Saturday 13 March 2021 from 3pm to 5pm
Join us for the opening of 'Gerwyn Davies: Plush' and the announcement of the John Fries Award winner.
Shortlisted from over 400 applications, the 7 finalists of the 2021 John Fries Award present newly commissioned works, developed with the support of curator Miriam Kelly. The 2021 finalists include Darcey Bella Arnold, Daniel Jenatsch, Sara Morawetz, Ryan Presley, JD Reforma, Melanie Jame Wolf, and Shevaun Wright. Matching the philanthropic support of the Fries family with the Copyright Agency’s enduring commitment to developing and sustaining artistic practices, the John Fries Award has recognised the contributions and achievements of early-career practitioners from across Australia and New Zealand for more than a decade.
'Gerwyn Davies: Plush' explores the expression of camp as an aesthetic strategy in photographic self-representation. They renew and affirm camp's queer critical capacities, moving beyond popular understandings of camp as a gay sensibility, a mode of theatrical performativity, or an ironic inversion of taste. For Davies, camp is a performative and aesthetic intensification that can be applied to images and the image-making process itself. 'Plush' brings together works from the series 'Utopia', 'Deluxe', 'Sunny Boys', 'Idols', 'Leisure Sick' and 'Bel-Air' all produced over the last four years.
UNSW Galleries events are generously supported by Young Henrys Brewing & Distillery, Freeman Vineyards, and CAPI.