Julia Schauenburg

Rangas, the elderly, even poignantly wilting flowers: when she’s not freezing fresh-skinned beauties in time for Frankie mag, this snapper’s got a knack for collecting. She once spent a year travelling the world to pocket pics of old souls and most recently bought herself flowers every week, 52 times, to Hasselblad their decay into longer-lasting art. Born and bred in Hamburg, Germany, Schauenburg arrived in Sydney at 21 and promptly fell in love with the place (we don’t blame her). With L-O-V-E comes the need for a J.O.B. so she stayed to study photo media at COFA and has been working as a freelance photographer ever since.
www.juliaschauenburg.com

Tara Marynowsky

A Sydney lass through and through, this wild watercolourist has become an international favourite, showing and glowing from Paris to the Pacific and back again. A COFA grad and former Helen Lempriere Travelling Scholarship recipient, she’s known for childlike, whimsical work that’s weighted by underlying menace (in the way only the stories and nightmares of children can be: hello evil clowns). It’s ghostly but you can’t look away. Not prepared to be limited to walls, she also works in what we wear, bringing her pastel palette to window displays for Incu and painterly graphics for clothing label Something Else for Natalie Wood.
www.taramarynowsky.com

Joan Ross

Black humour laced with the lurid features in much of the recent work of this Blackheath-based installation artist. Her last show advised viewers to enter a fluoro neon suburban lounge room filled with colonial curiosities on crack, ‘at their own risk.’ A little nu rave meets a lotta New World, she was recently immortalised in an Archibald painting by Matthew Lynn wearing a kangaroo-fur ball gown of her own creation. Witty and wonderful, grand and garish, there’s no telling what this artist will upend next from her bag of crazed Australiana. There’s also no doubt it will charm and confront.
www.gbk.com.au/artists/joan-ross/joan-ross-enter-at-your-own-risk

Beastman

For years they’ve been creeping along Sydney walls and into galleries: elaborately patterned wilderbeasts in bold contrasting colours. You’ll recognise one by its mournful, teeth-rimmed open black mouth and the hypnotic symmetry of its eyes and patterned fur. It may seem to come from a time before language, but its remarkable expressiveness is all thanks to Beastman. Prolific and enigmatic in equal measure, Beastman is Brad Eastman, an artist, designer, photographer and founding editor of online art mag weAREtheIMAGEmakers. He cut his teeth in the skate scene and has been at the vanguard of a burgeoning Sydney street art scene ever since. Increasingly collected around the world, he can still be found regularly pounding the pavement, most recently to make a 3-story mural of the 4ZZZradio building in Brisbane.
www.beastman.com.au

Will French

An avid mechanist, Will French has cycled through the Tour de France in avery narrow gallery window in Redfern, powered a sewing machine with avery loud motorcycle engine in Chippendale and co-built a canoe with the purpose of (once it was happily floating in water) spinning it on the spot… Hisdesire to ‘go places’ means he’s won the Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Artists Travel Scholarship and recently completed a residency in Tokyo, Japan. Conceptually driven, French’s most recent work at Gallery 4A, Colourful Language, used naval ‘signal flags’ to disguise unutterable profanities that would have had viewers blushing, had they deciphered them.
www.willfrench.com.au/art.html

Troy Emery

Troy Emery isn’t the only ‘Wild Thing’ in his workspace – the place is littered with them! Completing his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Hobart has inspired a taxidermied penchant in Emery, who wrangles found (and then stuffed) objects into creatures as wild those once displayed in the dimly lit cabinets of nose-itchingly, dusty natural museums. In 2010 he held his first solo exhibition, Wild Things, after completing his Masters of Fine Art and was approached by Ian Dawson Gallery, Paddington, to become one of their represented artists.
troyemery.blogspot.com

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