The Canvas Project is an exciting new Sydney-based interview program devoted to giving emerging artists a voice, showcasing Sydney’s artistic talent.

In our first season of episodes, we uncover fresh emerging talent within the Sydney arts scene. We give Sydney artists—visual artists, musicians, designers, sculptors, and everything in between—a means to bring their work to a wider audience, while also showing Sydneysiders what’s happening in their arts scene. By providing a platform for artists to broaden their viewership, we foster the vital relationship between artists and audiences that is essential for any art community to survive. We bring the artists to you, and we bring you to the artists.

We aim to liberate art from the stuffy pretences of high culture and bring a wider variety of creative work to a new generation of art lovers. We hope that through this project we provide audiences with a glimpse into the hidden wonders of the Sydney arts scene, and showcase the rich diversity of culture that Sydney has to offer.

Development

The idea for The Canvas Project hatched in early 2011 by producer Mario Brce and associate producer Mitchell Lagos, both media students at Macquarie University, when they identified the need for a more open and accessible dialogue between artists and audiences in Sydney.

The inspiration for the project was found on the streets of Sydney, Brce describes walking down George Street at night and being enthralled by the experimentation and creativity of the buskers and artists on the sidewalk, ‘All of this local stuff was what I always thought was far more exciting that what’s on television’. The next logical step was to bring this excitement to a medium that would connect people to their local arts community.

With lots of vision and not much else Brce and Lagos took the idea to David Koumans, now the executive producer, who enriched the project not only financially but with his experience and familiarity with the Sydney art world, ‘I wanted to give young and emerging artists of all genres a chance to say something, anything, in an uninhibited forum.’

The formation of the rest of the team happened organically through outreaches into university campuses and online networking. The team is mainly composed of media and arts students and graduates, attracted by the opportunity to further grow the arts community in Sydney and gain experience in addition to their tertiary studies and experience portfolios.

The Canvas Project aims to reach a wide audience on a large scale platform, but this is balanced by a personal and intimate interest in the arts. Lagos speaks for The Canvas Project as whole when he says that ‘to be able to create a widely accessible platform where a lot of different creative people can come together and be noticed really excites me.’