The 2003 Anne & Gordon Samstag
International Visual Arts Scholarships
| Callum Morton | Simon Pericich | Samantha Small |
Artist: MARIA KONTIS
TOP:
He does not remember this day 2002
from the series: Five photographs that destroyed my life: 1946-1985
pastel on paper
56 x 76.5 cm
BOTTOM:
What was she like then? 2002
from the series: Five photographs that destroyed my life: 1946-1985
pastel on paper
56 x 76.5 cm
© the artist
Eleven Days 2001
pastel on paper
26.5 x 45.5 cm
© the artist
Before this happened 2000
pastel on paper
40 x 63.5 cm
© the artist
Maria Kontis makes realistic black and white pastel drawings from photographs and from life. Her work embraces an exact semblance, but at the same time manages to make something unearthly or unstable enter the drawing and slant its apparently straightforward agenda. One way she does this is by including the blur familiar to us from photography, memory or fading light, thus making the viewer strain to see and by extension to understand.
Kontis has recently made a series of drawings called Photographs that destroyed my life: 1946 -1985 (2002). Included in the series are typical family album images, an adolescent boy, two young men on the beach, two people with a car, a woman, two girls. There is no coherent story which the drawings illustrate; rather, they show moments of suggestive meaning which echo with implied narratives through our experience and memories.
These works contain a surrealistic intensity, they project mysterious auras of contemplation, confounding any direct reading.
Stephanie Radok
from her Samstag catalogue essay;
The Point of Knowing
| Maria Kontis Born 1969, Canberra, ACT |
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| 2003 | Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship MFA, Chelsea College of Art & Design, London, UK |
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| 2003 | Master of Fine Art, College of Fine Arts, The University of New South Wales, Sydney | |
| 1999 | Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours), College of Fine Arts, The University of New South Wales, Sydney |
| Callum Morton | Simon Pericich | Samantha Small |