Performance or painting, fashion, film or photography, installation or illustration. The SMACs panel want your vote for Sydney’s best artist of 2009.
The nominees are:
Every time we see the news-reel work of Locust Jones in galleries (like the MCA, or Chippendale’s Serial Space) we shudder to a halt. His panoramic drawings are about intense subjects and employ ink and a paper canvas to create detailed pictorial critiques of the world. Jones strikes deep at the heart of disturbing socio-political moments, ensuring we’re affected by the art and bowled over by the delivery.
2009 saw two robot-based works from hybrid media artist Wade Marynowsky. The first (held December 08) was a well dressed, well mannered and overly intimate robot called Boris. The second, in August at Performance Space, was ‘The Hosts: A Masquerade of Improvising Automatons,’ a programmed and performative exhibition that create a space for awkward, part-choreographed audience/robot interactions that made for oddly inspired introspection.
Marley Dawson
Dawson’s CV is impressive. This year alone he’s exhibited at Roslyn Oxley9, Artspace, the Australian Centre for Photography, Locksmith Project Space and soon he’s heading to Perth for Awesome Arts. With each work, his themes of displacement, masculinity, machinery, transparency and an over-arching engagement with space encourage us to consider the dualisms of the conceptual, the banal and the bewildering.
The 2009 winner of the Blake Prize, Australia’s premier religious and spiritual art award, Mesiti’s triumphant silent video work Rapture (Silent Anthem) was filmed at this year’s Big Day Out and is a slow-mo contemplation of contemporary worship, suggesting transcendence and ecstasy have new homes. Away from her art, Angelica is part of art supergroup the Kingpins and engages with transgression, context and pop culture in a compelling, disarming and dangerously clever way.
Tom Polo investigates success and failure in his art, using painting and installation to reference both the mundane and the spectacular. In a Shrigley-esque way, Polo uses humour to anchor self-deprecation and success as they wage social war, giving us witty, approachable works that remind us of how ridiculous inflated aspiration can be.
Yates makes organic robots – an oxymoron, yes, but these are life-sized animated robots built from balsa wood and paper, held aloft by helium balloons. What makes them truly fantastic is they sway, gently, like real humans do. Get close to them and they start to wander around. Cultural trainspotters will know the two robots of ‘Rhabdomancy’ are recreations of Yates and his partner, local zinester/author Vanessa Berry, who dressed identically to the robots at the exhibition opening. Cute. And cool.
Share this page 
Home - Remix the City - Best Music Event - Best Live Act - Record of the Year - Next Big Thing - Best Artist - Best Arts Event - Best Performer - Best Collective - Best Sydney Song - Best Major Festival