Art Students Inspired by Cutting-edge Exhibition ‘I wanna be your Anti-Mirror’

The role of art is to challenge us and hold up a mirror to society and the world around us. This week VCE Art Making and Exhibiting students viewed the exhibition I wanna be your Anti-Mirror on show at the La Trobe Arts Institute in View Street. The purpose of the visit was to allow students to witness firsthand how artworks are made and displayed on a set theme. This introduces the focus of their work for Semester 2, where they will explore a theme that they develop as a collective, produce individual works on this theme and present them to an audience at the start of Term 4.

I wanna be your Anti-Mirror included works by seven early-career artists, curated by Alicia Frankovich, herself an emerging Art Curator. The exhibition allows each artwork to be itself in the world, unfixed yet forceful. The processes of becoming, illuminating, sprouting, solidifying, repositioning, transitioning, interrupting, remodelling, living and decaying, underscore the works’ very existence. Our interpretation of them, in parallel, evolves in time.

The images are an insight into the artists’ ideas in response to the theme. In Scroll, 2023 (5-channel digital video, digital sound, televisions, vinyl prints, LED strip lights), the blurry image of students was taken to highlight the key idea in the artwork, about society getting ‘lost on the internet’.

Visiting this exhibition was an important stimulus for the Art Making and Exhibiting students, inspiring them in their ideas and their own art-making.

Mr Peter Hughes, Art Teacher

ABOUT

Georgina de Manning explores a doubling of life online and IRL in her take-over of the cinema and infiltration of the galleries with meme placards, video projections, monitors and LED lights. De Manning looks at AI construction, internet culture at large and the NFT art trade, creating works through digital 3D modelling and montaged memes. She questions the languages and controls associated with tech platforms, where companies profit from what she calls ‘predatory actions’, gleaning and selling people’s data following our initial engagement with them.