Becc Orszag has been awarded a Siemens-Rmit Fine Art Travelling Scholarship for her large scale drawing Cannot Contain This. The drawing also took out the Siemens-RMIT Aquisition Prize. The finalists exhibition is on at RMIT Gallery 16 DEC - 23 JAN.
The awards attracted more than 200 entries this year, with 43 shortlisted artists exhibiting their work at RMIT Gallery. Chairman and Managing Director of Siemens Australia and New Zealand, Albert Goller, presented the awards. Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art – Drawing) student Becc Orszag was awarded the $1,000 Siemens-RMIT Acquisition Prize, as well as a $2,000 Undergraduate Scholarship to spend on travel, Her large charcoal drawing, cannot contain this, will now enter the Siemens corporate collection.
Ms Orszag said the drawing was concerned with losing unique identity within a collected identity. “I have portrayed a class of children all clothed in the same uniform,” she said. “It is just a very basic uniform, and I have concentrated on the individual detail of their faces to try and show the individual breaking free from a collective ideal. I’m searching for the moment at which the individual surrenders their unique identity for that of a collective, stemming from a concern of the troubling absence of individual thought within a contemporary society.”
Ms Orszag used layering of charcoal and erasure as a means of creating a malevolent air in her work, starting with a 1918 Austrian school photograph and stripping it back to make it her own.
“I used violently erased planes to expose the intense voids of darkness that surround the subjects, which find themselves suspended in a dreamlike reality,” she said.
Ms Orszag plans to use her prize money towards a trip to the United Kingdom to look at art schools for possible post-graduate study. The Siemens-RMIT Fine Art Scholarship Awards help RMIT Fine Art students further their careers by assisting their research and production costs.
Images courtesy of RMIT Gallery.