Staff Scholarship: Dr David Rosetzky
Staff Scholarship: David Rosetzky
Profile:
Lecturer:
Third year folio: Images and Connections (Art Major)
Image Cultures 2: The Visual Document
Domain: Identity and Culture
Project #4: After Palermo
After Palermo is a new series of double-exposure photographs featuring human figures visually meshed with natural forms and materials. Inspired by recent travel to his partner's ancestral homeland of Palermo. Rosetzky creates layered, intimate portraits by harnessing the decorative elements adorning the ornate facades and interiors synonymous with the Sicilian city. Theatrical tropes of baroque sculpture and architecture emerge organically through the artist’s investigation into the surrealist strategies of spontaneity, randomness and chance. Through this analogue process of overlaying photographic exposures, Rosetzky configures transient scenes that explore subconscious thresholds and the multi-faceted nature of identity.
The project was exhibited at Sutton Gallery from 27 July – 24 August, 2024.
Teaching Strategies:
An exhibition of After Palermo was held at a commercial gallery in Melbourne that represents David’s work in Australia. This provided invaluable insights for students, especially the Art Majors in graduate year who are shaping their careers. Several artists floor talks were held at the gallery with students and the commercial gallery system was outlined. Curatorially, the project also informs David’s involvement with the organisation and curation of the graduate exhibition – this year to be held at Carlisle Art Space in the St. Kilda Town Hall supported by the City of Port Phillip.
Biography:
For three decades, David Rosetzky’s lens-based artworks have articulated the manifold experiences of selfhood. Observing identity as that which is shaped by and understood through the framework of community and culture, his practice utilises photography, video, installation, sculpture, and performance to produce institutional-scale projects. In exploring notions of belonging, intimacy and desire through image, text, movement and language, his rigorous methodology often draws from oral, written and video testimony gathered through interviews with casts of performers, community members and fellow artists. Rosetzky has been the subject of over 40 solo exhibitions and 70 group exhibitions throughout Australia, Aotearoa, Asia, Europe and North America. Notably, his Portrait of Cate Blanchett (2008), commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, was exhibited in The Third ICP Triennial of Photography and Video at the International Centre for Photography (ICP) in New York, 2009. In 2013, David Rosetzky received a PhD in Visual Arts from Monash University, following which he was appointed Sessional Lecturer in the Master of Photography program at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) and Lecturer in the Bachelor of Photography program at Photography Studies College, Melbourne.