Cult

2008-10-08T03:22:00.000-07:00

From the 'Bridge Road Projects' blog 2007:

Paper/Rock/Scissors
West Space
15-19 Anthony St Melbourne
July 19 – August 11 2007
Review by Tai Snaith

Curated as a group effort by the 10 or so committee members of West Space, this group show is a perfect example of successful democratic process and a playful interpretation of a somewhat literal curatorial premise of three inanimate objects.

Each committee member was asked to suggest a couple of artists whose work they thought would fit well with either rock paper or scissors as a starting point. The committee then employed a casual voting system to chose the final twelve artists in the show. One of the impressive and interesting aspects of the final result is that these chosen artists range not only across genres and mediums but also across generations to create a diverse yet unified result.
In the main gallery space the viewer encounters a somewhat sparse and considered group of objects responding to each theme. Louise Hubbard’s untitled chair work sits quietly by the entrance with a pair of nail scissors skewered precisely and almost humorously through the centre of the 60’s (after Kosuth?) yellow plastic seat. Along the far wall leans Peter Burke’s wire framed text pieces, reminiscent of both newspaper headlines outside the corner milk-bar and word games reiterating the 3 word schema of rock paper scissors in a literal yet somewhat witty tabloid repartee around the prompt ‘paper.’ Joining these two works in the main space are Ash Keating’s rocks, melted black plastic lumps of waste retrieved from the Holden factory floor, arranged in a ritualistic ring with an almost totemic pile in the centre, suggesting that most things, even the humble rock these days is made from petro chemicals.

Along the wall leading to the second space are five mounted paper based works; four exquisite-corpse-esque collaborative collages responding to paper by Damiano Bertoli and Tony Garifalakis and one pencil drawing by James Lynch. Here we see the re-visited themes of Superstudio’s Continuous Moment and the occult reversed and re-interreted in the Bertoli/Garafilakis works and in the middle Lynch’s drawing depicting a complex yet painstakingly concise depiction of scissors cutting up sets within sets, hinting at the tangled web of deconstructing the self and some of the tiniest grey lead writing known to man.

The Third room, dubbed the Rock room, shows the angry smashed cardboard instruments of Jarrad Kennedy chucked in the corner comically in front of Lyndal Walker’s photographic series of faux female rock stars hung like posters on a teenagers wall and opposite Jessie Anguin’s printed hardcover books of ‘I shot Ricky Swallow’ complete with a little spot to sit down and read them in peace. This room illustrates how old work can be given a new lease of life when re-arranged amongst fitting neighbours and tied together with a good strong theme.

Finally, the small room at the back of West Space houses the more sentimental and obsessive works in the show. Nicholas Jones’ ‘The Age 1903’ from 2006 is a meticulously carved copy of a 100 year old large format compendium of the Age. Sitting on a low wooden pew rather than a plinth, this work addresses our human attachment to paper in the book form and questions whether scissors improve or destroy it as an object. Opposite, Elizabeth Gower’s three pre-existing works using junk mail catalogue images of scissors cut and arranged carefully on drafting film sit silently and wisely as a well- rehearsed homage to the obsessive marriage of scissors and paper and the puzzling commitment to repetition and arrangement in her practise. Masters student Andew Huxton’s paper ship sailing on a paper sea is the final flat hand in the game of rock paper scissors at West Space, the silent winner of a democratic process of decision making, a simple game where no-one can argue with the result.

2008-10-08T03:12:00.001-07:00

From the 'Bridge Road Projects' blog 2007:

ANDREW ATCHISON
ISLAND DRAWING
TCB art inc. June 6 - ? 2007
Review by Alex Martinis Roe

Feedback, Static and the Malfunctioning TARDIS

Andrew Atchison’s Island Drawing does some new work with the artform of drawing and self-reflexively gives us a four dimensional discussion of drawing as content. This Island Drawing is a map of Atchison’s spatial experience and memory of an island he visited on holiday. Multi-media elements cluster on the floor, forming an island to contemplate from a distant shore. On an island of pot plant vegetation, two wood veneer monitors sit facing away from each other. Each displays a low-fi video of the island landscape.

LINE: The 1st Dimension: Drawing as diagramatic

Drawing can be seen as similar to mapping. Rather than being defined by a use of materials, it is perhaps more interesting to look at drawing practice as that of notation. Mark making in response to sensory perception is the traditional model of what constitutes drawing as a particular domain of artistic research. Atchison adapts this idea of mark making in order to frame his investigation within ‘drawing language’. The resulting notations of his spatial/temporal understanding have an immediacy that is distinctly intuitive. Although observational, this drawing has no claims to objective representation. The video elements clearly position us behind the eye of the artist. The movement of the camera follows the orientation of the artist’s body. One of the Nature Videos is not only a notation: it describes the artist’s body exploring the island’s geography. The isolation of the landform enforces a cyclical exploration of its shores. One always ends up at the same point of beginning. Atchison stands at the centre of the island and turns 360 degrees holding the camera at eye height. The video loops continuously so there is no narrative beginning or end to the island’s perimeter. This could be seen as an extension on the idea that drawing reflects the world, pointing out that drawing and what it describes are always engaged in an inseparable feedback.

SHAPE: The 2nd Dimension: Drawing methodologies as content

On the wall there is what Atchison calls a TV drawing of the island. Wood veneer contact covers a foamcore ‘TV’ and inside is a drawing of the Island surrounded by mirrors reflecting the image endlessly within this small space. The edge of the drawing repeated recalls the division of the night sky in a star chart format. Little stars drawn around the island deepen the sense of there being a planetarium within the TV. This drawing inside the TV is made using a well-known formula. Atchison revives the primary school art project where you colour paper in rainbow crayons, paint it black and then scratch out a multicoloured line drawing. The TV drawing gives us this formula as stars waiting to be illuminated out of a night sky. Recalling a magical moment in childhood, this drawing immortalises the memory of the island holiday as a new celestial body. The stars are like dots and the island a new join-the-dots constellation. Here is the new TV Zodiac!

DEPTH: The 3rd Dimension: Drawing as memory.

TV Drawing is a discussion of TV broadcasting as a notational drawing practice and also a site of collective memory. Are our memories framed like TV programs and vice versa? Memories play in our heads on a loop: always the same snippet. Repeating out of context they distort becoming our own immortalised fables. TV can be seen as our culture’s production of its own distorted memory. What happened yesterday is broadcast today via a reductive snippet: framed, partial, discoloured/hypercoloured. The island is foregrounded via the loop and the star constellation as an isolated realm. The rugged landscape and blustering audio track of the wind is hauntingly different to our colonised holiday locations. This uncanny otherworld that Atchison has drawn is parallel to the de-contextualised realm of memory.

TIME: The 4th Dimension: A new appreciation of the static as temporal.

‘A homemade TV work, for gazing at but without sound or movement.’[1]
Atchison’s drawings give us insight into notational practices (whether that be drawing, television or memories of a summer holiday) as a kind of TARDIS.[2] Like Doctor Who’s vehicle for space/time exploration Atchison’s wood veneer TV is malfunctioning. It begs that we look deeper into the static and find a new constellation of stars in a formation which recalls our island of looped memories.
Alex Martinis Roe 2007

[1] Artist’s statement
[2] The TARDIS is a time machine and spaceship in the BBC’s ‘Doctor Who’. It is an acronym for ‘Time and Relative Dimensions in Space’ (which coincidently sounds like a futurist description of drawing). One can be transported to any point in time and space on board the TARDIS. Its interior is much larger than its exterior, which can blend in with its environment. Doctor Who’s TARDIS was a damaged and stolen model which suffered from malfunctions.

2007-12-16T00:35:00.000-08:00

1:1 - Beth Arnold
Victoria Park Gallery
29 Nov- 15 Dec 2007

Investigating urban space and its temporal changes and movements, Beth Arnold’s 1:1 is a meticulous reinterpretation and reconstruction of an outdoor concrete environment. Featuring plaster casts of discarded objects amidst photographed sections of pavement and rubble, the installation, all sectioned into a highly analytic floor grid, complements the rear space of Victoria Park Gallery. A meditative look at the contemporary landscape, 1:1 is a poetic contemplation of the inherent complexities within our inner-city environment, where discarded and forgotten objects lose their initial purposes and shift through space as debris, still physically present, yet drifting into the spaces between human-defined usefulness.

2007-11-28T02:42:00.001-08:00

THIS WEEK:


Conical Inc. proudly presents:

In Anticipation Of A Future Bright
Sean Bacon (NSW)
Gallery

Intersection (Part 2)
Katie Lee & Dean Linguey
Enclosure

1 - 22 December
Opening this Friday 30 November at 6pm

More information coming soon on:
www.conical.org.au/exhibitions_fs.html

Conical Inc.
Upstairs 3 Rochester St
Fitzroy Victoria
Australia 3065
T: 03 9415 6958
E: info@conical.org.au
W: www.conical.org.au

2007-09-18T18:57:00.000-07:00

Sean Rafferty
Projection: Bleach
Kings ARI, level 1/171 King St, Melbourne 3000
Wed - Fri 3pm-6pm, Sat 12pm-6pm

The spaces we inhabit, their form, functionality and presence are examined in ‘Projection: Bleach’, the latest of Sydney artist Sean Rafferty’s ‘Projection’ series, at Kings ARI. This large-scale installation of cardboard and timber artworks, resembling a suburban home in construction, ethereally implies an absence of presence. The cardboard panels feature images of unfinished brick-veneer homes; faint pictures of confined spaces now empty, yet soon to be filled with sentiment, all stenciled onto the boards by a process of sun bleaching. These very images exist as a by-product of the sunrays’ absence from their contours, an extended musing upon the thought of a new intangible form that comes with nonappearance, much like the eerie qualities of a ghost-town. Vacated Home Theatre presents the viewer with an empty cardboard room, its walls embedded with indistinct shadows of what would most commonly feature in a domestic ‘television room’: a couch and lampshade. These shadows represent a symbolic trace of the television’s ‘projection’ upon the space in which it resides. Sean Rafferty’s ‘Projection: Bleach’ is a thought-provoking investigation of space, place and the environments of the everyday.

2007-08-07T18:28:00.000-07:00

THIS WEEK:

Funny Ha Ha

Roy Ananda
Jamie Boys
Jen Cabraja
Jess Johnson

August 10– September 1 2007
Opens Friday August 10, 6pm

The Narrows,
2/141 Flinders Lane, Melbourne AUS Funny Ha Ha brings together four artists who are unabashed fans of comic culture. As artists they have chosen to probe the obsessions of their youth that they are just too stubborn and eternally adolescent to outgrow. Together they have thrown up a bizarro landscape blending biomorphic characters and speech sampled from contemporary art mags and comic book zines. Creating an unruly yet playful terrain where perhaps all art could be read as thwarted comics anyway?

2007-08-02T05:28:00.000-07:00

THIS WEEK:

"Conical Inc. presents the final performance of:

Practical Illustrations of Body Configurations in Architecture
Alex Martinis Roe

This Saturday August 4 at 2pm
Exhibition is open this Thursday & Friday 12 - 6pm, Saturday 12 - 5pm

See www.conical.org.au/exhibitions_fs.html for more information."

2007-07-06T18:10:00.000-07:00

Matthew Bradley

Storm Machine

Curated by Jeff Khan

Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces

22 June 2007 - 21 July 2007

Contemporary culture has done much to imply an impending sinister quality within mechanistic modes of transport. From 1960’s biker films to the forecasted auto-delinquency of Mad Max (1979), the symbiotic vehicle-to-human relationship of motor transport has been surreptitiously assessed and critiqued numerous times within recent history, and truly, the masculinity within these fabricated (often filmic) cultures is overt. Indeed this may fall in line with the cultural cliché surrounding the threat of the machine or artificial intelligence, but in particular, the motor vehicle may offer new concerns with regard to its potential for providing its user with superhuman powers (by means of speed and force) as well as the psychological implications of unbalanced interdependency that underlie the relationship of user and vehicle.

This notion of a gasoline-driven dystopia is investigated in Matthew Bradley’s idiosyncratic exhibition entitled Storm Machine. The show’s penultimate work, a giant true-scale model of a futuristic Monster Bike designed by the artist, holds a savage presence over the space. A mix of gruff and gritty metal with precise engineering and ingenuity, Monster Bike encapsulates perfectly the iconography of a fierce, masculine mechanistic vehicle. The bike leans in static disuse against the gallery wall, yet this is a brooding stillness, and implies the expected arrival of a human other to complete the ominous and destructive symbiosis.

Beside the Monster Bike the viewer is presented with an insight into the vehicle’s construction, by way of the artist’s computer-generated plans for the construction of the model, truly articulating the paradoxical delicacy surrounding the intricate engineering of this and other destructive vehicles. This is similarly demonstrated in Air Gun, an impressively produced pneumatic gun hung beside two television screens that display video works serving to quirkily demonstrate its construction. Bradley’s emphasis on process not only serves to create a certain indistinctiveness between artwork and artwork-in-progress, but it is this documentative approach that instigates a level of objectivity, if even passivity regarding the ethics of man and machine. The artist, much like a machine himself, merely builds and observes, without injecting any sense of pathos or socio-political stance into his creations.

Fascinating in its originality whilst all the while ambiguous in its ideological position, Matthew Bradley’s Storm Machine is a scrupulous investigation into the cultural mythologies surrounding the machine’s prophesized role in the initiation of a dystopic society.

2007-06-20T23:33:00.000-07:00

Increase Your Uncertainty - A Constructed World
2 June - 26 July 2007
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art

A Constructed World, Ecstatic Torino, 2004, video still
[sourced from: http://www.accaonline.org.au]

Interactivity, collaboration, and their immanent conflicts are currently at play in the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, with the first major survey for A Constructed World, the artistic partnership of Melbourne artists Geoff Lowe and Jacqueline Riva. ACCA's gratuitously bold architectural structure is indeed a space of substantial difference to those ACW are more akin to exhibit within, yet the building’s overbearingly obese white-washed walls surprisingly complement the quirky and inviting artworks intriguingly well.

Upon entering the space, the viewer is immediately confronted with a work that embraces blatant interactivity. Change Platform is a circular gazebo-esque construction filled with a welcoming array of pillows, colouring books, stools and a guitar, all the while emblazoned with the oxymoronically didactic statement of democracy: “It’s all about love you fucking cunt.” Further into the gallery-space a makeshift windowless room has been assembled. Its entry and exit doors bluntly padlocked, the viewer may experience the interior of this brusquely built structure only within two certain days of the week, furthermore under the obligation of signing a legally-binding Social Contract, specifying a pledge to uphold strict confidentiality as to what has been witnessed within the space for “six calendar months” thereafter. An artistic statement that is both adamant and amusing, The Social Contract sees A Constructed World crudely countering critiques of their democratic collectivism by means of superimposing a forceful level of restriction upon their audience.

It is precisely this intrinsic investigation of collectivity that creates a sense of cohesion in what seems to be a manically disparate array of work. Relational aesthetics, perturbed notions of an artwork’s resolution, and the ominous push/pull of art versus non-art are all present within Increase Your Uncertainty, yet the breadth of trans-media and trans-conceptual exploration by no means negates the singularity of ACW’s practice. It is an evolving series of works, however, one that is fascinatingly consistent in its essential elements of practical inquiry. One such example of this evolution is the collaboration’s ongoing extensions of their Ecstatic Torino Project. Initially merely a cheaply constructed video of the two dancing ecstatically after their sincere joy of finding an apartment, its idiosyncratic imagery (that includes Jacqueline Riva dancing naked whilst covered with Post-It notes and Geoff Lowe dressed in a suit waving two large sheets of paper scrawled with the slogans ‘Stay in groups’ and ‘No need to be great’), has been revisited numerous times. Notable examples include the tacky appropriation by a Brazilian choreographer, as well as the most recent, Truck Dance, a performance in conjunction with Increase Your Uncertainty that featured two artists mimicking A Constructed World’s Ecstatic Torino dance publicly on the back of a truck throughout dispersed locations within Melbourne.

Since their formation in 1993, A Constructed World have presented an ongoing practice that is essentially thought-provoking in its levels of engagement. The complexities of their work are too often overlooked merely for a superficial assessment of their democracy as a ‘novelty’, yet it is this embrace of collectivity and the consequent range of artists and minds involved with their projects that makes the work of ACW such a diverse boiling-pot of thoughts, concepts and visual stimuli.

2007-06-17T23:38:00.000-07:00

OPENING THIS WEEK:

Ocular Lab Inc.

31 Pearson St., West Brunswick 3055
(map ref 29 7-D)
email: ocularlab@gmail.com
www.ocularlabinc.com
Exhibition open Sat-Sun 1-5pm
By appointment t:03 9380 9184

MASATO TAKASAKA

I LIKE MY OLD STUFF BETTER THAN YOUR NEW STUFF (MORE PROG ROCK SCULPTURES FROM THE 5TH DIMENSION)

23 JUNE - 1 JULY 2007

OPENING DRINKS SAT JUNE 23 3-5PM

2007-06-06T18:11:00.000-07:00

THIS WEEK

MELBOURNE OPERATIC

VIDEO ART SCREENING

8PM
TUES 12 JUNE
LOOP BAR, 23 MEYERS PL

FREE ENTRY

"Melbourne Operatic is a selection of recent video works infused with a sense of humour and a touch of melodrama. Using themselves as readily available subjects in their work, these artists can dramatise their own lives and surroundings, or insert themselves into a TV or movie inspired form of heightened existence.

Featuring: Dominic Redfern; Anastasia Klose; Ross Coulter; Kate
Robertson & Michael Ciavarella

This program of four short video pieces moves from the mundane to surreal, with a pervading sense of unease balanced by moments of oddball comedy and pop soundtracks.

Curated by Rosemary Forde for Pilot projects, Melbourne Operatic is currently on exhibition at Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts, New Zealand.
This is the only Melbourne screening of the program.
Program runs for 25mins."

2007-05-30T06:44:00.000-07:00

Raise High the Roofbeams
8th May 2007 – 19th May 2007
Bus Gallery (in association with Firstdraft Sydney)

Australia’s numerous artist-run initiatives (ARI’s) are without doubt an irreplaceable fixture of the local cultural community. In celebratory acknowledgement of this fact, Victorian ARI’s are currently coalescing in a collaborative season of exhibitions entitled Making Space. Ratifying the festival’s emphasis on the communal network, Melbourne space Bus has extended an invitation to interstate ARI’s excluded from Making Space to exhibit in a Melbourne locale. With an exhibition featuring increasingly popular artists Sean Rafferty, Michaela Gleave and Camille Serisier, renowned Sydney initiative and recipient of the aforementioned invitation, Firstdraft, is creating strong impressions on visitors to their southern counterpart.

Camille Serisier presents a quirky juxtaposition of the natural environment with human manufactured materials titled: My Big Baby Bear. The images of a large grizzly-bear as well as forestry and wilderness are stylistically hand-drawn on visibly ‘man-made’ torn paper and cardboard. The artist’s sentiment is neither sinister nor passive, but a sophisticated work of calm ambiguity. Playful in its presentation, the work of Serisier immediately engages its viewers with its undeniably appealing aesthetic, and then furthermore propagates a mood of curiosity and perhaps empathy towards the artist’s character of the 'Big Baby Bear'. One can’t help but be reminded of current impending environmental concerns.

Sean Rafferty’s Projection Standee Manual Instruction is a crafty play on functionality and the artistic process. With a series of white cardboard box constructions all hung to tactfully resemble the artist’s canvas, Rafferty neatly cuts into, illustrates onto, and arranges his meticulous forms in order to instruct his audiences regarding the construction of a viewing booth intended for video art projections. It is however art about art; and although meditated, considered and executed in a manner that is both thoughtful and sophisticated, any hope within the viewer of an explosion of meaning will inevitably be countered by the actuality of an implosion of self-indulgence. Rafferty’s work is an intrinsic reminder of art’s self-destructive counter-productivity in the event of becoming too engaged with its own methods of practice.

Contributing to the disparate array of themes within Firstdraft’s offering to Melbourne audiences, the black and white photographic work of Penelope Benton is almost neo-feminist in its treatment of the male-gaze. Entitled Mini Mechanics, the work consists of three digital prints, stylised in a black and white aesthetic that draws to mind burlesque vaudeville. In each photograph are leather-clad sexualised women posing amongst an old fashioned automobile in a mechanic’s garage. Indeed a vocal critique of masculine iconography and its derogatory assumptions of women.

While the Making Space festival presents the work of emerging artists already quite familiar in Victorian spaces, Bus have proved themselves a hot-spot with the inclusion of interstate artists making a mark in other Australian capital cities. Raise High The Roofbeams is a commendable effort, brought to Melbourne by one of Sydney’s most well established artist-run initiatives, indeed refreshing in a scene that too often can seem congested by its own cultural introversion.