Top Arts is an annual exhibition as part of the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority’s Season of Excellence, showcasing students who “excelled in VCE art subjects in 2024”. In other words, these are the works of students – artists who are still finding their feet, their preferred mediums and their artistic voices. To paraphrase James Joyce, these works are portraits of the artists as young people, and viewed through those lenses, there are some brilliantly accomplished works on display.
The entire exhibition is soundtracked by the church bells from Indigo Gordon’s looping animation Membrane Wulf, an intriguing visual tale of perhaps the genesis of the wolf just a few minutes long. It’s strangely mesmerising and is well worth seeing a couple of times as it loops again and again.
This video’s church bells keep singing as you view the rest of the exhibition, divided into sections like Mother Nature, Portraits and Knowledge. Diptychs, triptychs and polyptychs abound in these walls. For instance Ethan Mangopoulos’ My Life consists of three panels of strikingly loud skeletal colour, expertly curated to be sandwiched between Elkan Brady’s lino cut print A Light and Elektra Katsalidis’ wall of fascinating multimedia Deconstructed Cabinet of Curiosities, both of which are predominantly black and white.
Georgina Quah’s octaptych The Information Action Ratio – using oil, paper, gesso, resin and wood – is an excellent example of art using current communication trends, since every panel is a screen shot of an Instagram photo, although looking as if they’d come from the pages of a Philip K Dick novel.
Aliandra Nasrun’s Wood Song has a vital physicality to it, being two music sheets printed on wood then hacked into with an axe. Arielle Humphreys’ pair of portraits Tali’s Faith and Grandma’s Faith are well on the way to attract judges of the Archibald Prize.
Eddy Edwards’ Pink Celery is a quirky enneaptych featuring nine portrait-style photos of people covered in tattoos, each one with a quote below them, saying unexpected things such as they like to play with LEGO or go birdwatching.
Student art exhibitions, such as the annual celebrations in the Victorian College of the Arts or RMIT, are gigantic spectacles, room after room of bold artistic experiments. When bodies of work of such magnitude need to be selected from, then subjectivity inevitably becomes involved; this year’s Top Arts features 40 artists from 1400 submissions. With such a cull rate, more than once this reviewer was left wondering, why was this one selected out of literally hundreds of others?
While the judges have, overall, chosen an admirably diverse range of subjects, ideas and especially mediums – Anoushka Russell’s Dovetails, Meg Kane’s Our Rooms, Yasmine Chakielli’s Lands of Tatreez and Sanuthmee Kariyawasam’s Morbid Curiosities use ceramics, photographs, painted rocks and clay respectively – the question of which pieces didn’t get chosen can float in one’s mind.
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Despite this, shows such as Top Arts should be lauded and applauded. Being chosen to participate in an exhibition like this can give an artist the confidence, exposure and feedback that can launch careers. Remember, David Lynch’s 1967 four-minute animation Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times), made on a budget of $200, effectively began his film career. With luck, Top Arts 2025 will do something similar to a few new artistic voices.
Top Arts 2025 group show will be exhibited until 20 July 2025 at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Federation Square; free entry.
