Primavera 2010

First published on 28 Jun 2010. Updated on 5 Apr 2011.

Katie Dyer is the manager and curator of the National Art School Gallery. She's been enlisted to curate this year's Primavera - the Museum of Contemporary Art's annual spring show of artists under 35, which is sponsored by Qantas.

Katie, how did you go about selecting the seven Primavera artists?
There is travel involved: just seeing what's exciting and innovative and who's consistent. I went to all the major capitals - time doesn't really permit you to get to the regional areas, but you hope with your networks that you hear about these things if you don't know about them already.

And then you have to narrow it down?
I selected seven artists based on the gallery spaces that we were going to be working with. It almost works out to be a room per person, and I decided I'd much rather show an in-depth presentation of somebody's work rather than lots and lots of artists.

I'm looking at some cute photos and sculptures of pins, clips, and pencil sharpeners that office workers visiting the MCA will find all too familiar...
That would be Emma White's work. Emma originally went to art school in Canberra but she's been based in Sydney for maybe about seven or eight years.

Why the stationery?
I think it has come from [White] thinking about being an artist but having to do boring administrative jobs to support yourself. It's done in a humorous way. What's around you? What's your immediate surroundings? She began to respond to that, and use that as her subject.

Adelaide's Akira Akira uses IKEA furniture in his work. Why?
Because he's really thinking about the idea of hierarchies and value systems of objects that are produced in the world. So he makes his very meticulous, very crafted and labour-intensive work, and he shows it with something that is very throwaway.

What's going on in his ‘Spillberg (Black) No.1'?
It looks like a paint spill. You think someone's kicked over a large can of black glossy paint but in fact it's a sort of sculpted, fixed piece. Yet it's got this endless potential.

Brisbane's Julie Fragar - she's an autobiographical painter isn't she?
Her subjects are not always about herself but there's a strong presence of that in her work. The other thing that she's doing is breaking up the picture plane. There's text written over them, so she's really bringing your attention to painting and how it's not supposed to be a replacement for an actual thing. She's got works that are just text as well. You can see them as an object, or you can stop and read them and you can make sense of them.

And Sydney's Agatha Gothe-Snape? What's her deal?
She's a fantastic artist in the sense that she has a real kind of refusal to be fixed into any one medium or style. She has come from a performance background. Then she studied painting. She's doing some really interesting work using fonts and postering. She's done some work for Primavera using Powerpoint.

And what are we to take from her screen prints, ‘Wrong Solo 1 and 2'?
‘Wrong Solo' is a collaboration with another artist called Brian Fuata. And it's largely performance, but out of that came these portraits. The circle in the head: is it empty? Is it full? A thought bubble, or a vacant spot?

That's fun. And who are the other three artists in the show?
Alasdair McLuckie [Victoria] is working largely in drawing and recently he's been making beaded work. His father taught him how to weave when he was very young. He's interested in ideas of cosmic energies and the visual language of tribal societies and folklore. James Newitt [Tasmania] is going to show three video works. James's work is based on a direct engagement with a community or individuals. It often takes months to work up a project because he's connecting so much with a community; they're like extended portraits. Jackson Slattery [Victoria] paints watercolours based on images from the internet that become tropes - the kind of images that appear and reappear. Watercolour is quite an unforgiving medium, so you can't cover up mistakes. It's the opposite of digital media, where you can keep manipulating.

What links these artists?
I wasn't trying to find a trend, but what really links them, in retrospect, is a very strong interest in histories. In the 70s artists were so interested in the moment. In our world there are so many knowns and there's nothing to discover, but history is this area we can keep returning to and uncovering. That's quite a strong component in a lot of contemporary art. Nick Dent