The Research in Focus prize was a direct response to the ongoing impacts of COVID-19 and ran for a second year in 2021. AAANZ replaced the annual PhD Prize that usually runs during the annual conference with a competition that would take place virtually. The competition was open to all current PhD students, recently submitted PhDs and early career researchers within three years of the award of their PhD. The aim of Research in Focus was to support and reward excellence in research communication about art history and practice-led research.
WINNER
$1000 sponsored by Taylor and Francis
Hong An James Nguyen, ‘Decolonising diaspora, language and translation’, (University of New South Wales)
How family-based translations open up critical dialogue about epistemic worth, cultural resilience and coloniser responsibility for refugee encounters inside the settler colonial state.
ENTRIES
Irene Payne, ‘Painting Anthropocene Landscapes’, (Griffith University)
This project contends that landscape painting offers an important visual language and a suitable medium and mode to represent the Anthropocene age. I argue that painting traditions have provided a fertile site from which to critically respond to changes in our environment. Landscape painting inevitably draws from and reflects the traditions of its history, but also extends and transforms itself through creating hybrid interpretations and shifts of position throughout time and place. The aim of this video links images from the final creative work, a slow walk around the exhibit. Landskins Series (2020–21). I refer to the Landskins as a body—an anthropomorphic reference to physical skins that are marked by particular stories and contexts of place and time, and experience. As the work is designed as an active viewing experience, a reading of the spatial organisation of the works is as relevant as the engagement with each individual work. Hybrid and atemporal mixes of traditional, philosophical, and physical approaches to landscape painting are explored as a way to extend narratives.
Justin Mallia, ‘Sabaudia : Fascist Italian Architecture?’, (Monash University)
This research focuses on the city of Sabaudia in Italy, placing the city within its historical, architectural, cultural and political contexts, thoroughly recovering and cataloguing original architectural material along with new investigation and production of drawings, photographs and theories focusing on the legacy of the built reality of an idealistically imagined future that did not come to pass as intended.
Suzanne Crowley, ‘Entanglement Matters’, (University of Tasmania)
This study arose from a curiosity about connections between the Arts and STEM. Undertaken during COVID I recognised the reset opportunity this provided for the Arts, and the way we view learning. Taking geometry to represent STEM, I use visual art practice and autoethnography to explore my lived experience and extrapolate to the wider cultural context. Arts practice is an entanglement of embodied learning processes. When understood, such learning can enhance interdisciplinary experience.
Tets Kimura, ‘Japanese fashion and soft power in Australia’, (Flinders University)
Soft power is the ability to achieve political goals by attraction rather than coercion. Japanese fashion is found to be attractive in Australia. However, sales data shows that Japanese fashion giant of Uniqlo has made no profit in Australia since its arrival in the Australian market. Furthermore in the “Whaling War”, Australians have not been convinced in buying Japan’s irrational pro-whaling argument because of cool Japanese fashion—showing that Japanese soft power is not working in Australia.