Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer is an artist whose practice is concerned with the digital conditions of contemporary life. His practice engages with the cultural functions of imaging technologies and examines how networked cultures make use of the history of representation.
Kiera Brew Kurec’s practice is concerned with performance as a means for transformation through the agencies of time, endurance, environmental conditions and cultural practices. Her work includes live performance, performance for video, photography, textiles and sculpture. Brew Kurec graduated with a Masters of Fine Art from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2015 with first class honours. In 2011/2012 she interned at Franklin Furnace, a leading institution in the conservation and archiving of performance practice located in New York. In 2019/2020 she returned to New York undertaking a research funded by the Australia Council to observe current best practice techniques for archiving performance at MoMA archives, NYU Fales Special Collections, Franklin Furnace and the Asian Art Archive in America. Brew Kurec has exhibited and performed extensively through Australia as well as New York, Oregon, Berlin and Penang, and is the recipient of multiple grants and awards and undertaken residencies in Penang, Berlin, Oregon, New York, and across Australia. Brew Kurec the co-creator of the arts industry podcast Pro Prac.
Xanthe Dobbie is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher based on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation in Naarm, Melbourne. Working across on- and offline modes of making, their practice aims to capture the experience of contemporaneity as reflected through queer and feminist ideologies. Drawing on humour, pop, sex, history and iconography, they develop shrines to a post-truth era. They have exhibited extensively locally and internationally with recent works including live-streamed theatre, interactive media, AR, VR, collage, performance and installation. Significant exhibitions include Matrix Re-Loaded at RMIT First Site Gallery (2023), Cloud Copy at Lismore Regional Gallery (2023), The Long Now at ACMI (2022), and Don’t Be Evil at UQ Art Museum (2021). Xanthe recently won the Incinerator Art Award for Social Change and in 2023 was Guest Editor for Runway Journal Issue #46 Ghost. They co-founded performance series Queer PowerPoint for which they have performed at major festivals and institutions including MCA, Sydney Opera House, WA Museum, RISING, and Now or Never. Xanthe is currently undertaking a PhD focusing on digital and interactive art at RMIT University as part of the ARC Linkage Archiving Australian Media Art: Towards a Method and National Collection
Ash Garwood is interested in how photography and computer-generated images relate. Her conceptual photographs blend analogue and digital components, considering the landscape in relation to science fiction and a queer perspective. Her works often resemble classical landscape or still life genres, challenging photographic traditions through digital assemblages, which reveal their digital construction on close inspection. Ash has a Bachelor of Art Theory from UNSW, Honours in Photography from UTS and an MFA in Photography from UCLA. Ash's work has been included in exhibitions at the Aperture Foundation, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Australian Centre of Photography, Hazelhurst Gallery, Firstdraft, New Wight Gallery, PSLA, Artspace and others. She has been featured in Art Collector, and her work is held in various private collections in Australia and the USA, the Macquarie Bank Collection, Gippsland Art Collection and Artbank.
Maya Kilic is a mixed-media artist working within the field of digital photography, video and animation. Based in Sydney Australia, Kilic explores a perspective of life as a young person living in a digitally prevalent era. Personal struggles ranging from cultural belonging to feminine identity are playfully explored in relation to pop culture influences, internet culture, adolescence, dreams and fantasy. Kilic’s practice introduces an alternate way of documenting life by representing ‘the real’ as an interplay of physical, virtual and imagined worlds. With an embrace on digital editing software, phantasmic snippets of reality are created through processes of digital artifice, photomanipulation and collage. What is real and what is fiction is blurred in Kilic’s practice as elements of exaggerated fantasy and wonder are enmeshed into her experience of both physical and virtual worlds.
Ella Sutherland lives and works in Sydney, Australia. Working across the fields of visual arts and publishing, her practice engages with architecture, the written and social spaces of queer communities, and the poetic potential of letterforms. Her work has been shown widely throughout New Zealand and international venues including Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Carriageworks, Sydney; Christchurch Art Gallery; City Gallery Wellington; Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; UNSW Galleries, Sydney; 12th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju and Sumer, Auckland. She was the recipient of the 2022–23 Creative New Zealand Visual Arts Residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, and will undertake a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ Moya Dyring Memorial Studio in 2024.
