Pebble Botanica and (there will be a) New Garden Benedict Ernst Innovators 1 at Linden Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 10 April – 9 May 2010 The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. — Marcel Proust The perceived alterity of the East has long been a […]
The First Working Retrospective of the Fauxist International Curated by Vivian Ziherl Metro Arts Galleries, Brisbane 7–19 June 2010
Lazy Slum Tape Projects and Six_a Blindside, Melbourne 19–21 August 2010 The opening of Lazy Slum at Blindside coincided with the Nicholas Building’s annual open studio event. Lazy Slum, a collaboration between Melbourne collective Tape Projects and Hobart group Six_a was described by Blindside as a ‘cross-disciplinary experiment in what happens when you build a […]
Amongst other initiatives arising in the -current community-obsessed zeitgeist is the commencement of Melbourne’s own FreeSchool. This alternative form of pedagogy has distinct legacies and structures in different countries, springing from education movements that defied state (or church in the case of countries such as Spain at the turn of the twentieth century) institutionalised education […]
Here you are, standing on the edge of the precipice, feeling your blood thump against the abyss. Look at you, contemplating that awesome and terrible vastness. Friedrich would be proud. You stand here and you think: what could I say to you, Universe? Monkey! Monument! Heartbeat! Sunset! Who is receiving these vibrations, anyway? Which bit […]
The Public School is an autonomously organising direct-education project initiated in Los Angeles in 2007. Identified as ‘a school with no curriculum’, The Public School sessions are developed from the starting point of a class request posted to a website which then gathers a student body and, finally, a teacher. At the time of writing, […]
In recent months I have responded to two unusual project call-outs to meet with artists I did not know: one occurring in a tiny office at the Abbotsford Convent and another in my bed. As an artist who has sought to create my own encounters with strangers, I was curious to find out why these […]
It has become apparent that Artist-Run Initiatives (ARIs) in New South Wales are trying to exist in a climate where both state and local government are publicly pushing to increase the profile of their community and volunteer generated activity. Working in opposition to this, however, is pressure stemming from local government in the form of […]
DAMP, Big Pencil Drawing 2010, acrylic on timber, resin, vinyl and graphite on paper. Courtesy the artists. Photography: Matt Stanton
Do we sense patterns or impose them? Is it a compulsive human function to make order out of chaos? I have found myself creating a pattern. I’d note a thread of a concept, technique or reference that seemed to connect the works of Sean Bailey, with the installations of Nathan Gray — the colours, the […]
A small block of tofu makes inroads into an emerging discourse. Operating out of Tokyo since 1899, the Morinaga Company might be said to manufacture a fairly standard block of soya bean curd. The label on their prime-selling foodstuff — a firm, long-life block of the stuff — reads: ‘This revolutionary package locks out light, […]
‘Images proliferate. Am I wrong in being reminded of the printing of money in a period of wild inflation? Do we know what we are doing? Are we able to evaluate what we have done?’[^1] — Wright Morris, ‘In Our Image’ In August last year, I made my first ever trip to the Museum of […]
‘…But these langues that fragmented open up a multitude of lingwix can extend to a liquid form that is ever changing and not with surface, but open, closable, but with effort opennable again. Like with a loop of talking the words can sound like completely different words and once they do you can’t hear the […]
The cinematic works of the legendary New York filmmaker Jack Smith and the lesser known, but equally important, Brighton based filmmaker Jeff Keen, present us with two highly developed versions of the trash aesthetic. In his oft-cited appreciations of Maria Montez and Josef von Sternberg, Smith rails polemically against the hegemonic naturalism of both Hollywood […]
Jake Wotherspoon’s Opening Performance (2010) for Re/Gendered at Platform featured a creature, too hairy to be human but not hairy enough to be ape, reclining in a cabinet.[^1] With a derisive stare articulating the boredom and misery of the caged curiosity, its gaze was directed at the crowd and the cabinet beside it housing two […]
In Marina Abramović’s recent retrospective, The Artist is Present, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a naked man and woman stood facing each other in a doorway. As patrons were confronted with the challenge to come in close proximity to a naked stranger, they were simultaneously required to decide which anatomy was […]
Lately I’ve been having these visions. Glimpses. An outline, a figure — an icon. A ‘black’ bearded man brandishing a pistol. No ill premonition, rather the assured revelation of Anthony Martin Fernando. There’s not a lot we know about Fernando. He was a sailor, an engineer … a toymaker? He was Aboriginal, and also a […]
Koorie Heritage Trust, Melbourne, March 2010 Originally, Lyndal Jones’ country house was imported from Europe, more than 150 years ago, and reassembled in the regional Victorian town of Avoca. Jones discovered the property, which had been abandoned and had fallen into disrepair, purchased it and then remodelled it into an artist residence and project site […]
New York City, April 2010 Katie Holten is an Irish artist who often works with the environment to produce art. In late 2007, she was selected for a major commission to celebrate the 2009 centennial of the Grand Concourse, the primary artery of the Bronx, New York. She created Tree Museum and transformed the Grand […]
Ben Forster’s practice traces the limits of logic. He uses computers as the basis of his representation of systems of logic and rationality. Yet it is this rationality that Forster employs in his work to highlight the inconsistencies of this system. The young Canberra-based artist has taught a computer how to draw and has programmed […]
Office of Australia 23 January – 20 February, 2010 Box Copy, Brisbane Joseph Breikers of Boxcopy is also present David M. Thomas : How do you see a strategy such as institutional critique functioning within a space like Box Copy? Dirk Yates : For me the initial impetus for providing a critique about this small […]
In 2006, French artist Marie-Jeanne Hoffner undertook a residency at Monash University and it was during this period that she and Melbourne-based artist Stephen Garrett discovered an affinity in their approaches to making art. In the same year, Garrett in fact built part of Hoffner’s work for her exhibition Heimlich — What Belongs To The […]