The Alice Prize 2024
Anna Reynolds, 2024, mess made and other barriers, 135 x 250 cm, digital print on cotton rag
I am delighted to inform you that my artwork mess made and other barriers is included in the 2024 The Alice Prize hung at the Araluen Arts Centre in Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia.
The Alice Prize is an acquisitive national contemporary art prize, welcoming entries from around Australia, in any medium or theme.
Significant among regional art prizes, The Alice Prize contributes to one of the largest regional collections of Australian art, with works by leading artists from across its 50 year history.
This year 63 artworks gleaned from a strong 372 preselection entries were assessed by the expert selection panel consisting of Lucy Stewart, a Lecturer in Visual Arts and Arts Administration at the Charles Darwin University campus in Alice Springs, Dallas Gold, artist and former NT gallery owner and Petit Abazis the Director of the Northern Centre for Contemporary (NCCA) in Darwin, NT, Thanks for choosing my work you guys!
The exhibition for The Alice Prize 2024 opened last night, and the judge, Dr Daniel Mudie Cunningham announced artist Fiona Foley, the winner for her video work Janjari.
Congratulation and good on you to all artists who applied, I personally had to really consider entering the prize this year due to personal financial priorities and the $50 entry was a gamble with money I didn’t really have. I made the work inside of photoshop and the image existed only in a file state and the physical work didn’t physically exist at the point of pre-selection.
Of course, being chosen during pre-selection then posed another question about how to pay for the printing and freight of the work to Alice Springs? Like I said it’s a gamble and 372 artists took the challenge and paid the price, so good on you. Being rejected is the less glamour side of building a creative practice.
My work is a digital composite of collected images of signs, street barriers, construction and the general shit show that clutters the pavement in the name of progress and development. Disheartened by the confusing environmental messages and actions of our times. I continue to build my own interpretations of urban landscapes trying to make sense of it all..
My 150 word artist statement accompanying my image in the online application process was…
Anna Reynolds art practice is full-on and full-time
Graduating with a Masters by Research at Charles Darwin University in 2019 positioned Reynolds as an innovator exploring digital print on textile. More recently, an extended Churchill Fellowship has taken Reynolds across India, Scotland, Berlin, Austria and Mallorca, researching art and textile. Relationship to the natural environment and concern for its demise are often an undercurrent and force in her creative practice. Textile has specific ecological dialogue woven to its core, but the transformative lens found at demolition sites still inspires Reynolds to re-imagine gritty anti-human flora deprived landscapes. Man-made mess and other barriers, is a digital composite collectively forming a sprawling redevelopment, protected by a heavy-handed layering of traffic barriers, textures and public notices. Visual signs protecting crumbling monuments of renewal and investment. Demolition sites, once symbols of transformation, are haunting reminders of the environmental toll exacted by human endeavours.
