We acknowledge and pay respect to the Traditional Owners of the lands upon which our campus is situated, the people of the Boon Wurrung and Woi Wurrung, who have created art, made music and told their stories here for thousands of generations. We also acknowledge and extend our respect to the Traditional Owners of all lands on which our work is viewed, shared and enjoyed, and to all Elders, past, present and emerging.

VCA Art 2023

Zara Sigglekow is a gallerist and sometimes writer from Aotearoa. She co-founded and is the Director of FUTURES, a commercial art gallery in uptown Collingwood, Narrm.

Zara Sigglekow - FUTURES Gallery

Whilst viewing the VCA graduate exhibition, I started thinking of a fictional house, something in between a dollhouse and a suburban family home with a barren garden, and the artworks I have selected inhabiting this structure. And I thought of the character of the ‘Girl’ and ‘Girlhood’ as a real and imagined state, played out in real life and churned on the internet through the circulation of performative imagery. This house is a space of whimsey, delight, horror, delicacy and youth (how could we avoid youth at a grad show!). Within the ‘Girl’ there is a mix of sincerity and irony that is hard to distinguish. Sweetness so sickly it becomes abject. The abject made pretty.

Sugar Syrup House 

Bea Rubio-Gabriel is a writer, performance artist, and curator born in the Philippines now living and working in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Approaching writing as artform and ephemera, ergodic texts and homemade books become new modes of access and dismantle dominant knowledge and power structures. Currently interrogating systems of care and Resistance Aesthetics, they challenge current curatorial and euro-centric modes of exhibiting by approaching the curatorial as its own artistic medium; grounded in rhizomatic ways of care and collectivisation. Through performance, they explore pre-colonial writing systems (Baybayin) and how languages of the past can be activated as cultural imaginaries for a utopian present. Their research focuses on the moral economy of labour, care critique, and the politics of translation. They currently sit on the board of KINGS Artist-Run as co-director and coordinate the Emerging Writers Program. They work with Runway Journal as an editor and are part of the filipinx collective SALUHAN.

Bea Rubio-Gabriel- KINGS Artist Run Initiative

Our labour is ON SPECIAL. 20% OFF. 30% OFF. 50% OFF. Culture is production. ALL SALES ARE FINAL. Work is art and art is play and play becomes work. Take a chance and see if you can catch anything. Nostalgia comes with luck of the draw. Fleeting moments on a drive to somewhere. Family conversations that cannot be rearticulated through words. Snapshots of a life story left for the taking. I can’t help but see the hard work that runs through other migrant communities, the accumulation of second-hand goods being passed down from family to new family, the memories embedded in my grandmother’s furniture. Sing me a lullaby and this too shall wash over us in time. Before loss is grief. Grief is love that does not know where to go. Sacrifice happens when the interests of the present are flown to the future. I want to go home. Where home can be made, home is found. I want to clasp our conversations close to my heart. Hold it there forever, where care can flow gently. My father was born in the valleys and my spirit crossed the sea. You cannot stop a river, no one can own the waters. Remember the river red gums, hear the song of a creek. We are held by all that is around us.

the production of culture / the culture of production

Adam is a Melbourne based artist, curator and gallerist who received his BFA (Hons) from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2013. In 2016, he co-founded LON Gallery, which began as an artist-led project space and in 2019 Stone became the sole director, formalising the gallery program and representing a group of four artists. The gallery now represents 14 artists at varying stages of their careers and maintains a strong focus on curated group exhibitions. As an independent curator, gallery director and artist, Stone has presented over 150 exhibitions.

Adam Stone - LON Gallery

Most art schools no longer embrace the term ‘house style’, which was once used to describe the pervading conceptual or aesthetic territory that defined an institution. Now considered archaic, tutors encourage their students to glean influence from a wide reaching and fluid variety of subjects, echoing the accelerated pace of consumption and accessibility of information in contemporary culture. Upon being given the task of curating a selection of artworks from the graduate exhibition, I was curious to see whether in fact, intuitively common threads of conceptual and aesthetic enquiry pervaded, or whether alas, the notion of a house style was in fact truly dead.

A decade ago, when I was at the VCA, abstract painting and expansive installations of plaster, cardboard and ephemera reigned supreme. In 2023, it seems that figuration is in, painting students are in fact painting again, and that a renewed interest in bronze still sustains.

I would suggest however, that this reflects the wider trends of contemporary art in Australia and abroad, rather than the influences specifically pertaining to the VCA. Perhaps the full scope of contemporary influence does truly lie beyond the four walls of the institution.

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