Interview with the Artist
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Latest Arts ProjectBorn in Sydney, Australia.
Lives and works in Sydney, Australia.
Emily Sandrussi is a Sydney based multidisciplinary artist working primarily in photomedia.
Her photographic series of works Domino Theory explored universal themes of life, death and passing time, taking as it’s starting point an archive of photographic negatives taken by artist Emily Sandrussi’s stepfather during service as a conscript in the Vietnam War. The affecting suite of images is a nostalgic paean, a meditation on remembering and dis-remembering and on loss and mortality and the Vietnam War of 1962-75.
Sandrussi’s potent, pastel-hued photographic variations and versions were created from scanned images from the personal archive; the artist acknowledging and incorporating the spontaneous corruptions in processing and also exploiting additional manufactured digital glitches that interact with the existing disruptions on the surface and the disparate organic marks of dust, scratches and fingerprints.
Domino Theory, is a poignant contemporary ‘memento mori’ that is both very personal yet universal. It is an artifact that focuses on the passing of time, and the tracings, the trauma and the legacy of a war decades after it has ended. Her potent, pastel-hued photographic variations and versions were created from scanned images from the personal archive; the artist acknowledging and incorporating the spontaneous corruptions in processing and also exploiting additional manufactured digital glitches that interact with the existing disruptions on the surface and the disparate organic marks of dust, scratches and fingerprints.
Emily Sandrussi’s most recent series of works The Whole Field of Human Knowledge, seeks to dismantle the patriarchal institution of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, challenging the position it held for so many years as a status symbol for an aspirational middle class. The works engage with the tensions associated with recording or collating history and knowledge, challenging the hubris of any attempt to prove or celebrate humanity’s accomplishments and progress.
Emily Sandrussi completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts with first class honours and the university medal (2013), and was the inaugural recipient of the Artereal Gallery Mentorship Award for her work in the Sydney College of the Arts Undergraduate Degree Show (2013). In 2016 she completed a Master of Fine Arts at Sydney College of the Arts.
Emily Sandrussi was awarded the John Coburn Emerging Artist Award as part of the Blake Prize (2014), and she was also a finalist in the prestigious William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize at Monash Gallery of Art (2014) and the Contemporary Landscapes in Photography Prize at the Perth Centre for Photography (2014).
Her work has been exhibited at Parliament House (Canberra), Monash Gallery of Art (Melbourne) and COFA Galleries (Sydney).
