Photomedia

Leyla Stevens is an Australian-Balinese artist who works within a lens-based practice. Her work has made a significant contribution to expanded documentary genres in Australian video art, as well as exploring the reparative potential of artmaking framed within political and social justice issues. Her practice is informed by ongoing engagements with storied places, archives, cultural geographies and performance lineages through a transcultural lens.

In 2021 Leyla was awarded the prestigious 66th Blake Art Prize for her film, Kidung, which engages with Bali’s silenced histories of political violence. Her immersive multi-channel video installations have been exhibited widely through major national and international group exhibitions, including recent presentations at: Museum of Contemporary Art, TarraWarra Museum, UQ Art Museum, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Artspace Sydney, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Guangdong Times Museum and Seoul Museum of Art. She has been represented in prominent biennales exhibitions: The National 2021: New Australian Art; 2023 TarraWarra Biennial, and the 17th Jogja Biennale.

Leyla’s works are held in significant collections including Museum of Contemporary Art, AGNSW and Kadist. She works collaboratively as a member of Woven Kolektif, an artist group exploring diasporic connections to Indonesia. Her upcoming film, PAHIT MANIS, Night Forest will be presented as a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW in November 2024.

Steven is an artist, curator and educator who works across multiple arts organisations in NSW.

He works with Photomedia, installation and performance. His art practice explores the physical and psychological landscape of masculine identity, vulnerability and loss. His work is often politically provocative and personal, referencing lived experiences. Steven has received artist residencies, been a finalist in photographic prizes, arts writing and exhibits regularly.

Steven was instrumental in creating the Hill End Art Gallery in 2021. He is currently collaborating with the CORRIDOR project where he has been invited to join a new exploratory arts program as mentor and artist. He curated While the World Waits, a touring exhibition featuring 20 regional NSW artists responding to the pandemic and events of 2020/21. This exhibition has been shown in 15 locations across the NSW Central West and was opened at NSW Parliament House in August 2024.

Recent exhibitions include Plant + Human with the Australian Centre for Photography and Build That Wall where he installed a 3-day durational performance work for Cementa. Steven exhibited work in dialogue with Wendy Sharpe at Bathurst Regional Art Gallery. Steven was selected to create and exhibit new work with Orange Regional Gallery for Material Measure and Queer Ecology with Schmick Contemporary in Sydney.

Steven studied with NAS and holds a BFA, Hons, MFA in Photomedia. He is currently a lecturer at the National Art School. He has been a lecturer with the Australian Centre for Photography. He was a board member with the ACP from 2016-2019 and currently sits on several regional Arts advisory panels. He now also works for Arts OutWest as Arts and Health and Projects Officer. Highlights include the thrill of live radio, arts writing, curating regional exhibitions, running workshops, supporting regional artists, and working with Western NSW Local Health Network to deliver art in health settings across Central West NSW.

Steven has travelled extensively having lived and worked in Perth, London and Sydney. In a desire to broaden his art practice, career and most importantly life, Steven chose to make a move into the Central West in 2018. Home is a beautiful property on Wiradjuri land in Hill End NSW, where the hum of the bush is ever present and full of surprises.

Dr. David Manley is a Sydney based artist and educator. He is a lecturer in Photomedia at the National Art School Australia and also works as a Senior Mental Health Clinician at St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney. He holds a PhD in Fine Arts and a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of New South Wales Art and Design. His work is concerned with the interplay between architecture, the image and human psychology. In 2012 he was a winner of the Head On Portrait Prize and his visual and textural work has been published here in Australia and internationally. Some venues that his work has been exhibited in include – Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Monash Gallery of Art, The Australian Centre for Photography, Verge Gallery Sydney University, Galerie Pompom, Blackeye Contemporary Photography Space, NSW State Parliament, the Ulsan Cultural Arts Centre and the Hongik University Contemporary Art Gallery in Hongdae South Korea.  

Skye Wagner’s art practice covers a range of media, including performance, photography and video. She has exhibited at MOP, Articulate Project Space, The Paper Mill, Kudos Gallery and Slade Research Centre, London. She has a Bachelor of Media from Macquarie University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the National Art School. Currently she is a lecturer in photography at the National Art School and a sessional tutor at the University of Technology, Sydney, in the Photography and Situated Media Program.

Damian Dillon is a Sydney based artist who works across photography, installation, sculpture and video. Dillons Photomedia practice deconstructs digital and analogue processes to consider how representational practices over the landscape inform a postcolonial comprehension of place. Dillon has a Bachelor’s Degree from Sydney College of the Arts, and two Master’s Degrees from the College of Fine Arts NSW. He has been a recipient of many grants and prizes including the Blacktown Art Prize, and Waverley Mayor’s prize, and his recent work has been collected by Artbank, Waverley Council, and MAPH Melbourne. His latest studio residencies include, Sim Iceland, Megalo Print studio and Photo Access Canberra, and recent exhibitions include Hong IK university Seoul, Muswellbrook Regional Gallery, and a major commission for the Museum of Contemporary Photography. He is founding director of schmickcontemporary Gallery Sydney and current director of Syrupcontemporary Gallery Sydney.

Vincent has extensive experience in the visual arts as an exhibiting artist and in the higher education sector. He has held positions in teaching and technical roles at UNSW COFA and TAFE NSW. His experience also extends to professional creative industries working with various performing arts companies including Sydney Theatre Company and Bangarra Dance Theatre. Vincent holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts majoring in photography and moving image from the University of Western Sydney. Joining the Photomedia team in 2017, Vincent is committed in supporting the immersive studio-based education experience for students and staff at National Art School.

Genevieve Felix Reynolds is an artist and educator born on Jagera Country (Brisbane) working across painting, digital media and installation. European and Nigerian ancestry informs her engagement with intercultural aesthetic histories, which she investigates via intersections of art-making, archaeology, collecting and curating. In 2021 she completed a Masters in Fine Arts for a thesis researching intersections of contemporary painting, museum and image archives. Felix Reynolds’ practice has been supported by funding from Create NSW, Creative Australia, Arts Queensland, Griffith University and the University of New South Wales.  

Harley Ives is a Sydney based photomedia artist. His works are concerned with the material qualities of the moving image and how they can be directed to discern a painterly quality in video. In part this is a response to the dematerialization of images in a Post Internet age and seeks to explore the aesthetics of image decay. Recently his practice has instigated a collision between real and virtual sets in order to bring to view our relationship to synthetic imagery.  

Harley has been included in group exhibitions nationally at venues including Artspace Sydney, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Griffith University Art Museum, RMIT Melbourne, and held six solo exhibitions at Chalk Horse Gallery, Sydney. Currently, Harley works as a lecturer in Screen Arts at Sydney College of the Arts and in Photomedia at The National Art School. In 2018 he completed a Fine Arts PhD with a thesis titled The Material Qualities of the Moving Image and the Painterly Gesture. 

Jacky Redgate (1955–) is a Sydney-based artist and educator. Born in London, Redgate emigrated to Australia in 1967.  She received a Bachelor of Arts from the South Australian School of Art (Sculpture), in 1980, a Master of Visual Art from Sydney College of the Arts, in 1998 and a Doctor of Creative Arts from the University of Wollongong in 2014.

Redgate’s career evolved through the divergent contexts of late modernism, 1970s feminism, minimalism, and conceptual art. Her work came to prominence in the early 1980s at a major turning point in the artworld internationally and nationally and during the ground-breaking debates of postmodernism, especially regarding the role that photography played. Her participation in major exhibitions like the 1985 Perspecta helped redefine the view of photography as an art form.   Her practice often occupies the intersection of photography and sculpture – two and three-dimensionality – flatness and depth. A common thread in her work is an interest in the differences between various systems – both personal, such as snapshots, or impersonal, such as mathematics. Much of her work is a meditation on photography, its optics and gazes. Redgate has worked almost solely with mirrors for the past two decades, performing a cathexis on emotionally laden objects that tease with a combination of abstraction and an autobiographical mirroring. Melissa Keys has recently commented, “She is a pioneering figure whose practice has been singular, rigorous and imaginative”.

Jacky Redgate is an Honorary Senior Fellow with the Faculty of the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Wollongong and is represented by ARC ONE Gallery, Melbourne and Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, Sydney.

Denis Beaubois was born in Mauritius and lives on Gadigal land. He was a member of performance ensemble Gravity Feed as well as the Post Arrivalists and has performed with Japanese company Gekidan Kaitaisha in the Drifting View X in Tokyo.

He holds an MA in photography and performance as well as an MFA in Time Based Arts from COFA, UNSW.

He has exhibited both internationally and locally at numerous galleries and festivals including the TATE Modern, San Francisco MOMA, The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, The Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, The Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei.

He has received numerous awards for his works most notably winning the Bonn Videonale, and receiving the Judges special prize for the Internationaler Medien Kunst Preis, ZKM. He was also the recipient of the Create NSW Fellowship for established artist in 2018.