The subjects they know best

Canis Nugroho with her Young Scholars certificate and teacher Kobey Weir. 162089_02 Picture: STEWART CHAMBERS

By Cam Lucadou-Wells

Gleneagles Secondary College students’ latest soaring achievements could be said to be all in the mind.
First, there’s Canis Nugroho who has been selected in University of Melbourne’s young scholars program.
The Year 10 student has the chance to meet 699 like-minded chosen peers with leadership qualities and academic smarts during the program – named after the university’s former Vice-Chancellor Professor Kwong Lee Dow.
Canis is no stranger to success. He was one of 10 students to win a place on a recent student tour to Vietnam to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan.
Media student Sarah Said’s sassy three-minute film Internal Monologue has been shortlisted for Top Screen 2017.
Beautifully shot and full of wry humour and dry observations, the film features an opening quote from Frida Kahlo: “I am my own muse. I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to know better.”
In the self-written, directed, edited and performed film, Sarah chats to her slightly older self and finds out the “heartbreaking” news that there will be no more Instagram in 2019 – and realises she has a big forehead.
Year 12 art students Naomi Blakeley and Jimmy Nguyen, meanwhile, have been shortlisted for Top Arts 2017.
Naomi’s translucently turquoise work Gibigianna – The Play of Light is product of more than 50 individual resin forms.
The would-be interior designer experimented meticulously before mass-producing the works.
Jimmy’s illustration The Galactic Adventures of Spaceman is an intensely rendered maze of lines made with black fineliners.
It took many hours of detailed work, the promising illustrator said.
Both artworks face a final selection process for the Top Arts exhibition at Federation Square next year.