ARC ONE is delighted to present the 2024 VCA Artist Opportunity Award to Mythra Schwartz & Jarrad Martyn 🎉🎨🏆
This award is granted from the VCA Masters or Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) Program and grants Schwartz & Martyn the chance to exhibit at ARC ONE in early 2025.
Mythra uses the physicality and materiality of paint – thinking through the act of making - to unravel the connections between place, memory, stories from the past, and how they connect to the present. Often using motifs of shadows, reflections and other fleeting moments in both paintings and instillations to create liminal spaces: dreamscapes embedded with the haziness of memory.
Jarrad uses painting to explore humanities shifting relationship with the natural environment and how legacy is visualised. Using photographs his father made while working in Antarctica in 1985 as the starting point, Martyn’s interest lays in the duality of the photographs - they are personally sentimental, yet draw out new political and environmental associations in the present day. The collective public memory of ‘Antarctica’ as a place and as an idea has become synonymous with current conversations around climate change and similar global concerns.
This is the third year that ARC ONE has partnered with the Victorian College of the Arts to present this award. We are proud to be supporting these outstanding graduates.