Dentons and the National Art School are proud to present Diverse Voices, a selection of outstanding artworks by recent Master of Fine Art graduates working in wide ranging art practices and art media that are informed by their diverse backgrounds and identities. Together the artworks speak to the artists’ personal experiences as people from diverse cultural backgrounds, DSG communities and people who are neuro-diverse. The artworks embrace a common visual language and together promote themes and awareness of societal inclusivity.
Diverse Voices
Artworks are available to purchase below:
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ALI TAHAYORI
$3,200.00After Everything Has Been Said, 2022
Face mounted photographic print on acrylic
100 x 100 cm
FramedBorn in Shiraz, Iran, Ali Tahayori currently lives and works in Sydney, Australia (Gadigal Land). Growing up in Iran during the 1980s, within a system of oppressive homophobia, he quickly adopted the dual vision of an outsider. Moving to Australia in 2007 and living in forced exile as an Australian migrant, he continued to exist as an enforced member of the subaltern. Drawing on his Cultural heritage, he incorporates the traditional Iranian craft of Āine-Kāri (Mirror-works), translating it into a contemporary visual vocabulary. By combining fractured mirrors with text and imagery, Tahayori aims to create kaleidoscopic experiences of revelation and concealment that capture the distorted vision he has inherited. In his practice, a discourse on diaspora and displacement meets a discourse about queerness.
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ARMANDO CHANT
$3,200.00Palimpsest VII (Valle de Veneon), 2022
Created in collaboration with master embroiderers Rajat Jain (coordinator) , Mohammed Waseem (embroiderer), Mohammed Irfan (embroiderer), Mohammed Imran (embroiderer), Mohammed Fahim (embroiderer), and Mohammed Tasleem (embroiderer)
Hand embroidered linen canvas, Graphite, wax, varnish, photographic Digital Print, Graphite stick, wooden shelf 65 cm x 42 cmMy practice-based research is an investigation of material transformation as applied to mediated images of the ‘landscape.’ The work is concerned with the possibilities and limits of representation using processes of erasure, disruption and repetition in relation to found images, where ‘the image’ does not sit exclusively within one realm but in between multiple mediums and surfaces. This interdisciplinary approach builds on the conceptual and aesthetic tension between craft and concept, image and object, local and global, visual and tactile. My work explores these dynamic relationships by foregrounding the in-between as a new space that emerges from these binary tensions.
Within Australia, I have participated in solo and group exhibitions both in Sydney and Melbourne that have been part of arts festivals such as Sydney Art Month and Head On photography festival. I have also participated in major regional exhibitions such as the Tamworth Textile triennial 2015, where the gallery acquired the work for its collection and its 2020 edition, and the Wangaratta Contemporary Textile award in 2019 and 2021. Internationally I have participated in curated and solo exhibitions, installations, and symposiums in Florence, Finland and Paris.
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SVETLANA PROKHOROVA
$1,200.00Towards the sun, 2022
Screen print
75 x 56 cm
Framed size 92 x 73 cmSvetlana Prokhorova was born in the USSR, and now lives and works in Sydney, the Gadigal Land.
Her current project investigates the power of the visual language of Avant-garde and Russian Constructivism. It is informed by her personal experience of Soviet symbolism and visual elements that emerged from the Avant-garde graphic culture. She analyses how values of progressive art movements served propaganda purposes in a totalitarian regime. In her art practice, Svetlana uses geometric abstraction and minimal forms, paying a special attention to colour and its psychological effect.
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MEI ZHAO
$1,500.00Beautiful Dawn Kyeemagh V, 2022
acrylic on canvas and board
119 x 79 cmMei Zhang’s painting practice explores map-making and Western landscape traditions in response to current patterns of globalisation, the gig economy and hybrid cultures in relation to their impact in reshaping the local environment and the concept of place. Combining direct painting and drawing in the landscape with the Google Maps’ interface, she creates work using the methods of Chinese landscape painting and abstract expressionism in diverse media to envision the natural and cultural topography of Sydney landscape.
Mei’s works focuses on three Chinese market gardens in the Sydney region, in which local indigenous and colonial histories are intertwined with the physical characteristics of these marginal, low-lying, densely farmed zones in Sydney’s urban ecosystem. Inspired by the composite view of Google Maps that combines aerial and embodied perspectives, she transforms the geographic features of these gardens through mark-making consisting of poured paint and gestural brush-marks to develop an integrated mapped space of individual works arranged into a dynamic installation view. Through this process, she seeks to embrace a culturally diverse position of place within the expanded field of painting, in which landscape can express living memories while simultaneously embodying an artistic process of understanding the nuanced social and cultured landscape in which we live.
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WOLFGANG SAKER
$1,500.00To You the immortal, 2022
Single channel HD video
26:01 minutesWolfgang Saker uses painting, technology and digital media to focus on the concept of the avatar, and the shrinking difference between the corporeal and the digital. How the absurdity of the internet is leaking into earth. Frequently incorporating figurative elements, text and surreal nonlinear storytelling, His works draw upon online avatars, virtual realities and melancholy in modern social society and a satirical take on popular culture. While questioning if it matters if we are corporeal of virtual?
