EDUCATION 2004-07 BVA honors (painting) Sydney College of the Arts Sydney 1994-95 Diploma of Sound Engineering School of Audio Engineering, St Kilda Melbourne 1987-89 BVA ceramics Wangaratta TAFE/Victoria College, Melbourne SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2007 D/A Converter Pontifica Universidad Catolica de Chile 2006 Heroes of a Brief Moment in Time Archetype Gallery Sydney Never Arrived Almost Gone Installation at the Sydney College of the Arts 2004 Anonymous bodies in an empty room St Tropez Gallery, Surfers Paradise QLD GROUP EXHIBITIONS/PROJECTS 2007 Trajectories of dissent Tooth Gallery Sydney Open Trajectory The Archetype Gallery Sydney 2006 SCA undergraduate show Sydney College of the Arts Barley Touching the Earth Newspace Gallery Sydney 2004 It’s The Economy Stupid Newspace Gallery, Sydney Persephones Paradox Arts & Psychology in Dialogue Conference School of African and Oriental Studies London 2002 Sound Of Impact Mekanarky Studios Sydney 2001 Art Of Mekanarky Mekanarky Studios Sydney 2000 Operation Alchemy The Arena Vienna Austria PUBLICATIONS 2006 Sydney College of the Arts Degree show catalogue 2005 Patterns:Journal of the American Society of Cybernetics ‘The happy accident’, A dialogue with Lukas Pawlik. GRANTS/SCHOLARSHIPS Fauvette Loureiro Traveling scholarship 2006 Santiago Chile 2007 RELEVANT WORK EXPERIENCE 2001-2006 • Curator and stage manager Mekanarky Studios Sydney 1990-1998 • Artist assistant Imagineer and MORE productions Assisting with various art and sculpture installations In Sydney and Melbourne

HOUSE FIRES AND OTHER SOCIAL EVENTS Anthony Sawrey 2007 If you have been living in a cave, then maybe you haven't noticed that for many people on earth, mass media is very widespread and intrusive. In fact living in a cave is no sure guarantee that you will reach the necessary escape velocity to be free of it. Even without watching television or picking up a newspaper we are never far from its influence, but for artists who want to engage with the culture of the everyday, its presence continues to be a rich source of ideas. I have always had an interest in the mass media, especially its inanities such as the cults of celebrity, the diversion of sports, and the coverage of accidents and mayhem. To feed this interest, I would search through media material from video to print to put together collections of images for future projects. Such methods for gathering material were normally limited by the availability of media to source these images, but now in the 21st century, with the emergence of the World Wide Web, all this has changed. Now I can access as many images as I want without having to be a cataloger or an archivist but merely a browser, a user, a lurker. Like one of those freeloaders in a newsagent, standing at the shelves scanning random magazines until I'm thrown out, I can pick and choose the Images that appeal to me at that moment and not have to worry about buying the medium so to speak. I have the freedom to indulge in the message without lumbering myself with the entire package. This is why the web is such a mine for me, because the images that I'm interested in circulate so frequently that I don't have to worry about letting a interesting image slip through my fingers like before. I like the lack of quality control that is characteristic of web media, those random, unexpected elements that have appeared in the flow. Digital artifacts, compression distortions, odd colors, funny screen calibrations, dead pixels, blurring, and so on, the effects are endless. When I find an interesting image, I can use digital imperfections to distort representations and alter the assumed meaning(s) of a mass media image. The process of image transference from the hot house of the digital realm to an archaic medium like paint brings all these possibilities in account because the change of context from monitor to gallery space, from virtual space to physical space freezes the flow and changes our habitual interpretations of them. Different histories clash. Suddenly images that usually pass in a blur take on new significance. The change in speed and environment prompts different emotional responses and reconfigurations. This conflict is what I am looking for when I paint media images, to turn supposedly familiar content into something unquantifiable with uncertain boundaries. Nothing is as it seems, nothing is true. All assumptions are false and all that is certain is that context changes everything.

Median Strip- Oil on canvas 460 x 910mm each panel. (3 panels)

Proximity- Oil on canvas 820 x 1020mm each panel (4 panels).

Chase- Oil on canvas 880 x 1490mm

Train- Oil on canvas 880x 1490mm each panel (2 panels)

Heroes of a Brief Moment in Time Anthony Sawrey 2006 The selection of works which I have presented you here are part of my interest in the voyeuristic culture of modern media and humans fascination with celebrity, and disaster. Why are such disparate phenomena linked? Both demonstrate in vastly different ways the transition of one state into another. The crash test or the racing accident show controlled forms dissolving into randomness and the cult of celebrity deals with the rise of an individual and their inevitable fall into obscurity. On a personal level accidents and the fall from grace of friends and family are a cause for distress, but with the rise of mass media culture we have been able to become detached from taking responsibility for our voyeuristic tendencies.  The rise of web based media has accelerated both the cult of celebrity into ever shorter clips and destruction and mayhem has become more remote and stylized. But when selected media images are fixed in an archaic art form like painting and removed from the private realm of the home computer to a gallery space, the conventional position of multimedia as the arbitrator of meaning is upset and new structures within the images become apparent, meanings that are usually overlooked and disregarded in the usual rapid media flow. I want to be able generate a discourse regarding how we relate to the mass media and what empathy we have for those who are contained, however briefly, within it. By pausing fragments of the flow and preserving them in paint this process can be initiated.