Amos Gebhardt wins the 2022 Bowness Prize

Huge congratulations to Amos Gebhardt who was announced as the Winnerof the 2022 Bowness Photography Prize at the awards presentation last night at Monash Gallery of Art.

Selected from a shortlist of 54 works, Gebhardt is awarded $30,000 and their work Wallaby 2022 will be acquired into MGA’s nationally significant collection of Australian photographs.

As Gebhardt says:

In this new series, native animal x-rays from medical archives are interwoven with elemental forms to investigate colonial violences on both land and water creatures.

The wallaby died from a suspected gun shot wound, and is depicted here as a form of haunting, merging with constellations specific to the place they were found. The image pushes bounds of traditional photography by using a range of light frequencies to reflect the fractal interiority beneath the skin and within outer space, revealing possibilities of perspective beyond the human eye.

By enhancing the luminosity of these once animated bones, the work suggests the entangled lines of entropic connection between cosmology, trauma & sentience.

Gebhardt’s sustained and continued practice of producing work that is visually rich is epitomised by a courageous commitment to agitate dominant narratives around marginality, representation, queerness and human ecologies.

Recent acclaimed series include There are no others (2016), which features gender diverse people floating in celestial space; Evanescence (2018), which depicts human collectives suspended in contested landscapes; Night Horse (2019) examining the powerful currents between horses as they negotiate consent and desire during mating season, capturing the undeniable force of non-human narratives and Small acts of resistance (2021), which celebrates queer familial entanglement.

Over the last 17 years, the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize has emerged as an important annual survey of contemporary photographic practice in Australia and one of the most prestigious prizes in the country.

This year’s judges were artist Rosemary Laing; Hannah Presley, Director of Agency and Senior Curator, Museums and Collections at University of Melbourne; and MGA Director Anouska Phizacklea.

Tolarno Galleries will exhibit Night Horse for the first time in Melbourne in April 2023.

Image: AMOS GEBHARDT Wallaby 2022, chromogenic print (light box), 76 x 95 cm. Edition of 5 + 1AP. Install photo by Amos Gebhardt.