Central Australian Art Society

Supporting artists in

Central Australia since 1963.

The Central Australian Art Society is a volunteer group dedicated, since 1963, to giving Central Australian artists the support and inspiration needed to develop skills, and local residents an opportunity to participate in, and enjoy, a vibrant and creative community.

Important Update for En Plein Air Participants

En Plein Air will now be on

the last SATURDAY of the month

CAAS Member Event:

All members are invited to participate in

'En Plein Air'

amended details below

Our thanks go to member Carol Adams who has organised these opportunities.

The Annual General Meeting was successful.

Thanks to those members that attended the meeting, especially those who have volunteered to hold an office in CAAS or to be a Committee Member.

The results of those elections are below.

The Advocate Award 2023 was a great success with a significant increase in entries and a large crowd for the 'Walk in the Art' opportunity to hear artists talk about their work, on the last Sunday of the exhibition.

Lisa Stefanoff won the Chapman and Bailey Excellence Prize for her video 'Never Ceded'

Lisa Stefanoff - Never Ceded
This work might be a dream, or a quiet nightmare.

It’s about the death of empire in one corner of one of its colonies - this town’s CBD, it’s river and ‘old Eastside’ neighbourhood; central Arrernte country: this place known variously as Alice Springs, Mparntwe and other specific Arrernte language place names.

On a formal level the work invites its audience to spend 7 and a half minutes attuning to place by attending to a juxtaposition sight and sound.

The piece uses a historic moment to look at once both backwards and forwards, towards other possibly historic moments on our future horizons.

I was trained as a documentary filmmaker. I love the counterpoint work of editing; of composing story and crafting affective impact by cutting and stitching
together sound and image in time.

The surreality of the everyday - a routine and uneventful drive home with broadcast radio on, for example - sometimes needs a frame to hold it in focus. I've used a recording through a windscreen to render uncanny ironies visible and audible.

I filmed the piece in live audio-visual synchrony, on an iPhone 12MaxPro camera.

The ‘decisive moment’ of the work came when I got into my car in the Coles carpark at around 9pm on the 19th of September 2022, and turned the key, activating my radio. What I could see and what I was hearing was immediately cinematic.
I balanced my camera on the dash and drove at a pace that matched the processional dirge of the commentary. In this way, the piece was edited entirely ‘in camera’.

Very far from daytime London, and far from the mass media horror stories about Alice Springs night life, my drive home carried me trance-like through weirder and weirder dreamy juxtapositions, of human death and urban lifelessness, of power and dispossession, of colonial scepters and ‘post’-colonial spectres.

I kept in the small bumps and mishaps of the filming to make it clear that it was an indexical real-time recording. In the language of German video artist Hito Steryl (2009), you might call this video a 'poor image' -- 'a visual idea in its very becoming' that inherently 'tends towards abstraction', especially when the frame is drained of light. The opening and closing titles anchor the work in historical time, place and consciousness.

Natasha Perkins won the People's Choice Prize and the Leaping Lizards Gallery Prize

with 'Afterlife'

Other prizewinners were:

Faces Prize: Bre VanDenBerghe - Naomi

Stories Prize: Scott Bennett - Four Souls on the Path

and

Chapman and Bailey Places Prize in memory of Iain Campbell

Ruby Bethune - Behind the Headlines

Button
Button
Button

See more images of

The 2023/Exhibition

on the Advocate Art Award Webpage

Annual Membership of the Central Australian Art Society (CAAS) runs from July 1 until June 30 the following year.

Current members please rejoin now.

CAAS also invites any artist practising in Central Australia to apply for membership, which gives access to numerous benefits.

Two of those benefits are:

a reduced entry fee to the Advocate Art Award, and
preferential rates of commission on any work sold at the Advocate Art Award and on exhibition at the Art Shed

Join or rejoin CAAS, and enter the Advocate Art Award, on this website
See the drop-down menus above