2008 LAITH MCGREGOR, TOM POLO, EMILY PORTMANN & JACKSON SLATTERY
EXHIBITION IMAGES
Sullivan and Strumpf Fine Art present new works from four dynamic emerging artists under 35: Laith McGregor, Tom Polo, Emily Portmann, & Jackson Slattery.
12 - 31 August 2008
Laith McGregor graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) from the Victorian Collage of the Arts in 2007. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth. McGregor has had three solo exhibitions, including Goodbye tata at Helen Gory Gallery, Melbourne in 2006, and most recently Shape It Anyway You Like at Melbourne’s TBC Gallery in 2008. In 2007 he was awarded the Tania Brougham Award and in 2006 he received the National Gallery Women’s Association Award. McGregor draws on illusionary material to convey a sense of the uncanny in his work. The characters within each image are derived from both factual and fictitious realms including hero worship and personal family stories. The ambiguous and surreal qualities that result from McGregor’s practice highlight the grey areas that exist between fiction and non-fiction.
Tom Polo graduated in 2006 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) with Honours from the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney. He has exhibited in numerous group shows since 2003 and in 2007 he held his first solo exhibition, An Excessive Aesthetic, at Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney. In 2007 Polo was short-listed for the 2007 Qantas Spirit of Youth award and in 2008 he was a finalist in the Churchie National Emerging Art Exhibition. His recent work addresses contemporary society’s inherent desire to be ‘the best’ and explores what it means to be a ‘winner’ and by association, what it means to be a ‘loser’. Referencing both mundane and spectacular achievements in life, the work encourages the viewer to reflect on their own experiences of success and failure.
Emily Portmann graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Photography) with Honours from the National Art School in Sydney in 2005. She has been involved in a number of group shows since 2001 and in 2005 she held her first solo exhibition at Johnston Galleries in Perth. In 2007 Portmann was the winner of the National Photographic Prize – John and Margaret Baker Fellowship, Albury Regional Gallery and was a finalist in the ABN Amro Emerging Artist Award. In 2008 she was a finalist in both the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Foundation for the Arts Photography Award and in the Churchie National Emerging Art Exhibition. Her work is featured in the 2008 text book Artwise Contemporary 2 – Visual Arts 10–12 by Glenis Israel and in the 2008 photographic publication HIJACKED. Portmann’s deeply personal practice investigates the body, particularly her own, as a personal/public possession. Through her ghostly translucent figures she explores the duality of self and raises numerous questions about role play, sexuality, spectatorship and the notion of portraiture
Jackson Slattery graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Drawing) from RMIT in 2004. His work has been exhibited in various group shows throughout Melbourne and in 2006 he held his first solo exhibition at Seventh Gallery, Fitzroy. Slattery was as a finalist in the Siemens-RMIT Fine Arts Traveling Scholarship Award (2003) and in 2005 he won the Artholes Self Portrait Prize, Artholes Gallery, Melbourne. More recently he won the Peoples Choice Award at the Metro 5 Art Award (2008). Slattery’s meticulously painted watercolours offer up narratives which begin autobiographically but gradually splinter into the fantastical. By reproducing found and personal photographs and re-contextualizing them, Slattery attempts to develop a new memory system which questions the validity of external realities on both a personal and collective level.