A place to see a few photos and a few words about Sydney art exhibitions when you can't get there yourself. Or when you want to see photos of yourself on the internet.
when: Wednesday 7 July 2010, 6pm-8pm. Exhibition until 25 July.
artist talks: Sunday 25 July, 4pm.
cost: free.
where: Firstdraft Gallery. 116-118 Chalmers St, Surry Hills.
See the FB event by clicking here.
from Firstdraft Gallery:
Gallery 1 – ‘Colony Collapse’. Tessa Zettel and Karl Khoe.
‘Colony Collapse’ continues Tessa Zettel & Karl Khoe’s ongoing collaborative project to micro-farm pockets of the city, cannibalising leftover building materials (and other devices of protection/preservation) in the construction of makeshift experiments in urban self-sufficiency. At Firstdraft the artists investigate the possibilities for small-scale mobile honey production in the gallery and beyond, as they prepare to build a hybrid native beehive-food cart destined for Sydney Cove. With food crisis, suburban sprawl and the colony’s precarious histories (and futures) on their minds, Zettel & Khoe invite audiences in to smell the flowers and talk to the bees.
As part of the Firstdraft Emerging Artists Studio Program supported by Australia Council for the Arts
Gallery 2 – ‘Slide’. Bronwyn Carter.
Carter began this work with a specific question; what can Painting say as distinct from other media? The artist posits that the whole process of making a painting cannot be separated from image generating technologies that began with the invention of photography and continues with digital media. The paintings reflect, as well as critique, something about the sea of images which surround us, and specifically the collective hallucination of cinema. The source imagery is film stills /photography. In the artist’s palette there is a colour heightening and saturation, a drama of light and dark, and the paint is kept present; it is sometimes visceral, sometimes controlled; which draws attention to its use.
Gallery 3 – ‘How to draw sex, violence and death the Luke Thurgate way’. Luke Thurgate.
‘How to draw sex, violence and death the Luke Thurgate way’ is about public collaboration, interactivity, drawing and the nature of authenticity, reproduction and the graphic signature. The work invites the viewer to physically experience the production one of Thurgate’s drawings. Over the course of the exhibition it is hoped that viewers will collaboratively fill the blank surfaces over which the filmed drawings have been projected as a guide. The images themselves explore notions of masculinity, trauma and love. The drawings form part of an ongoing series of self-portraits in which exaggerated notions of masculine expression are played out. The participant becomes the means through which these notions find a permanent physical form.
Gallery 4 – ‘Twist’. Baden Pailthorpe.
‘Twist’ furthers Pailthorpe’s interest in video games as a subject matter. The video work explores the aesthetic anomalies in First-Person Shooter games (FPS) that are activated through glitches and by using cheats. Resisting the narrative drive of these games (where the player is the protagonist) through inaction, Pailthorpe found that the game falls into a state of perpetual regeneration. The graphics engines endlessly repeat their cinematic loops. Through this political act of stasis, resisting the game’s violent narrative pull reveals the subtle beauty of the game’s virtual architecture. Perpetual action is activated by inaction. Whereas the insatiable desire to continue killing leaves a true gamer in a carrot and stick scenario of always wanting more, the true path to satisfaction perhaps lies in resistance. In stopping to smell the proverbial, virtual roses, the performative potential of these virtual spaces emerges.