Simon Cuthbert
Artist’s Statement
The architecture of waiting
A good deal of life is spent waiting; for an egg or kettle to boil, the bus or international flight to arrive, we wait on exam results and blood tests or a judicial sentence to be handed down. For every complexion in life there is a waiting.
Sometimes we wait for death.
For the dying it maybe peaceful, protracted, sudden or mysterious. For those supporting the dying time and space shift in the presence of impending death. Many of the images in this series were made while my mother life ebbed, those strange moments at lifes end. As such they are lower case revelations in which a unifying theme may be faith, belief, hope or simply the architecture of waiting.
Simon Cuthbert
July 2017
Biography
Simon Cuthbert makes photographs that reverberate across a spectrum of long established photographic genre. With an eye honed by the rigours of museum collections documentation, his day job, his work provides an important challenge to notions of Heritage- the white bread miasma that is Brand Tasmania.
Over twenty years Cuthbert has refined an extraordinary visual archive detailing humans desire to create structures that provide shelter and comfort, utility and efficiency. Part portrait and indexical document, part social commentary and part elegy Cuthbert toys with the viewers habituated knowledge systems of the built environment. This is the true Nature of the twenty-first century world not the artificially sequestered wildernesses so dear to Romantics. In the supposed “non-places” of the suburbs, the roadside layover or desperate barren paddocks we encounter ambitious invention, wilful individuation or entropic approximations of such. What is striking about Cuthbert’s archival vision is a palpable sympathy for the subject matter.
A Cuthbert leitmotif is an insistent compositional isolation that enhances the forensic incremental detail provided by the lens but also elevates what are essentially architectural studies into the genre of portraiture. Here in these terrains it is difficult not to anthropomorphise- sometimes “Cuthbert’s” structures stand resolute, sometimes stagger against all odds, where simple survival is in itself heroic. Of late this sensibility has become much keener indeed much more mature.
Craig Judd August 2017
Awards
2008 MaCarthurCook Art Award, (3rd place) Gallery 45downstairs, Melbourne
2006 Houston Fotofest Discovery, Photonews Magazine (May 2006), Hamburg, Germany
2005 National Photographic Purchase Award, Albury Regional Gallery, NSW
Prometheus Visual Art Award, All Saints Anglican School, Gold Coast, Qld
Island Art Prize (part of the Ten Days on the Island Festival), Stanley Artworks, Tas
Julie Millowick Acquisitive Award, Castlemain State Festival, Horsham Regional Gallery, Vic
Exhibitions
Recent Solo Exhibitions
2014 Beyond Nature, Kaunas International Photography Festival, Lithuania
2010 Beyond Nature, Singapore International Festival of Photography
2010 Simple solutions for a complex world, Despard Gallery, Hobart
2008 Branded, Despard Gallery, Hobart and Linden Gallery, Melbourne
2006 Downtown, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne
2005 Downtown, CAST Gallery, Hobart Tas
Call of the Wild, Gallery 482, Brisbane; Despard Gallery, Hobart
Recent Group Exhibitions
2016 32nd Alice Prize, Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs
2014 It Is Not It That We See, Sawtooth ARI, Launceston
2013 Apache CLIP Award 2013, Perth Centre for Contemporary Photography, WA
2012 Josephine Ulrick & Wynn Schubert Photography Award, Gold Coast City Gallery, Qld
2009 Poimena Art Prize, Launceston Grammar School, Tasmania
2008 Gold Coast Ulrick Schubert Photographic Art Award, Gold Coast City Gallery, Qld
Sunshine Coast Art Prize, Caloundra Regional Gallery, Qld
MaCarthur Cook Art Award 08, 45 Downstairs, Melbourne
Melbourne Art Fair 08, Despard Gallery at the Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne
2007 City of Hobart Art Prize, Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery, Hobart
William & Winifred Bowness Photography Prize, Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne
City of Perth Contemporary Art Prize, Town Hall, Perth
2006 If You Leave Me, Can I Come Too?, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney
Light Sensitive, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Melbourne Art Fair 06, Despard Gallery at the Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne
2005 City of Perth Contemporary Art Prize, PICA, Perth
Hutchins Art Prize, Long Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart
This Urban World, Devonport Regional Gallery, Tas
Industrial Strength, Horsham Regional Gallery, VIC
CCP/Leica Docmentary Award, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne; and touring nationally through 2006/07
National Photographic Purchase Award, Albury Regional Gallery, NSW
Prometheus Art Award, All Saints Anglican School, Gold Coast
Rhapsody 21C, The Academy Gallery, University of Tasmania
Outdooring, Senkukan Gallery, Tokyo
On Island, Devonport Regional Gallery, Tas
Island Visions Art Prize, Stanley, Tas
Awkward Silences, Linden Gallery, Melbourne; Plimsoll Gallery, University of Tasmania, Tas
Website
https://www.despard-gallery.com.au/artistprofiles/simon-cuthbert/
Showing all 2 artworks
Simon Cuthbert
Big Foot
84 x 104 cm type C print $2,500.00