STROBED

when: Opening night Thursday 9 September 2010, 6-8pm. Exhibitions continue until Sunday 26 September 2010.
cost: Free.
where: ESP Gallery, 228 Illawarra Road, Marrickville.

From ESP:

- click to enlarge -

We have three great artists to present to the inner west world next week. This is a fringe event, so put on your alternative hats and enjoy the exhibition. Here’s the details:

Dei El-Ayoubi: Begin
It all starts here. Lets Begin at the very beginning.
Conception, Gestation, Birth. Begin is an installation piece and a series of photographs that explore the physical experience of being in the womb. The images do not aspire to create meaning but to assault the senses. The spectator takes part and is involved in the drama; the spectator is a part of the collective memory of creation.

Michael Gray: +8GMT (CHINA DIPTYCHS)
Woo Sing and the Mirror
One day Woo Sing’s father brought home a mirror from the great city. Woo Sing had never seen a mirror before. It was hung in the room while he was out at play, so when he came in he did not understand what it was, but thought he saw another boy….
He spoke to the stranger in a very friendly way, but he received no reply. He laughed and waved his hand at the boy in the glass, who did the same thing, in exactly the same way…
China was the first time in my life I had experienced being the ‘subject’. I was photographed as much as I photographed.
Some of the photographers were the ‘serious’ kind, long lenses peering around corners. Some, with smaller point and shoot cameras walked up and gestured for me to pose for them. Sometimes, that’s how I worked too.
Unable to speak the language I blended into this mass ‘photography’, one in a million subjects/photographers operating with some unspoken barter system. I was a subject for others, others for me and China provided the backdrop. It’s a new ‘mass’ camera culture.
I felt more at ease in China as the ‘subject’ had a camera too. Before this experience I had never felt comfortable being the unsolicited photographer. Usually my attempts in Australia failed because I was too far away or I couldn’t engage the subject in a way that reproduced what first drew me too them.
Where Australia provides distance, China closes in.

Tim Andrew: Where’s my private jet
While dealing with the heavier, pessimistic anxieties and abjection about living and surviving in the world, I hope my work delights the viewer with bright, humorous, graphic themes and persistently entertaining titles. My private thought and feelings, often puerile, stupid and funny are expressed mostly through the image/object titles.
These titles are married to the work in ways that produce a sort of incongruence. Through reflection created by this incongruence and the intimate, exposing nature of my work, I hope the viewer is both repelled by the weirdness and horror of the objects and drawn in by the delicate, intimate and vulnerable sentiments attached to them. For me the severed arms in my work express very relate-able human feelings of impotence, powerlessness and mortality. I use a bright pallet to buoy the heaviness, with an uplifting sense of joy, optimism and fun. This I hope, creates a sense of conflict or ambivalence in the viewer which operates as a subtle analog for our greater emotional complexities. I think above all, my work reflects that despite our special differences, we’re all really more alike than not.
I suppose, the central concern of my work is really existential. I’m a white, single, middle class man. I have anxiety attacks and imagine the sensation of molecular incohesion, I have fantasies about Madonna and fear both that there is and isn’t a god. I obsess about fakeness, fear impotence and really want intimacy more than sex, but either would be good. I’m a humanist, I enjoy people and don’t mind sitting close to them on the bus. I often believe love is hormonal or not. I try to be sincere. Like everyone I’m kind of confused and fascinated lots of the time, I think this is where my work lives.

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