The work is a graduation exhibition towards completion of the MVPA (Master of Visual and Performing Arts) at Charles Sturt University.  Staff, students, and others all welcome.

About Christina Reid
Photography has always played a big part in her life, as both her brother and father work as photographers.  As someone who likes to draw she has always questioned if the way she produces an image was the best way it could be done.  Photography is a medium of the real, reproducing exactly what falls in front of the lens – whereas drawing is presupposed to be invented or imagined.  She began to question our assumptions about the “truth” of an unknown photograph.  She became very interested in the Tom Lennon Photographic collection, both for its value as art object and its connection with local history.  Her most recent work has been based on this imagery.  Rather than mimesis alone – the detailed copying of a photograph into drawn form – she is involved in what is “selected out” in this transforming act of making a drawing.  The “fact” of the photograph slides over into the narrative imaginings of the drawn image.  Her work is a questioning of the meaning we attach to a photograph – do we need to know its provenance, its date, where it was, or who is in it?  The moment before or after the photograph was taken is distant to us.  Like the boys leaning towards us from the edge of the road… can the drawing then make its own logics of mood, of how and who these unknown persons are.  In questioning the “meaning” of an unknown, or partially known, stray photograph – often of strangers, lost in the past – she would attest that drawings she has made from these are not a rote “translation” – but seek out a drawn narrative.  They are revisioned histories.  They construct the imagined story of place and purpose in these Wagga Wagga invented histories or hints of people and glimpsed events of the 1950s and 1960s.  The process has allowed room for her to explore some thought provoking arguments about identity, ownership and appropriation.

Information

Vic has worked at all major art institution in Sydney including The Museum of Contemporary Art, The Art Gallery of NSW, The Powerhouse Museum, Carriageworks and Performance Space.

He has also worked with many theatre and arts organisations such as Shopfront Theatre for Young People, Pact Youth Theatre and The de Quincy Co.

Vic established The Cad Factory, an underground music, performance and exhibition space in Sydney Australia. It was the first underground space in the country to receive Presentation and Promotion funding from the music board of The Australia Council and is currently establishing a rural residency program in an old disused school house between Wagga and Narrandera for national and international visual artists, performers and academics.

Vic’s artistic practice often involves large scale site specific collaborations which involve sound, dance, installation, photography, video, live music and performance.

Vic is a multi instrumentalist who has toured shows to Europe, Britain, China and throughout Australia and has had his theatre productions programmed into the Edinburgh Fringe and The Brisbane Festival.

He is a sound designer who likes to miss-hear things whilst listening at the cracks and is a strong advocate for the establishment of an artist run initiative in Wagga to fulfil a gap in artistic development of local artists and cultural expression within the region.

Research for exhibitions: using a collection One of the key priorities for any institution lucky enough to hold a substantial collection, in any media, is the need to ensure that this collection is made accessible to the public. This can be accomplished with permanent displays, which may change over gradually, or with temporary exhibitions, bringing out a number of works united by a theme or an artist. Both require the responsible curators to carry out constant research into their collections, using both the institution’s own resources and others. This seminar will examine this research process, drawing upon recent exhibitions at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery: Arthur Wicks: Inside/Outside: Forward/Backwards, April Glaser-Hinder: Works 1970-2000, and Crossfire 2: print & glass.

This presentation will examine the necessity of ethical thinking in the creative industries. Given the industrial and creative pressures to ‘push the envelope’, creative practitioners are under increasing pressure to engage audiences through controversy to gain attention or get a foothold in a highly competitive environment. We will suggest how training in ethics can help practitioners make good, strategic decisions about when to use shock and controversy, and outline case studies of the kinds of ethical problems which can arise in creative industries and demonstrate the benefits ethical thinking can bring to creative practice.

Dr Emma Rush
After completing her PhD at the University of Melbourne in 2005, Emma took up a Research Fellow position at the Australia Institute (www.tai.org.au) in Canberra. While at the Institute Emma was the lead author of two papers on the sexualisation of children, which prompted considerable public debate, ultimately leading to a Senate Inquiry into the issue. Emma has tutored across a range of disciplines (philosophy, politics, and sustainability). She teaches ethics in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Dr Anna Poletti
Anna researches autobiography in literature and multi-media. Her book, Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture, was published by Melbourne University Press in 2008. She is interested in the ethics of life writing and biography, and has an article forthcoming on institutional uses of life narrative in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. She teaches creative and screenwriting, as well as subjects in literature in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Neal will discuss a number of recent projects in which he has worked with artists as a communication designer, either as project collaborator or project communicator. He will show examples of his work and discuss some of the possibilities that arise when working with a communication designer.

Neal Haslem is a design educator and practicing communication designer. His current practice-led research PhD at RMIT University in Melbourne investigates the potential to frame a ‘socially-situated’ communication design practice and ontology through a reflection on the role of ‘the other’ in design activity.

The birth of Pacific Post, an original New Zealand play, was the culmination of two years work undertaken by Ross and Stephanie for their Master of Arts Practice.  The play is based on a letter written by Stephanie’s Grandfather, who was based in Fiji during the Second World War, to her Grandmother; who was at home in the small  mining town of Westport on the South Island of New Zealand’s rugged West Coast.  Stephanie and Ross collaborated in the writing of this piece and coaxed it through eight drafts and several workshops to a final production, which Stephanie directed while Ross played the central character. The play looks at the separation and anxiety endured by a generation of ordinary Kiwi families during the Second World War and by developing a personal, family letter into a piece of live theatre, they have aimed to give voice to some unexplored areas of New Zealand’s social history.

Stephanie and Ross lecture full time in Acting and Voice on the NASDA (National Academy of Singing And Dramatic Art) degree at the Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology in Christchurch, New Zealand.  Both have worked extensively throughout New Zealand and overseas, directing and acting in theatre, film and television for the past twenty six years.

Pacific Post has just received a professional reading by the Court Theatre, Christchurch’s foremost professional theatre company, as part of the ‘Fresh Ink’ play reading series of new works.  It is the first step towards the play being programmed there in the future an outcome which is important for them both as they believe passionately in adding to a growing list of New Zealand stories told through the medium of theatre. They intend to see Pacific Post produced further afield with a national tour to not only the major cities but also the provincial towns.

In this seminar, Margaret will show some recent work consisting of some commissioned images and some of her non-commissioned work.  This work will then be linked to her future direction and that is a proposal for a Doctorate in Visual Arts.  The Doctorate centres on a photo-documentary of two communities living around Moreton Bay, Brisbane.  In this presentation, she will show preliminary images and identify key cultural theoretical frameworks that inform the proposal and the research.

Margaret has worked as a photographer and educator for 25 years in Zimbabwe, South Africa and Australia.  Her images have appeared in the New York Times, Newsweek, The Independent UK, and Australian publications including the Sydney Morning Herald.  Other clients included aid agencies and UN organisations.  Her work is editorial and documentary in style.  She has lectured at UTS (Sydney) and is currently teaching at Charles Sturt University and at Griffith University (Gold Coast).