Professor Ryan Daniel
What an amazing semester and indeed year we have had. Staff and students have been extraordinarily active, with more events, exhibitions and activities occurring than I can remember from recent years. The eMerge Media Space has its own identity and will continue to develop a reputation for presenting cutting edge new media works. The Gallery’s presentation of “Screengrab” was just sensational, with works from across the globe. We also received wonderful coverage of this event in a recent edition of Real Time. There have been Honours exhibitions, visiting international photographic work as well as many other exhibitions on the way for next year.
Other major events this semester have included our Symposium on indigenous art issues, held in partnership with Arts Queensland and as part of the first ever “Cairns Indigenous Art Fair”. It was held in Cairns at the Centre for Contemporary Arts and was attended by over 150 people during the day. With keynote speakers Nicolas Rothwell and Judy Watson, along with a range of panel and individual presentations, it was a remarkable day and significant opportunity for stakeholders to debate the issues. Stay tuned for the release of the Symposium Proceedings which will contain all papers presented during the day, keynotes as well as panel presentations.
Staff in the School continue to be very active and work hard on behalf of the University. Clive Hutchison completed a very successful marketing tour of Scandinavia and met with our friends at NKF, in Sweden and Denmark. Katja Fleischmann is off to Europe at the end of November to deliver a conference paper and visit a number of key institutions for the purposes of developing new links and gathering data towards our “curriculum refresh” project. In January in Hawaii, Katja also delivers a conference paper that she and Clive authored around the concept of “creative exchange”. We welcome a new staff member in Cairns, Jacquelene Drinkall, who will commence with us on the 16th November. One of Jacque’s first tasks will be to present a conference paper in Europe and gather data for curriculum refresh – well done Jacque and welcome to the SoCA! Next year will also see a new staff member in Townsville so stay tuned for that big announcement.
It has been another proud year in the history of the School of Creative Arts since it was totally reformed in 2006. Next year promises to be an even bigger year so I look forward to communicating with all of you then!
Best wishes, Ryan.
Fresh face for the Cairns Creative Arts team
The School of Creative Arts, Cairns campus is very excited to have a fresh new talent joining the team!
Dr Jacquelene Drinkall will be relocating from Sydney to Far North Qld to begin teaching Visual Arts at JCU next year.
Here is a (sort of) short bio highlighting her amazing background: Jacque is a practicing and exhibiting Visual Artist, Art Theorist and Historian. Her hybrid PhD thesis Telepathy in Contemporary, Conceptual and Performance Art was graduated in 2006 from the University of New South Wales, College of Fine Arts, School of Art History and Theory, and included both substantial production of exhibited artwork and an 85 000 word dissertation. Jacque also has a Master of Arts, Visual Arts (by Research) from Australian National University, where she also completed a four-year Undergraduate/Honours degree that was awarded the ANU’s University Medal in Painting. Leading directly into her honours thesis was an eight-month Independent Research Unit undertaken at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, funded by a Telecom Travelling Art Scholarship, where she studied with renowned performance artist Marina Abramoviç and renowned cyber/public-space artist and theorist Kzrysztof Wodicszko.
Jacque has received numerous other awards and prizes, including the Marten Bequest Travelling Art Scholarship, Australian Postgraduate Award, Janet Johnson Award, College of Fine Arts Student Association Prize, two awards from the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In 2008 she was awarded an eight-month Artspace Residency and a NAVA grant. Jacque has exhibited widely in Sydney, Melbourne, Gold Coast, Bathurst, Newcastle as well as Auckland, Paris, Moscow, Miami and London, and she is also represented in a number of public and private collections, nationally and internationally. Jacque has lectured at College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales; Canberra School of Art, (National) Institute for the Arts, Australian National University; and Digital Design Lab at the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning at University of Sydney.
In October, this year Jacque participated in the This is Not Art (TINA) Festival, presenting both her artwork, Weatherman UFOlogy (a long term project centered around the construction and performance of a large UFO sculpture that science fictionalises Weather Underground countercultural narrative) and presentation of ideas central to both this artwork and her paper Social and Political Aesthetics of Telepathy in Fluxus Art in a TINA Critical Animals conference panel discussion. She will also present a peer reviewed conference publication paper for the International Conference on Digital Storytelling (ICIDS 2009) in Guimarães Portugal, thanks to generous funding from her future employer.
We look forward to having Jacque on board at SoCA next year and wish her all the best!
From big things, bigger things grow
This year Dr David Salisbury has had his PhD published as a book. The title of the book is Tali nan Bapilin Tigo (three strings entwined): A study of the West Sumatran Minangkabau Talempong tradition. The aim of the book is to identify structures in the talempong musical tradition that correspond with structures in the Minangkabau cultural tradition of the Payakumbuh region in West Sumatra, Indonesia.
A good image goes a long way
Congratualtions goes to Letitia Thirapthi, who won the Strand Ephemera Photographic competition recently.
Letitia is a 1st year New Media Arts student at the SoCA in Townsville. Her photograph was selected the best out of 232 submitted images, from entrants of all ages. The judges said “more of a snapshot, the woman at the table striking a similar pose to the sculpture really embodies something about the nature of the exhibition that was not captured in any other image and that is the interface of the public with the art.” Letitia won a $250 gift voucher from Doug Kemp’s Camera House for her creation.
The Strand Ephemera ran from 9 - 11 Sept this year.
Taste testing the arts
Are you a senior high school student who has a passion for the arts and who wants to learn more about what the Cairns campus SoCA can offer you in terms of innovative creative opportunities?
Then sign up to experience an exciting 1 day workshop on campus at the School of Creative Arts, James Cook University, Cairns to taste test some areas of the Bachelor of Creative Industries. This degree is unique for northern Australia. It combines three streams – Media Design, Performance and Visual Arts and lets students customise their own study plans to incorporate subjects from all streams to create a diverse, creative skill sets. Creative Arts Day will give you an introduction to this degree.
Creative Arts Day is on Thurs 12 Nov 2009, 9:30am – 3pm at the Smithfiled JCU campus in Cairns.
There is no charge for this workshop and a BBQ lunch will be provided, however you are responsible for your own transport to and from JCU.
As there is a limited capacity of 40x students for this workshop, applications will be determined by JCU. RSVP by Fri 30 Oct, 2009.
For more information, or to reserve a place, contact elly.murrell@jcu.edu.au or ph 07) 4781 3142
The best year 12 artworks in Qld on display at SoCA
The 2009 Creative Generation Excellence Awards in Visual Art and Design invites the community to experience artworks by some of Queensland’s outstanding senior visual arts students.
The 2009 touring exhibition showcases the artwork of 40 senior students from both state and non-state schools in every region of the state. The Awards encourage students to achieve high standards and promote the study of visual arts practice in schools and to the wider community. They also demonstrate the degree of sophistication in concepts, diversity of artforms and media, and the high standard of arts programs in Queensland secondary schools.
The selected works will be exhibited at the Queensland Art Gallery and tour throughout regional Queensland from mid 2009 until mid 2010. The touring exhibition provides students with an opportunity to present their works to the community in a professional exhibition context.
“This is a wonderful chance to see what can be achieved in visual art and design at this level,” said Ms Elly Murrell, the Community Engagement Coordinator at the School of Creative Arts. “We hope that many local secondary students, teachers and parents, as well as the general community take this opportunity to visit the show whilst in Townsville. “
“The exhibition has and will be touring many regional venues in Queensland, including Atherton, Gladstone, Chinchilla after it was launched at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane earlier this year,” said Ms Murrell. “The caliber of these works is outstanding, so we thought it would be good to show the community Creative Gen 2009 as well as having our own student exhibitions in the University’s gallery over the year.”
The exhibition is on show from Monday 12 October – Friday 13 November 2009.
To get a better understanding of our creative arts courses for Townsville and Cairns download new SoCA brochure here.
Creative Exchange: Preparing students for the realities of their future workplace
Creative Exchange – the capstone subject of the Bachelor of New Media Arts degree at the School of Creative Arts was taught for the first time this semester. Whether students majored in Digital Imaging, Digital Sound, Digital Media Design, Digital Visual Arts or Performance they all participated in multidisciplinary collaborative teams. This innovative concept became even more cutting-edge through students from the School of Business, Discipline IT being an integral part of the learning environment. In near future students from Journalism and Business will also participate.
This semester saw 13 groups, with a minimum of 3 members from different disciplines, having devised projects that intersect with new media, technology and the wider community. Each team approached their project within a project management framework. This process was managed separately through a team advisor (Prof. Ryan Daniel). During the execution of the project all teams had access to wide range of creative arts expertise provided by all SoCA staff. In addition industry professionals from the region, Brisbane and Germany were invited to give feedback to students so that they could benchmark their projects against industry standards and expectations.
The subject developers Clive Hutchison and Katja Fleischmann are confident that this subject gives students a competitive edge: student learning and graduate outcomes are aligned to industry expectations and it prepares students for the shift to an increasingly global economy.
It is pleasing to see that 3rd year students embraced the concept: “I think everyone is excited to be producing such a large-scale project in the community and we will all be determined to give this subject and project everything we’ve learnt and everything we’ve got to make sure we produce the best projects we can and so we can go out of this course as the first wave of New Media Arts graduates with a bang!” (3rd year BNMA student, SP2 2009).
Final presentations of the outcomes will be held at SoCA on Mon 9 Nov 2009.
Photography students enhancing their image
On a hazy Friday in mid October, 24 photography students along with lecturer Kirsten Heritage from SoCA at JCU spent a full day with digital imaging and colour management expert, Les Walkling from Melbourne. Students learned how to maximize the quality of their images for printing and output through a series of workshops and discussions from one of the internationally recognized leaders in the field. To the rhythmic tapping of the computer keyboard, the perils of Adobe Photoshop were exposed and solutions learned, taking the student’s knowledge in this specialist field to a high level over the course of the day. Tricks of the trade were shared freely and many myths of digital processing technologies were exposed.
All students who attended were thoroughly rewarded by the experience and in the early evening, an exhausted but inspired group ventured home ready to apply what they learned in order to put the “wow” into their photographs.
For more details about how SoCA connects with the community see here
Culture in the Mix – JCU Graduate Student Exhibition
This is a very busy time for uni students with end of semester assessment and preparing for exams. However, it is also an exciting time for the 3rd year creative arts students at James Cook University as 2009 sees its first graduates of the Bachelor of New Media Arts.
Culture in the Mix the title of the graduate exhibition, at the Perc Tucker Regional Gallery in November, perfectly sums up the diverse range of skills and artistic output that the New Media Art students have achieved within their 3 year degree.
This exhibition is an opportunity to see a cutting edge display of screen, print and web based media, combining the best of the degree’s five fresh new media disciplines: digital visual arts, photography, media design, digital sound and multimedia performance.
An example of work that will be on show includes Skye Millard’s video art piece ‘Light’. The Media Design student used Final Cut Pro to create a short 60 second video within the theme of “Journey”. The assessment was designed to explore non-linearity and the spoiling of time and space through the layering of moving image and non-sequential construction of narrative. As a stand alone piece of image construction, this work imbues meaning through the suggestion of the dominant theme and its underlying subtext – change, perception and time.
Another work includes Tali Dunnage’s photographs, visually documenting local life in the FNQ town of Tully, home to many different cultural groups. ‘William’s Hands’ portrays one man’s life story. Tali explains “to me this type of art epitomises the art of capture; a person and or moment that is pure, not staged.”
So come along and see the latest generation of digital arts practitioners as they challenge the traditions of gallery exposition and lay the foundation for future North Queensland new media artists.
Everyone is welcome to the opening event on Friday 13 November 7pm at the Perc Tucker Regional Gallery.
The exhibition is on show from Friday 13 to Sunday 22 November 2009.
