Resonate Magazine | Australian Music Centre

Image: Julian Day  

Composer, artist and broadcaster Julian Day has just been announced as one of two recipients of the prestigious Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarships in 2018. The Scholarships provide each artist with a twelve-month living allowance of USD $48,000, as well as travel expenses and the cost of institutional study fees at a leading international art school of their choice. The other scholarship was awarded to Sasha Grbich, an artist working in the forms of sculpture, installation, sound and video.

The selection committee for the 2018 Scholarships included Simon Biggs (Professor of Art, Director: South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia), Christian Lock (Lecturer: Painting, School of Art, Architecture and Design, University of South Australia) and Angela Valamanesh, internationally exhibited artist and a celebrated former recipient of a Samstag Scholarship in 1996.

Professor Biggs said about the two successful recipients, 'The quality of applicants for the 2018 Samstag Scholarships was high but there were two that were especially strong. Julian Day impressed with his experimental works that explore the space between visual and sonic art, musical sculptures that are almost surreal in their combination of elements and their odd logic; and Sasha Grbich, as an artist working with installation, performance, sound and video, whose work engages with the everyday, bringing together the quotidian as an expanded assemblage of small and large scale things and events of the world around us.''

Samstag Scholarships are awarded by the University of South Australia on behalf of the Trustee of the Estate of Gordon Samstag, the celebrated American artist who taught at the South Australian School of Art in the 1960s. Over 26 years, the Samstag Scholarships program has awarded 140 scholarships, their total value exceeding ten million USD.

> Media release 26 September (University of SA website)

> 'Julian Day and Sasha Grbich awarded 2018 Samstag scholarships' - Art Guide Australia (5 October 2017)

[Updated 18 October - link to an Art Guide Australia article.]