The Incinerator Art Award is Moonee Valley’s premier visual arts prize attracting artists from across Australia to respond to the Award’s call to action – art for social change. Throughout the month-long call for entries the gallery received a high number of submissions and the selection committee with Dr Kent Wilson (Senior Curator, La Trobe Art Institute), has shortlisted 22 works to be finalists.

In Musings we celebrate the personal significance of artmaking for artists within the Moonee Valley community.

Some artists in this exhibition create as an avenue for self-reflection; a way to process and ponder life experience, celebrate family connections, or better understand the inner workings of the mind. Others view creative practice as a way to intently observe the natural environment in order to contemplate nature, ecology and sustainable living. For others, art is synonymous with education, with art classes viewed as an opportunity to gain skills as well as foster community connections. At the core of all of the works in Musings is the belief that the process of making art elevates the activity of the mind and creates an internal, private space to reflect on art and life.

Silent Witness: A Window to the Past. is a powerful body of work, originally developed in collaboration with Melbourne Museum, that tells the stories of People and Country through the photographic portraiture of scar trees from Wotjobaluk Country by Gunditjmara Elder, and Moonee Valley resident, Uncle Jim Berg.

This series of artworks in The Billboard Project are about the journey of an iceberg. They are also a comment on global warming, and the impermanence of the landscape.