STROBED
a calendar for emerging artist exhibition openings in sydney + a few exhibition reviews
Underbelly Arts [Kensington Street]
when: Underbelly Arts runs from 8-17 July 2010. Lab Saturday is 10 July 2010 and The Festival (ticketed) is Saturday 17 July 2010.
cost: Public tours throughout the Lab are FREE. The Festival on Saturday July 17 is a ticketed event. By purchasing a ticket you will be invited to view work throughout the afternoon and evening across a range of spaces along and around a closed Kensington St. Tickets are $18/$22+bf presale.
where: The Lab – FraserStudios, 10-14, Kensington St, Chippendale. Lab Saturday - The Clare Hotel, 20 Broadway Ultimo (on the cnr of Broadway and Kensington St).
From Underbelly Arts:
Underbelly Arts: Public Lab + Festival is back in 2010 with a new home in Chippendale. From July 8 – 17, in various spaces next to the site of the old Carlton United Brewery on Broadway in Chippendale, over 100 of Sydney’s most exciting, experimental and emerging artists, will develop works and performances that will be presented on Saturday July 17 at the ticketed Underbelly Arts Festival.
Part fringe festival, part band-camp; this is your chance to get behind the scenes of art in the making.
From creating pop-up gallery spaces along Kensington Street to transforming the Clare Hotel into a theatre, Underbelly Arts Lab + Festival will offer a rare opportunity for people to scratch the surface of Sydney and discover some of the art and ideas that are ripe in warehouses, bedrooms and makeshift spaces throughout the city. Expect interactive installations, a DIY 3D film project, brutal 1900s street dance, voyeuristic engagement with the online world, random performances by a mass a cappella choir and much more!
In the lead up to the Festival, the public can get behind the scenes of the creative process with daily tours of Fraser Studios and even get involved by attending Project Participation Sessions for artworks that require public input.
On July 10, the Lab Saturday Program will take place from 2-7pm, putting artist, audience and process under the microscope.
Just 5 minutes walk from Central Station, Underbelly Public Arts Lab + Festival will take place in the thriving arts precinct around Chippendale.
See www.underbellyarts.com.au for details of the Underbelly Arts Public Lab Tours, Project Participation Sessions and updates for the Lab Saturday Program.
Tickets to Underbelly Arts Festival are strictly limited so don’t miss your chance to let Sydney’s creative underbelly seize your imagination.
HEADGEAR [Mils Gallery]
when: Opening night Wednesday 7 July 2010, 6-8pm. Exhibition continues until Sunday 11 July 2010.
cost: Free.
where: Mils Gallery, 15 Randle Street, Surry Hills.
From Mils Gallery:
18 artists were asked to make a mask each – this is their show.
Participating artists include:
Ann Thomson, Andy Townsend + Suzie Bleach, Huw Lewis, Adriano Rosselli, Bird Hat, Mim Fluhrer, Leah Fraser, Raffaello Rosselli, Tom Savill, Kristi Arnold, Joe Purtle, Todd Fuller, Harrie Fasher, Des Wagner, Ro Murray, Dunch and Bonno, Harry Townsend, Roman Stachurski.
Petrina Hicks + Maleonn [Stils]
when: Wednesday 7 July 2010, 6pm-8pm. Exhibition until 7 August.
cost: free.
where: Stills Gallery. 36 Gosbell Street, Paddington.
Petrina Hicks – Every Rose Has Its Thorn
Petrina Hicks is adept at using the seductive and glossy language of commercial photography to create works that probe the false promises of perfection.
Every Rose Has Its Thorn, is a precursor to a larger exhibition to be held in early 2011. The works have been created during a number of overseas residencies that became possible after winning the ABN AMRO Emerging Artist Award in 2008 with the unsettling image Lambswool.
In a time when so much fine art photography embraces the banal and anti-aesthetic as a distancing device from ever-seductive commercial imagery, Hicks has taken a radically alternative approach. She seeks to seduce.
Inspired by the overt lushness and tangible quality of Baroque painting and continuing a preoccupation with the aesthetics of advertising, Hicks explores the high and low art of persuasion. As if to understand the mechanics of this art she pulls it apart, extracting, classifying and itemising elements of visual seduction. Perfect pink roses, bunches of grapes, fluffy white kittens, and stone statues of an idealised human form, reappear as Hicks distils recurring motifs, singles-out illusory devises and over-saturates symbolism. It is seduction on steroids.
As if removed from their original placement such as in an historic still life or TV commercial, these usually loaded figures and objects take on an unnerving ambiguity. They are full to the brim with empty promise, deliberately absent of meaning in their context-less, slogan-free state. Using solid-colour backgrounds of sweet pink, electric blue and nuclear greens, her works appear like single-layers in Photoshop, lacking the insertion of generic scenery, the overlayed picture of a perfume bottle or a cleverly placed brand logo.
Cut loose from the products they could potentially promote, faceless glossy heads of hair, for example, float as if held up by a breeze-machine rather than body, hanging in limbo without a pretty shampoo-endorsing model to be retouched and reinstated. Similarly the kittens seem sadly obsolete without rolls of toilet tissue, sympathy messages or easy-open tins of cat food justifying their fluffy frivolity.
By refining and filtering how imagery appeals to our senses and then denying us the satisfaction of clear connotation or desire, Hicks subtly and quietly teases the threads of consumerism and unravels the relationship between beauty and money.
Petrina Hicks’ work has attracted many accolades over her relatively short career. As well as being announced as the Overall Winner in the ABN AMRO Emerging Artist Award in 2008, her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally in ParisPhoto 2008, Contemporary Australia: Optimism, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art 2008, Petrina Hicks: Australia-Japan, The Exchange of Viewpoints, Early Gallery, Osaka, Japan, 2006. Her works are in numerous collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the National Gallery of Victoria.
Maleonn (Ma Liang) – Second-hand Tang Poem
Photographer Maleonn (also known as Ma Liang) lives and works in Shanghai. His images contain highly choreographed scenes that blend traditional Chinese mythology and contemporary life. His Second-hand Tang Poem series reflects on the way Tang poems have operated in everyday Chinese life. For centuries, elementary students memorised the poems and used them to learn to read and write and even now they are memorised and recited but their meaning feels somehow second-hand. His work is a visual interpretation and contemporary re-telling of these poems.
The creation of Second-hand Tang Poem was inspired by his reading of a book –“New Annotation on the 300 Tang Poems” by Zhao Changping, which employed a great amount of well-documented and extensive evidence and analysis that Maleonn had never read before, completely different from what he got from his textbooks. He says of the experience; “My heart was quaked by his work and I was astonished. Later, I specially bought a lot of related books and read hours every night for months, in the hope that I could describe what I wanted to say through a group of works”.
He made up the scenes for the creation of this series on a huge table, there was real clay and rocks, artificial trees and moss grass, and traditional landscape by glass. He also made up models of men and architectural features such as alcoves and steps. His own “ugly calligraphy” (as he calls it) was hung by fishing lines. Clouds and fog were produced by a small fog producer, while moisture effect was produced by a water pot.
Usually it took him 2-3 days to construct one scene. He adjusted the scenery again and again based on his digital photography drafts before he finally photographed on film. When the photography was finished he had to destroy the whole scene he had created as he only had one large table. It was really painful but he describes how he “tasted the painful feeling of existence that could never be duplicated in photography.”
Maleonn graduated from the Fine Arts College of Shanghai University, where he studied in Graphic Design. After working in film for advertising for 10 years he decided to pursue his own art practice. In the few years since focusing on his art career Maleonn is now one of the most respected artists working in this medium in China, and also rapidly making his mark worldwide. His works have been exhibited and collected widely throughout Asia, American and Europe including at the Victoria & Albert Museum London.
4 Artists + Artist Talks [Firstdraft]
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.
