometriosis tissue, stretched and pincered across an entire ceiling. A feminist intervention into objectification implicates viewers within a normally privated experience of medical misogyny, through precise interactive programming.

Several works foreground conditions of dependency and maintenance that have always been a part of artistic life, but that conventional narratives of virtuosity obscure. MeiMei 莓莓 Hodgkinson’s beaded textile (pictured), developed over ten months alongside the labour of raising a child, traces the lingering effects of China’s One Child Policy through maternal anxiety and the impossible aspiration to become Enough Mum in Australia. Artistic production and reproductive labour interrupt, feed and challenge one another. Olive Guardiani’s Kite Lung (pictured in foreground, above) seems to propose dependency as a formal principle. Genoese sailcloth stretches against portable tent poles in a sculpture that mimes breath, pressure and temporary equilibrium. Neither material can sustain itself. The tension between tautness and potential collapse comes out of a continual negotiation with surrounding forces, in a work that offers almost a leitmotif for contemporary conditions.

Metro is very happy to host ‘the churchie’ this third year in a row and encourages you to spend time with these risked qualities of contemporary emerging practice.

Rachel O’Reilly Curator, Metro Arts