Nat Thomas and Concettina Inserra win the William and Winifred Bowness Prize 2008
9 May, 2008
Until Never is proud to congratulate Nat Thomas and Concettina Inserra on taking out The William and Winifred Bowness Prize 2008.
PRESS RELEASE
The winners of the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize for 2008 are Melbourne-based artists, Concettina INSERRA & Nat THOMAS.
Their collaborative submission to the competition, a chromogenic print titled Portrait of mother and daughter, after Mirka 2008, is a homage to the Melbourne artist Mirka Mora and in a broader sense, the place of 'family' within artistic practise.
The work was inspired by a story in Mirka Mora's biography, My Life; Wicked but Virtuous that describes how Mirka spontaneously decorated her face with zinc cream and mascara one dull Sunday afternoon at her holiday house in Aspendale. A photograph was taken which later appeared on the cover of the influential 60s underground publication, Oz Magazine. As Mirka herself recalled 'You can't do better than that on a Sunday afternoon, and it makes me think of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus:' 'Time is like a river made up of the events which happen, and its current is strong; no sooner does anything appear than it is swept away, and another comes in its place, and will be swept away too.'
The Prize, which was presented at the MGA on Wednesday 03 September at 6:30pm, was established to promote excellence in photography and will provide an opportunity to view and engage with some of the most interesting contemporary work produced over the past year. Entries opened in March 2008 and closed on 30 May, 2008. All still photo-based media including analogue and digital photography were considered. After attracting a record 363 entries from around the country, the judges selected 34 works by artists which showcase the strength and diversity of contemporary Australian photography.
Inserra and Thomas live in Melbourne and are graduates of RMIT and Victoria College of the Arts respectively.
The judges for this year's prize (Australian artist Rosemary Laing, Tony Ellwood, Director, Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, and Jason Smith, Director & CEO, Heidi Museum of Modern Art) were impressed by the way in which the winning work suggested a complex and challenging artistic practice utilising photography and performance to reference Mirka Mora. Special mention was made of works from Siri Hayes, Christian Capurro and Lynne Roberts-Goodwin.
Text courtesy MGA
http://www.mga.org.au/
Concettina INSERRA & Nat THOMAS
Portrait of mother and daughter, after Mirka 2008
chromogenic print
750 mm x 1125 mm
Reproduction courtesy of the artists and Until Never Gallery
Finalist exhibition: Monash Gallery of Art 30 August to 02 November, 2008
