Press release from AFTRS
The AFTRS Creative Fellowship is a unique offering designed to fund daring and adventurous projects from talented individuals with ideas for screen based concepts.
Now in its second year, the Australian Film Television and Radio School’s 2011 Creative Fellowship has been awarded to two contemporary Australian artists working across video, performance and installation: Angelica Mesiti and Christopher Frey.
Angelica Mesiti is an internationally regarded artist who specialises in video, performance and installation artwork. Angelica’s work has been exhibited at prestigious institutions such as Tate Modern London (2010), Centre Pompidou Paris (2010), and in 2009 her video work Rapture was awarded the Blake Prize for Religious and Spiritual Art.
Angelica has proposed, for her AFTRS Creative Fellowship work, a multi-channel video installation that will explore the notion of ‘cultural survival’ in cities around the world, in particular through the form of music. She plans to look at the way cultural traditions are transported within people and how they find new contexts for survival after migration and in spite of assimilation.
This project, which has been in development since 2010, started in Paris where she recorded the work of two African migrants performing the music of their homeland.
Christopher Frey’s project for the AFTRS Creative Fellowship is an experimental film aiming to create a three-minute, slow motion sequence of images set to a classical score. Playing with the themes of adolescence, genre subversion, religion and philosophy, Explosions will be set against an industrial streetscape where gravity has failed, and people float into space. ‘Some struggle, frantic and afraid, while others allow themselves to benignly float into the ether. Each of them watch as their fellow floaters explode around them into vivid colours of light and debris, before inevitably also becoming a shower of light.’
Christopher has a varied background in fine art, design, music composition, post-production and VFX. He has directed three traditional dramatic short films that have enjoyed success on the international festival circuit – Buses and Trains screened at the London International Film Festival and Sao Paolo International Film Festival.
Jan Chapman and Scott Meek, along with AFTRS CEO Sandra Levy, reviewed over 50 applications, settling on the two recipients due to the compelling and engaging treatment of their subject matter and their innovative use of the media in both of their projects.
AFTRS is proud to be supporting creativity and the exploration of screen based and moving image media and looks forward to continuing this commitment in the form of the Creative Fellowship in the coming years.