Since 2015, Stanley Street Gallery has opened each year with its’ annual Introducing – a curated group exhibition of early-career artists that are not yet represented by a commercial gallery. The exhibition seeks to assist those less recognised in gaining a wider exposure or introduction to a different audience, allowing the artists to form networks which they mightn’t have had the opportunity to do so. Starting this year’s exhibition program, recent BFA (Hons) graduate and one of SSG’s Gallery Assistants, Emma Pinsent, has curated three Fine Art graduates; Annette Bukovinsky (MFA – National Art School), Nakita Dass (BFA – UNSW&AD) and Zoe Welton (BFA – National Art School) into Introducing. 

Annette Bukovinsky’s work is as intricate and delicate as it is hard-hitting and bold. Investigating humanity's relationship with nature and the search for a new ecological philosophy, she addresses the challenges that threaten the vitality of our planet. In Bukovinsky’s use of clay, connections are made between the material’s fluctuating state and the state of the environment, the constant “pushing of boundaries” in construction and development, which are usually at a detriment to the world’s ecosystems.  

In Zoe Welton’s work, we see an engagement with the western canon of abstraction through the use of bright pastel colours and ambiguous shape and tone. However familiar Welton’s minimalist aesthetic may be, her work presents a contemporary approach; as much as it is reductive and clear, it is also playful, mysterious and accessible. Welton plays with the balance between recognizable form and complete obliteration – her paintings having an associative quality referential to cartoon characters or animals. 

In the tank, Nakita Dass’s Loop calls into question value. Specifically, the value that we place on temporal objects. These objects, as arbitrary and mundane they may be, are telling. They act as “obscured messages” or stories, which reveal a great deal about a time and place.

“Loop has kinetic, temporal bones, each neckpiece geometrically and materially charting one circuit around the main loop road within three neighbouring Western Sydney suburbs. Each Loop charts one walk taken, but also gives evidence of each place within time. Each loop conceals cues that can be read to reveal the age, demographic and ambience of the designated area, but also says something about an original journey - however ordinary or routine - about movement, pauses, meaningful temporal engagement and about the non-verbal cues that affect our figuration through space.” – Nakita Dass