2009 Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award

SCA PhD candidate, Sylvia Schwenk has been selected as a finalist in the 2009 Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award. The exhibition will be on display from 4 April to 17 May, at the Gold Coast City Art Gallery.

Schwenk’s work is generally socially based interventions performed in the urban landscape, and she looks to reconnect art and life through performance. She uses fashion, life between and in buildings, the human body and performance to create awareness, discussion and engagement of issues through participation. Schwenk’s performances are based on a platform of fun and lightheartedness, which engenders positive experiences for the performers and passers-by, who become actors in the shared public space of the performance.

Life Preservers I, 2008, is a photograph of four women modelling the latest fashion needed for global warming, as an intervention in the streets of Cologne. These dresses “enshrine an amusing imaginary double bind based on the extremes of climate change: to fill them would be good for drought, but would make one sink in the event of a flood, and vice versa.” Adam Geczy Social Exchange and Life, Catalogue Essay, 2009.

Schwenk was also a finalist in the 2009 Wilson National Art Prize, which was shown at Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane in February.

Image: Sylvia Schwenk, Life Preservers I, 2008.