First off I have a major conflict of interest in this story because I am the secretary of the Melbourne Stencil Festival. And as the secretary I have a warped and biased perspective mixed with exhaustion. I don’t want to be spruiking for the festival or telling the inside story.
Melbourne Stencil Festival exhibition
I could try and report the facts: the winners, the speeches, how many people attended but I didn’t take notes. I know from the door prize raffle that there were over 200 people through the door before the speeches started. I don’t want to make my own speech here. I introduced all the speakers last night: the curator Tessa Yee, the Mayor of the City of Yarra Amanda Stone, Stencil Festival President Phil Hall and the representative from the judging panel Craig Kenny. Craig Kenny announced the award winners:
Emerging Artist Highly Commended
Ben Howe “Centipede”
John Koleszar “Big John”
2009 Emerging Artist Award
Boo “Our Lade of the Transparency”
Best in Show Highly Commended
Pslam “Once a… Always a…”
HaHa “Ned Kelly” & “Nicky Winmar”
2009 Best in Show
Civil “Playground”
I can’t remember all the details. I did take my camera, so here are a few photographs.
DrewFunk painting opening night
DrewFunk's wall the completed
HaHa, Phil Hall, Amanda Stone, Ben Howe, Boo and Craig Kenny
Boo, Avid Consuming
I hope that I will be able to write more about the stencil festival when I recover.
Black Mark 
October 15th, 2010 at 11:39 AM
[…] Wednesday night was also the opening of Sweet Streets exhibition on the top floor of Brunswick Street Gallery. It was part of their “Urban Art” series of exhibitions (see my review of previous exhibition in the series). Although Tessa Yee curated both the Sweets Streets exhibitions at 1000 Pound Bend and Brunswick Street Gallery the exhibitions are a distinctly different. Under the broader category of “urban art” this exhibition has more illustration, comic book, photography and stencil art. It is a broad category that includes everything from Heesco’s fantasy illustrations to Debs aerosol paintings. But the street was not far away, even in, Jo Waite’s paintings of four panel comic strips that showed a vision of Melbourne with Spanish instead of English graffiti in the background. Bandos Earthling made an appearance in costume, carrying a large blank speech bubble made of cardboard and posing for photographs (I’m meant to catch up with him sometime during the festival). There were also some small Ben Howe’s stencils at the foot of the stairs at Brunswick Street Gallery. Last year Howe was highly commended emerging artist in the 2009 Melbourne Stencil Festival’s award exhibition. […]