VERGE Collective was born when six emerging photography and new media artists came together to bring to life their vision of an innovative and unique collaborative platform. Their goal was to initiate and implement professional and artistic development opportunities tailored to their lives as women, as they juggle work and family commitments, all the while striving to expand their creative businesses.
Vanessa Bertagnole, Julia Scott Green, Christine Ko, Lisa Kurtz, Tamara Whyte and Emma Wright achieved the double accomplishment of re-invigorating their own creative practices and the Brisbane arts scene when they banded together to become VERGE.
Their collaborative and supportive ethos breathes an authentic sense of community and safety into their practice, building a symbolic and protean space where they can take risks and grow, both artistically and personally. Learning from each other, they can push their collective and individual work into new territories, experimenting with unfamiliar media, unusual combinations, new canvases, and unique spaces.
Proof of their innovative spirit and breadth of experimentation lies in the diversity of their collective and individual CV, which has been highly awarded. In 2018, they were finalists in the CLIP Landscape awards and received a Highly Commended in the Clayton Utz awards. Their collective CV of exhibitions, awards, and residencies is impressive https://www.vergecollective.com.au/about.
Their most recent, and to my mind, most exciting projects were their 2018 Brisbane Super Natural Exhibition (Nov-Dec 2018), at Vacant Assembly, and their Depth of Field residency in Boonah.
Depth of Field pushed the artists far beyond their comfort zones, as they were encouraged to respond intimately to their physical surroundings in the Scenic Rim, creating site-specific, interactive mixed media installations, projections, and performances. Through their interaction with their environment, the ladies of VERGE investigated and led the audience to examine the rural-urban dichotomy of regional Australia and its implications for the human and natural worlds. The work was both artistically and physically challenging as they sought creative and thought-provoking ways to express the environment in their pieces.
Super Natural was also a study of the tensions in the natural and urban worlds. Through installations, photography, and videos, VERGE sifted through the underlying dissonance that arises from “the urbanite ambivalence to the ‘natural’ world,” drawing out whispers of the eerie and unfamiliar that lies between the cracks in our relationship with the landscape. The result is indeed an eerie, uncomfortable, yet magical and fascinating experience as you wander through the spaces of Vacant Assembly, noticing, perhaps for the first time, the discrepancies between our interpretations of the landscape, and its reality.
VERGE bring with them a promise of renewed energy and community spirit in the Brisbane art world, continuing their innovative and pertinent ventures into social tensions and relationships. They show us the beautiful, the disconcerting, and the disarming in their commentary on our interactions with the world.