Shepparton Art Museum announces award winners of SAM Fresh 2024

Shepparton Art Museum is pleased to announce artists Gabriella Vittorio and Kat Parker as the respective winners of the SAM Fresh 2024 La Trobe University Award and People’s Choice Award. The winners of the awards were announced to an excited crowd of over 80 attendees at the museum on Saturday 3 August during the official exhibition celebration, which included remarks from SAM Acting Artistic Director Danny Lacy and SAM Curator – Community Caroline Esbenshade.

Both artists’ winning entries have been on display in the SAM Community Gallery as part of the SAM Fresh 2024 exhibition, an annual, open-call group exhibition for young creatives aged 16-25 living, working, or studying in the Goulburn Valley and Hume regions.

Working in a surrealist style, Gabriella Vittorio’s winning entry, titled Lunchtime, is a digital drawing exploring her Italian heritage and the challenges of growing up as a culturally diverse person in Australia. Vittorio’s work depicts the common experience shared by many multicultural school students of self-consciousness around packed lunches from home. Vittorio receives a cash prize of $1,500 as the recipient of the La Trobe University Award.

An accomplished printmaker and artist, Kat Parker’s winning entry, titled Discarded III, features a life-sized 3D linocut model of a Robust White-Eye, an extinct species formerly found on Lord Howe Island. The artwork appears like a bird in flight, suspended on a barely-visible wire from the ceiling of the gallery. Parker receives a cash prize of $500 as the recipient of the People’s Choice Award, which was open for voting by visitors since the opening of the exhibition in May.

Caroline Esbenshade, SAM Curator – Community, says of the award winners:

“Both winning works really connected with audiences and represent a high level of skill within their practices. Parker’s Robust White-eye is such a unique approach to printmaking. Made of many artworks within an artwork, it is composed of multiple linocut prints that she has layered together to create a three-dimensional form. The resulting sculpture looks like it has taken flight in our galleries and at any moment will chirp!

Vittorio’s work has truly been a conversation piece. I have heard people off different generations and backgrounds sharing with each other what lunches they took to school, what was considered to be a ‘cool lunch,’ what was their least favourite thing to have for lunch and more. It’s been a beautiful point of connection between audiences and staff.”

SAM Fresh 2024 closed at SAM on Sunday 11 August.

ENDS