The aim of the Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship is to enable an artist at the outset of his or her career to undertake a program of artistic study overseas. Valued at $40,000, the scholarship this year attracted submissions from ninety-two artists.
Previous Lempriere exhibitions have been somewhat lack-lustre, but 1999 was marked by an impressive and energetic array of deceptively simple works. Perhaps it is the end-of-the millennium hype, compounded by the screech of major construction and gaudy advertising, that has become Sydney over the last year, which prompted these artists to move away from showy egocentric displays of technical ability, towards a more pared down conceptual and aesthetic approach.
The quality of this year's entries was highlighted by the strategies employed by the curatorial team, who took a firm grasp on the selection of works for exhibition, rather than giving the thirty-one artists free reign to choose. This approach was successful, with the densely-packed and quirkily curated exhibition enabling an intriguing dialogue to be struck up between seemingly disparate works.
Several undercurrents of social commentary emerged through the exhibition, in particular ideas of consumption and consumer desire. Ann Kay's Picture Tree projected an image of a gum tree onto a plastic shopping bag stuffed with more of the same, hanging from a plastic kitchen towel rack that jutted from the wall. The image faded and we were silently reminded of the number of forests devastated everyday, but as the projector hummed at the pile of plastic, Kay also entered the philosophical debate of whether or not technology can recreate the human experience of interacting with nature. Natural selection through technological intervention––we can have our tree and consume it