About
Georgia Saxelby is an interdisciplinary artist born in Sydney and based in Los Angeles. Working across sculpture, installation, video, and architectural intervention, her practice explores how institutional architecture encodes cultural values and reinforces hierarchies. She approaches these structures as haunted cultural fictions, exposing their porous and unstable qualities, ripe for reinvention. Her work draws from speculative fiction, feminist spatial practice, queer theory, and architectural critique. From creating new ornamental languages for neoclassical facades to staging alternative rituals in national monuments, her work seeks to create slippages between reality and fiction in order to upturn hierarchies, glitch rational time and space, and conjure expansive modes of seeing.
Saxelby’s work has exhibited internationally, including at the Hirshhorn Museum, The Phillips Collection, American University Museum, Smithsonian Arts & Industries Building, and the Embassy of Australia, all in Washington, D.C.; Miller Institute for Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh; Samstag Museum, Adelaide; Artspace, Sydney; and the 2022 Sydney Biennale Art After Dark program, Sydney. She has been awarded the Pittsburgh Glass Center Artist Residency (2023-24), Halcyon Arts Lab Artist Residency in Washington, D.C. (2018-19), Australia Council for the Arts Individual Project Grant (2024, 2022, 2019), Marten Bequest Scholarship (2021), Samstag Scholarship (2019), and was a Finalist in the New South Wales Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship (2019). Her work has been featured in Forbes, BBC News, Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, and Fox5 National News. Saxelby holds a Master of Fine Arts from Carnegie Mellon University (2024), where she received the premier scholarship, and has worked with Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Studio Daniel Libeskind as an architectural writer.
RECENT EXHIBITIONS
October 4, 2024 - January 6, 2025 | Smash the ceiling, floor, and walls; take the broken shards and blow them back at the Pittsburgh Glass Center Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA
March 16 - April 7, 2024 | Second Degree Vision, group exhibition at the Miller Institute of Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh, PA
10 September - 11 December, 2022 | Make-Believe with Devan Shimoyama | American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Washington, DC
February 28 - September 18, 2020 | 2020 Adelaide//International at the Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide, Australia.
July 9 - October 31, 2019 | Lullaby, solo exhibition at the Embassy of Australia, Washington, DC
February 6 - March 2, 2019 | Nevertheless, She Persisted, Artereal Gallery, Sydney
November 15 - December 16, 2018 | NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship Exhibition, Artspace, Sydney
September 28 - October 3, 2018 | Freedman Foundation Traveling Scholarship Exhibition, UNSW Galleries, Sydney
June 1 - July 1, 2018 | To Future Women, IA&A at Hillyer gallery, Washington, DC
June 7 - 10, 2018 | To Future Women, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC
June 22 - 24, 2018 | To Future Women, By The People, Smithsonian Arts & Industries Building, Washington, DC
January 21 - February 20, 2018 | To Future Women, The Phillips Collection museum, Washington, DC
AWARDS
2024 | Creative Australia Individual Project Grant
2024 | The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO For Creative Inquiry Grant
2023-24 | Pittsburgh Glass Center Artist Residency
2022 | Australia Council for the Arts Individual Project Grant
2021 | Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship | Australia
2019 | Regina and Marlin Miller Master of Fine Arts Fellowship | Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA
2019 | Artist Residency Fellowship | Corcoran School of the Arts & Design, George Washington University, Washington DC
2018 | Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship | Samstag Museum of Art, Adelaide, Australia
2018 | NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship (Finalist) | CreateNSW, Sydney
2018 | Australia Council for the Arts Career Development Grant | To Future Women, Washington DC
2018 | Visiting Scholar | Architecture, Culture, Spirituality Department, Catholic University of America, Washington DC
2017-18 | Artist Residency Fellowship | Halcyon Arts Lab, Halcyon House, Washington DC
2017 | Artist Residency Fellowship | The Wassaic Project, Wassaic, New York
2017 | Presenter | 9th International Architecture, Culture & Spirituality Symposium, Maine, USA
2017 | Ian Potter Cultural Trust Grant, Australia
2017 | Copyright Fund Ignite Career Grant, Australia
2016 | Freedman Foundation Traveling Scholarship, Australia
2016 | 64th Blake Prize (Finalist) | The Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Sydney
2015 | Artist Residency Fellowship | Culture at Work: Art & Science Research Institute, Sydney
2014 | The Chroma Prize for Innovation in Painting | Graduating Award, National Art School, Sydney
2014 | The Studio W Exhibition Prize for Overall Achievement | Graduating Award, National Art School, Sydney
2014 | University Prize for Art History & Theory | Graduating Award, National Art School, Sydney
2012 | Sydney Students Speak Finalist | Art History & Theory Pubic Speaking Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Works held in The Phillips Collection Archives, Washington, D.C. and in private collections in New York, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Pittsburgh, Berlin, Sydney and Melbourne.