DMG Award 2019

Madeleine Lesjak-Atton

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We’re thrilled to announce that Madeleine Lesjak-Atton is the 2019 recipient of the Dominik Mersch Gallery / Victorian College of the Arts Award. She has been selected for her captivating drawings from the 2019 VCA Postgraduate Exhibition, which involved shading, scratching and cutting across multiple surfaces in the space. The annual DMG/VCA Award presents a graduating Masters student with the opportunity to develop their work in a critical and professional environment through a solo exhibition at the gallery.

This exhibition extends on the artist’s postgraduate research, presenting site-specific charcoal and graphite drawings across the Dominik Mersch Gallery walls together with segments sliced from her own studio wall. All the works shown are Lesjak-Atton’s intuitive attempts to reinstate the grid of space whilst also allowing strong feelings of satisfaction and distrust to guide the marks that are made.

The feature work, ‘Studio Wall’, “began as a shaded graphite drawing that used the parallel lines of the studio wall as a guide for composition. I cut around this section of the drawing, taking out the sheet of plaster that forms the studio wall and leaving the timber underneath exposed. Shading the rectilinear shape led to a series of impulses that align with satisfaction, responsibility or doubt, culminating in an undoing and redoing of the grid. This work is part of a larger investigation into drawing actions that are framed by geometry. Within this investigation actions are assessed according to hesitance and decisiveness, and made to answer whether they correspond with a non-hierarchical, fluid theory of gender.”


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