photos by Heath Warwick.
I’m getting ready for my show The Blank Pages at Firstdraft Gallery in Sydney January 11-29, 2012. This show is a playful engagement with papier mâché and personal history. A large, hollow, cartoon-like head is skewered on a 1.8m long, wooden pole like an olive. Spit-balls, made by chewing a portion of a blank page of one of my teenage diaries, are applied to the work. The head has a large nose. What a large nose it has! A colourful woodcut accompanies the work. The colours I use in it make me glad. It is happy art for happy times.
Mound Activity vs. Slime Theory
Platform
1 April – 29 April
Sarah and I have been making some lumpy pieces leading up to our face-off of blobs to be installed in the glass cabinets set into the walls of Platform. Platform has been an operational artist run space for over twenty years. We are happy to have had our proposal accepted for this very public arena. Mound Activity vs. Slime Theory is housed in a series of large window boxes in the arcade in the underpass to Flinders St Station that’s entered from Degraves St – a space visited by thousands of commuters every week.
The project isn’t entirely collaborative in the sense that we haven’t made individual works together. However, we have consumed parts of each other’s practices and vomited them out in new forms. We set the work up yesterday using a side of the arcade each. The show opens this Friday. Whereas I knew Sarah would have some tricks up her sleeve my aim was simply to stare her work down with mine. I knew she already knew of this plan so she came back with some equally glaring pieces. She has also realized some amazingly lumpen lumps and clumps - veritable art-asteroids with an aesthetic gravitational pull that I could only hope to achieve with my sickly papier mache bits-and-bobs. Some of my works could have you, the viewer, veering over to my wall at the opening (some of my work is colourful after all). You will, however, most likely, walk along the row of cabinets on one wall sipping on a plastic cup of wine and then flick over to the other wall to walk down the other side. You’ll do this irrespective of whose work you are viewing – like everyone does at every show. I have also scalped Sarah and put her in one of my cabinets. All in all, it’s a friendly show in which the art hopefully works independently of each other but could also be read as one blob.
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-Sarah’s blob waiting
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I’ve been taking note of arrangements incorporating high key colour lately. I am colour blind (red-green deficiency). My grade three teacher made Mum aware off this when I was colouring in the sky in my drawings with a purple pencil. I can not colour correct my photos on photoshop as I can’t tell if there’s a magenta or green tinge to photos. I have difficulty mixing paint. It’s not that I can’t see the colours available to human vision its just that sometimes there’s not enough saturated colour hitting the limited number of receptors in my retinae to give my brain the information as to what the colours actually are. I like it that colour is a boundary of sorts; that there is a line in the sand which I can’t pass where others can. It reminds me that there are limits to all things. Yet the world exists outside and beyond me although it is only given meaning via my senses. This is a sweet paradox. Thereby I conclude my armchair philosophical session for the week. Goodnight.
Snap-shots of my backyard plants, my budgie, some ornaments of friends.
October 27, 2010
I’ve been busy… with other things…. writing my Masters exegesis and here’s a show I curated with two other board members from Seventh Gallery:
THESE ARE YOUR INSTRUCTIONS!
Loosely based on the work of conceptual artist Sol leWitt, five artists were invited to present instructions detailing the creation/completion/extension of artworks to a participatory audience. Gallery visitors were invited to take an active part in the development of the exhibition by constructing, extending or performing the works according to their own interpretation over the course of the exhibition.
Part happening, part conceptual, part minimal, part chaos the outcomes from THESE ARE YOUR INSTRUCTIONS were unpredictable and uncertain.
The opening night was almost riotous!
INSTRUCTORS:
LOU HUBBARD
DYLAN MARTORELL
SCOTT MITCHELL
TORIE NIMMERVOLL
CHARLIE SOFO
‘THESE ARE YOUR INSTRUCTIONS’ was a SEVENTH ARI project curated by Jessica O’Brien, Irene Finkelde and Jonas Ropponen with assistance from Arts Victoria and generous sponsorship from The Workers’ Club.
Follow this link for more information for further images of event:
24th July – 21st August 2010
I had so much fun with Andy, Kim and Amy-Jo and we spent so much time on the blog we created especially for our collaboration that I forgot to log it here.
We travelled to Brisbane to exhibit at Boxcopy. Meeting after meeting before the trip we got together to eat each other’s food, drink wine and pull little words out of a beanie to move through different stages of art production. The final product was a mash-up of our works, a cross pollination (maybe cross ventilation) of ideas and interests. We set up each others work and added further surprise elements.
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Grotto SEVENTH Gallery, Fitzroy. June 9- 26, 2010.
I really enjoyed making the work for this solo show and the installation of the work reminded me how much I enjoy playing games with viewers. When the viewer entered the space the most likely scenario was for them to head towards the largest component of the installation – the flesh coloured, papier mache mound resting on a wooden table which was framed visually by the door as they entered (Grotto). A small papier mache mushroom provided a visual focus for the ‘front’ of the work but due to the way the work was pushed up into the corner of the room people were drawn to look at the side which faced the corner. I did want the viewer to move in behind the work to take a closer look so I left enough space for one person at a time to squeeze into the corner and view the work from that angle. The side of the mound facing the corner was pocketted with cavities and outcroppings that suggested both caves and abstracted facial features. The stalactite and stalagmite-like protrusions became even more teeth-like to me as I trialled viewing the work myself from this angle – feeling very backed into the corner by the snarling sculpture.
One day a big ugly/beautiful, glossy, dripping, lumpy ‘work’ will be excreted by my imagination – contracting months of labour, short-cutting drying time, bypassing the incidental and accidental help of others and eliminating failed attempts along the way in an almighty arrival of the perfectly formed.
Here are some installation shots of my work:
‘Along the Length of my Body and at the Height of my Pubic Bone Sits the Old World and the New’
This was exhibited together with my short story ‘The Woodsman’at RMIT Project Space, Feb 5-25 Feb. in the show: Secret Files of the Working Men’s College.
Both this work and the short story started to lean more to autobiography than I had originally intended. As the title of the installation hints, the length of the shelf is as long as I am (1.92m) when reclined and sits at the height from the ground where the upper side of my penis joins the rest of my body (1.01m).
Some of the art in the background include that of Richard Harding, Nik Pantazopoulos and David Sequeira. Other artists in the show: Kate Just, Rhett D’Costa, Drew Pettifer, Spiros Panigirakis, Jon Riethmuller and Glen Walls.
Photography by Andy Hutson.
The Woodsman is the self published short story, mentioned in a previous post, that I am launching tomorrow night at RMIT Project Space in the exhibition Secret Files of the Working Men’s College.
Before I was aware of what I had said, I had announced to the curator in December that I was planning to write a short story to be launched together with my installation. At the same time as I was making papier mache sculptures for the installation I also spent the month of January working back late in the studio on this written piece. I must admit that writing has a certain spellbinding power that is even harder for me to break than art-making.
In this story I revealed more about my personal life than I ever expected. What started off as a fairytale romp about my ‘coming out’ as a gay man and the death of my father became a much more respectful piece. Central to the story is familial disfunction. My ‘coming out’ didn’t prove to be a liberalizing influence on my family as it often can be for other gay men with conservative parents – it became the amplifier of preexisting communication problems and immediately collapsed our relationships with one another. This falling apart was mediated and encouraged by the Christian fundamentalist sect that circumscribed our lives.
The Woodsman is a little heavy and a little self indulgent in the inevitable way autobiographical work often is, but hopefully written well enough to be an interesting read for others. The front cover is a woodcut with hand-colouring on printmaking paper. I have printed an edition of 100 of which a quarter have already been given away or sold.
