Midsumma and Australia Post 2020 Art Award Winners

 

"Emotional intelligence is the assertive capacity and awareness to control one’s emotions and respond empathically. Fear, love, excitement, and pain all impact and control our lives. Sex excites me, so I will have sex. My heart was broken, so I will not be vulnerable. As an artist, I experiment with emotions to help understand others. I hope to expand our collective emotional intelligence by creating sound sculptures that pull my audience into the mind of a specific character. Bringing light to the trauma of growing up in a world that trains a group of people to believe that they are degenerate. Giving a voice to those silenced by society, especially the LGBTQI+ community. I hope to find my art somewhere in the middle of emotions screaming to be heard and someone genuinely listening. For Empathic Deniability, one structure voices the external words and phrases said to people living with HIV on a regular basis. While the other structure voices the internal reaction to those phrases, this piece confronts the audience by putting them into the mind of someone who is struggling with stigma every day." - Samuele Tomasulo

Daley Rangi
Lipstuck
Award: $6000

 

"Occasionally I wear lipstick, nail polish, dresses, and heels, in my day-to-day life, and occasionally I am laughed at, and occasionally I am sneered at, and occasionally I am threatened with physical violence, and occasionally a certain word is whispered or shouted abusively in my direction; "faggot!". My way of dealing with obnoxious and cruel humanity (or the lack thereof) is to make art, usually through writing and performance, but sometimes it manifests in other ways, maniacally thrown onto a canvas or paper. I recently channeled some angry energy into a little protest, a self-portrait. It's entirely painted out of several lipstick shades and a kaleidoscope of nail polish. Keep doing you, fellow unconventional humans, and keep making your art in all those wicked, wild, and wonderful ways. I see you. As much as I am called 'faggot', I am simply only another 'f' word; free." - Daley Rangi

"'Physical' is a single-channel video work captured by Gill and their collaborators on smart phones and amateur range camcorders and given narrative form during the edit. It's ambivalence to definition is predicated by using the possibility of slipperiness and fracturedness as a methodological model. Through amateurism, improvisation and vacuous performance modes, paired with heavily stylised makeup and costuming and with editing techniques which see the image literally slide out of frame, 'Physical' works to shatter historical accounts of bodies, proposing new, fluid expressions of gender, family and class."- EO Gill