Winning entry by Neil Taylor; for a cool $12000 you can buy this artwork
Anchoring the art scene on the Central Coast is the Regional Art Gallery located on the shores of Caroline Bay in East Gosford. It is part of a complex that also includes the Gosford/Edogawa Commemorative Garden, the Arts Centre, and Caroline Bay Brasserie.
Officially opened in April 2000, the gallery has seen more than 160,000 people visitors each year looking over its diverse and stimulating exhibition program, mostly consisting of a range of local, national and international exhibitions of various media including painting, photography, sculpture, textiles, ceramics, and works on paper, all of which continually excites the viewers imagination.
The gallery has quickly become an important cultural and educational resource for the Central Coast community and boasts three exhibition galleries, two state of the art spaces with modular wall systems that can be formatted to 1 or 2 separate areas or alternatively a large foyer gallery. Located within the foyer is the Gallery shop where visitors can buy any number of gift lines.
A major part of the Gallery is the annual Gosford Art Prize [click here for list of entrants] which dates back to the early 1970’s where it began in community halls and shopping centers. Now the prize has found a home at the Gosford Regional Gallery and is an important part of the annual program supporting local artists and encouraging artists from across the NSW to visit Gosford.
This year a record 616 entries were received. Increasing prize money and increasing exposure naturally result in the higher number of entries. The catch for the Central Coast is that with the limited display space at the Gosford Regional Gallery and a growing number of entries there are more artists who don’t make the final show.
The majority of the selected works still come from the Central Coast Region and there is also a sense of pride that Gosford is starting to attract the attention of artists from interstate with works this year arriving from Queensland and Tasmania. Local artists now find themselves pitted against strong competition from around the country.
Judging the entries this year saw Ron Ramsay, Director of the Newcastle Region Gallery, selecting the winners of the Overall Prize, 2 Dimensional Prize, the Photography Prize and the Sculpture Prize with Jane Barrow, Ceramics teacher at Newcastle TAFE, selecting the winner of the ceramics prize.
Pinktober supporting breast cancer research
A three person panel undertook the difficult task of selecting the final 165 works to be included in the Gosford Art Prize 2011 exhibition. The committee in its deliberations tried to incorporate the many different approaches to art making that the Gosford Art Prize embraces.
A selection of works not chosen to be part of the exhibition will be presented in The Overflow organised by the Central Coast Art Society. This important community exhibition gives everyone a chance to be exhibited and will be held within the Imperial Shopping Centre, Gosford, from the 31st October to 14th November.
Gosford City Council, being the major sponsor and the organiser of the competition, recognizes the importance of this event for the local arts community whilst other major sponsors get a vote of thanks without their support there would be no prizes, they include:-
Booth’s Motor Group (Sculpture section)
Sharpe Bros (Photography Section),
The regional gallery is also fortunate to have the following supporters: Gittoes, The Friends of the Gallery, Lemon Tree Framing, Eckersley’s Art Supplies and the Central Coast Potters Society.
Gosford Art Prize Overall winner $10,000 (Judging & Comments by Ron Ramsay)
#228 ‘The Source’ (Artist: Neil Taylor)
This mysterious landscape is totally enchanting. A limited and unusual palette, the artist has chosen his subject very carefully depicting a number of complex and ethereal elements – darkness, water and light.
The painting is full of contrasts – it is smooth and highly finished and yet has areas of texture, it is in part abstract and yet realistic, it is dark and yet light, it is defined and then unfocussed and we appear to look both on the surface and below water.
The viewer can only guess the location of The Source but it is seems to flow from an isolated and almost mystical location.
Booths Sculpture Award $2,000 (Judging & Comments by Ron Ramsay)
#62 ‘Gust’ (Artist: Joanna O’Toole)
This work has a range of elements that make for a lively and well considered sculpture. The use of contrasting materials – found metal objects combined with richly coloured and finished timber come together harmoniously. There is a refined balance between the solidity and geometric simplicity of the base, the gentle upward curve of the timber and the corrugated, twisted shape of the metal.
The artist has carefully selected her materials and skilfully combined them to produce an elegant work that gracefully twists and turns inviting the eye to comfortably move from one part to the next.
Sharpe Bros Photography Award $2,000 (Judging & Comments by Ron Ramsay)
#609 ‘Pool Catchment’ (Artist: Helene Rosanove)
Compositional elements combine with a lack of definition and blurring to give this work the appearance – at first glance – of an abstract painting. Photography has had such a powerful influence on the world of visual art and the depiction of the real – the ability to record accurately a place, a person or an event.
This work shows us that the photographic medium can be used not simply to record – here the real has been contrived, on purpose, to almost dissolve into the abstract. Our attention is drawn into the composition in an attempt to unravel the mysteries of the undefined shape and colour.
2 Dimensional Work Award $2,000 (Judging & Comments by Ron Ramsay)
#250 ‘And there’s Today, Tomorrow, Yesterday’ (Artist: Becky Guggisberg)
Figures – standing, sitting, lying, presumably at the beach, are drawn and painted, overlapped as they spread across the surface. Some figures disappear below the paint whilst others are drawn onto the painted surface. Using a linear style that is informal and fluid, the artist accurately and creatively depicts the relaxed nature of her subjects.
The choice of colour – a bright yet limited palette bounds across the surface through energised brushwork and carefully controlled dripping. The colour has a sense of warmth – summer and the exotic.
Ceramics Award $1,500 (Judged by, Jane Barrow, Ceramicist)
#382 ‘The Little Storyteller’ (Artist: Eleni Antoniou Holloway)
This work by Eleni Antoniou Holloway stands out immediately for its bold use of glazes which are reminiscent of pottery from historical references. The little story teller sits atop a heavily decorated form. The narrative whilst not obvious seems innocent and playful. This is a well crafted and well conceived piece in which all of the elements come together.
Three days on from Julia Gillard’s policy announcement, and the most striking characteristic of the carbon tax debate is just how closely it resembles a dozen retards trying to fuck a doorknob. The only apparent solution is a massive airdop of Xanax into our reservoirs, because really, everyone needs a few deep breaths and a spell in the quiet corner.
Sure, the weeks leading up have all been hysteria: Tony Abbott marching that bulldog grimace up and down the length of the country, like a Cassandra made of old leather and stunted dreams, cawing grim warnings of imminent ruin and destruction at the gates of Troy. But you might have expected, once the details had been released, there would arrive a little more perspective.
Nothing doing.
Far from being objective carriers of information, media outlets have been trying to manufacture furore. “Families earning more than $110k will feel the pain of the carbon tax,” warned the Herald-Sun, straightfaced. “Households face a $9.90 a week jump in the cost of living.”
$9.90.
Cry me the motherfucking Nile.
Households on less than that income would be even less affected. Those in the upper range would have their ten bucks a week at least partly compensated, while others would be fully or over-compensated.
The tax, after all, was not on people, but on 500 high-polluting companies. The compensation was to guard against costs those companies might pass on to their customers.
Before we continue here is page one of the top 500 polluters in Australia. It is interesting to note Pauline Hanson rated #8.
So, no big deal, I said to myself when the details were announced. Surely this’ll all blow over. And then, found myself more than a little surprised when a Herald-Sun commenter (one step above YouTube on the food-chain, I’ll admit) said “Somebody needs to assassinate Julia Gillard NOW before she totally destroys our way of life.”
Just… hold up a minute. Ten bucks a week? Our way of life? Aside from incitement to murder a head of government being ever so slightly illegal (and something the Hun mods should probably have picked up on), the response just doesn’t make any sense. Here is legislation that might make some things marginally more expensive. Probably not much. It isn’t going to drive industries offshore, because things like power generation and mining Australian resources kind of have to be done in Australia.
And yet the hysteria, even when not reaching Lee Harvey Oswald levels, has been constant throughout, led by the paper who defines ten bucks a week out of a hundred grand as “feeling the pain”.
“Social demographer David Chalke said the tax threatened values at the core of Australian society. ‘To an extent it will make people question, “is it really worth the bother?” They’ll smell in this something of a class war,’ Mr Chalke said.”
Ten bucks a week. Core values. Class war. Then, “Generous payments to those on low incomes and higher taxes for high income earners would anger hard-working Aussies.” Because, people on less than $110,000 don’t have to work hard. That’s why they get paid less! Scrubbing toilets is easy and only takes five minutes, while high-level boardroom execs spend 20-hour days chained to some kind of awful lunch machine being beaten with lobster foam.
I also enjoyed “On 3AW yesterday, Treasurer Wayne Swan was unable to say how the carbon tax would affect a Falcon. He also couldn’t say what the price change for a can of tomatoes would be.” The random grocery quiz had undone the Treasurer yet again. “Wait, wait, wait, got one…uh… large box of Libra Fleur? Nope. Uh, Sara Lee Chocolate Bavarian? Hah, you got nothin’, Swanny!”
Then there were the numerous headlines about airfares set to “soar” (geddit!). Well-meaning travellers were interviewed saying higher airfares would make it much harder to afford family holidays. Tres sad, especially when Qantas “said it would need to fully pass on the carbon price to customers, with the price of a single domestic flight ticket to increase on average by about $3.50.”
Three dollars. Fifty cents. They currently charge you more than that for a bottle of water. They charge $7.50 to buy a ticket online, $8 for a cup of noodles, $25 to use their check-in counter, and $6 to board the plane first. The best comment left after that article was, “So people won’t be able to buy a newspaper for the boarding lounge anymore? Good.”
So let’s never hear any talk of ABC bias ever again, because the Sun has well and truly picked its horse on this one. Any online article on the tax was headlined by a video of the lovely Andrew Bolt, telling us it was “the greatest act of national suicide we’ve ever seen.” Funny, I thought that was when they gave him a TV show. There was also a great line about “so-called solar energy” – because now solar energy is just a theory too. Like gravity, or Adelaide.
I am a sometime journalist. In that sense, the staff in the Herald and Weekly Times building are my colleagues. This makes me feel a bit like whorehouse linen. No doubt they all say they’re just doing their jobs, looking for opportunities. Nonetheless, they’re still actively promoting harm for the sake of attracting an audience. Concentration camp guards are just doing their jobs, too.
And with that level of reporting, the effort from their readers is no surprise. “Co2 is not a pollutant. It is vital for life on Earth. Without it, trees will die,” said John. Get that man on the climate panel.
“How much will Australia’s temperatures decline once the tax is implemented?” asked Marty. Well, Marty, the atmosphere takes notes about where its constituent particles come from, so we’ll get a full report from the Hole in the Ozone Layer each quarter. He wears a jaunty hat, and gives every boy and girl a delicious melanoma.
The dumbshititis was also evident in the audience of the Prime Ministerial Q and A on Monday, where the average question could be summarised as, “I’m a person, and I don’t like paying money. Can I not ever pay money for things?” My favourite line, from a surgical swab of a man towards the end of the show, was that because he earned too much to be eligible for low-income handouts, “I feel I’ll be taxed into poverty.”
This taps into a very prominent feature of our political landscape: the constant line from Tony Abbott that Australian families are hurting, that Aussies are doing it tough, that life is somehow getting harder, that the cost of living is on the rise.
Shenanigans, Tony. Let’s get one thing very clear. Australians, en masse, are enjoying a better standard of living than has ever been enjoyed in this country’s history.
And not just marginally, but by a huge degree. Really, along with a few other developed countries, we are enjoying a better standard of living than any group of people has in human existence. We have every kind of food and beverage from around the world deliverable to our doors. We have technological advances that make a decade ago look archaic. We have goods and luxuries of every conceivable kind; cheap and accessible. We have more and better options with transport, entertainment, comfort, place and style of residence. We have the most advanced medicine and best life expectancy of all time.
While there is still poverty in Australia, it does not even touch the kinds of poverty experienced in most countries on earth. Support systems and sufficient wealth exist to cover at least basic needs. The small proportion of genuinely homeless usually have other factors that keep them away from those systems. Being poor in Australia means living in a crappy house, in a crappy area. Maybe a commission flat. It means living on welfare, getting by week to week, not having any money for nice things. It might mean the kids have to go to their friend’s house to play X-Box, or that they don’t get sweet Christmas presents. It sucks, but it’s safe. It’s solid. It keeps you alive. It’s a level of stability and security that half the world would kill for, and even the basic amenities of a commission flat are amenities that half the world doesn’t have.
Poor people in Australia do not starve to death. They don’t die of cold. There is clean water running in any public bathroom. If they’re ill, they can walk into a hospital and be treated. If they’re broke, they can get welfare. They can get roofs over their heads, even if they’re temporary. They have options. If the utilities are shut off, they can find a tap, or a powerpoint. They can make it through the night.
And those poor aside, the rest of the country is doing very fucking nicely indeed, thanks very much. Reading these stories of parents bitching about working long hours to afford their private school fees just makes me want to give their little tow-headed spawn a spew bath. The lack of perspective is astonishing. Their kids are safe and fed and healthy and getting every opportunity to do whatever they want with their lives. They’re not getting sent out to suck tourist dick for enough US dollars to get their siblings through the week.
It should make us ashamed that there are people with good earnings ready to claim victim status on national television over a worst-case scenario of five hundred bucks a year. This is what is driving people into a panicky rage. Five hundred dollars, if you can afford it. Less if you can’t. If you run a red light camera in Victoria it’s $300. Do 40 ks over the limit, $510. If we get fines, we bitch about it, but inherently accept the rationale: the fine is levied as a penalty by someone endangering others in the society. It’s the basic structure of how a society works. We all agree to abide by certain rules as a form of insurance, to make sure that we’re not on the receiving end of the negative consequences of lawlessness. When people refuse to abide by those rules, they’re variously censured by or removed from that society.
If we obtain energy by burning irreplaceable fuel, and the consequences threaten the safety of our society, then surely we should pay a penalty for that (adding to a fund to guard against those consequences). The rule is basic: you make the mess, you clean it up. Ten bucks a week is a sweet deal.
But in being part of the luckiest couple of generations of people to yet walk the earth, most of us still like to imagine we’ve got it tough. It’s that same sense of entitlement that I was discussing regarding Raquel a couple of weeks ago. When you grow up with a certain standard of living, you come to regard it as the natural state of affairs. If someone threatens that state, they are depriving you of what is fundamentally yours. To your mind, you have a right to live like this, purely because you’re lucky enough to have lived like this.
Well, you don’t. So if you claim you can’t afford ten bucks a week, I call Shenanigans, with a healthy dash of You’re a Dick. One dinner at the Flower Drum would make up your year’s liability in one hit. Genuinely struggling people will get compo anyway. But even they could afford it if they had to. Buy one less deck of Holiday 50s a week. Buy two less beers. Leave off the Foxtel subscription. Wear a franger, save half a mil. What the fuck ever. Remember that you live in a country where drinkable water comes out of a tap inside your goddamn house, and where the power runs 24 hours a day. This in itself is a goddamn privilege, and if you are going to bitch and moan about having to pay for that privilege, you can fuck off and die in a ditch.
Because you do not have a right to this way of life. No-one does. We just have the extreme good fortune of enjoying it, and that won’t last forever. We should appreciate it while we can.
Perversely, part of me wants to see what would happen if the sea levels rise a couple of metres, the coastal cities get swamped, the rainfall dries up, the power goes out, the militias take to the streets. Part of me would love to see these squawking indignant right-to-luxury dickwipes learning how to live in the dust, scraping out dried plants from the earth and hoarding their remnants from the Beforetime. It’ll be a sight if it happens. Dirty red skies will rise up from the ground each morning like a curse. The only creatures that seem to thrive, the cockroaches and carrion birds, will swarm black against the sand and the sunset, rasping dry songs with their throats and with their legs. The water will be gone. The world will not remember ice floes. And for her sins, for ten dollars a week from each and every one of us, Julia Gillard will hang from the garret at the gates of Troy.
Mostly peaceful protests in Egypt and the middle east, the Arab Spring, generally have rendered the death of Osama bin Laden irrevelant to the cause he once championed.
It must be remembered that al Qaeda has killed more muslims and arabs than it has westerners and only after failing to gain support in the arab world it went running back to Afganistan to bolster its attacks on the west. A few political points scored by Barak Obama and may well make him the president who was successful in erasing bin Laden. But in the world of terrorism it is perhaps a psychological blow to his supporters but not a knock out blow.
The Taliban continue with or without al Qaeda
This link explains only to well the circumstances surrounding the sybolism of his death.
Whether or not this in an accurate report remains to be seen.
Do you trust these men?
High-frequency Active Aural Research Program otherwise known as HAARP.
The HAARP facility
Suffice to say for those wishing to believe in some sort of conspiricy [new world order] theory it will have credence. For the sceptics, well it will be just some fantasy. Check out the link below.
csat.au.af.mil/2025/volume3/vol3ch15.pdf
If the link doesn’t work you may need to copy and paste into your browser.
Did HAARP cause the Japanese earthquake of recent times resulting in the tsami?
More to come on this HAARP.
Global warming, the result of HAARP?
Women’s rights activist explains why she thinks niqab a tool of oppression. This week, France initiated laws banning face veils, causing debate about role of government in expression and worship.
Veiled Muslim women take part in protest in London against France banning the wearing of Islamic veils in public on April 11.
– The hijab is a head scarf worn by Muslim women.
– The niqab is a veil that covers the face.
– The burka is covers a woman’s face and whole body.
KRISTEN THOMPSON
METRO VANCOUVER
Published: April 14, 2011 3:19 p.m.
Last modified: April 14, 2011 6:56 p.m.
While women’s and religious rights groups in France hotly debate the country’s new ban on face veils, one Canadian Muslim woman – who is speaking in Vancouver on Saturday – is calling for similar laws here.
“We can stop being politically correct about things,” said Farzana Hassan, author of Islam Women And The Challenges Of Today, who will be speaking as part of the UBC-Laurier Institution Multiculturalism Lecture Series at the Chan Centre.
“The challenges we face as progressive Muslims encountering radicalism are just huge so banning the niqab and the burka – not the hijab – is something I am proposing.”
Hassan said the issue is one of gender equality and public safety.
“You never know who is behind a face veil,” she said.
“We are living in a climate of political hostility and this is a politically-charged atmosphere.”
Hassan said the other argument – the one that suggests face veils actually liberate women because they prevent them from being seen as sex objects – is backwards.
“There’s a blatant contradiction there and that’s something I’m going to be exposing in the lecture – why it isn’t liberating and why it is an oppressive garb,” she said.
“I think that radicals amongst us are resorting to legalities and charter provisions to further their agenda, and in order to counter that we need to counter that with legality.”
“Charter rights are never absolute,” said Hassan. “The charter guarantees religious freedom so we can practice our faith, (but) in democratic societies there are still some limits.”
“Democratic societies are not anarchies and that’s where people are getting confused about the issue. A lot of people who would like to go around nude would say their democratic rights to go around nude are curtailed.”
Hassan said when you enter the public realm you’re entering a social contract with everyone around you.
“That social contract is something that has to be mutually decided upon and not dictated by the whims of one particular minority group within one particular minority,” she said.
Hassan argues that any culture that justifies misogyny and oppression – and she says face veils are oppressive – does not deserve equality.
“I’m just going to state it outright – it’s not equal,” she said. “There does exist an elaborate rationale, and to me that is justifying the unjustifiable.”
Meanwhile back here in Australia the federal opposition has backed a West Australian minister’s controversial comments on the burka, saying the dress goes against Australian culture and should not be worn.
The National Post runs the story where In a liberal society, we all enjoy a baseline right to speak, eat and dress as we please
Argus 
