the art life

The Oak tree known for its long growing hard wood and majestic presence is a universal symbol of strength and endurance. In the swollen promises of email spam and miracle products, the power to erect larger dimensions of the penis is the embodiment of manhood in redevelopment. This is where the GET OAK FIRMNESS show begins.

GET OAK FIRMNESS Curated by Elvis Richardson April-May 2009. Claire Lambe, Renny Kodgers and the collaborative duo Nat Thomas and Concettina Inserra in GET OAK FIRMNESS a performance and exhibition program exploring the expectations, power functions and romantic notions of the penis will be staged over two of the most interesting artist run venues in Melbourne; Hell Gallery and Ocular Lab.











The Candystripers is a collaboration between two Melbourne artists: pop-artist Gemma Jones and installation artist Lauren Brown. Their latest project is in the entrance to Bus Gallery, an artist-run-space in the heart of Melbourne, and is the third in a series of projects based in Melbourne.




Seeking to create hyper-real spaces that walk the line between exterior and interior experiences, The Candystripers project at Bus transforms the foyer into a cross between Victorian wallpaper, an oversized minimalist painting and a helicopter landing pad.

Labels: press releases

"The winner this year [of the National Photographic Portrait Prize] is Ingvar Kenne, for a picture of his two sons Cormac and Callum standing by a suds-filled indoor pool, presumably in a motel. It is a memorable image, but hardly an unforgettable one, and one may wonder whether a child is ultimately a good choice for a portrait; they are really only on the way to becoming a person. As a parent, one is rightly fascinated by each step of that development of personality, of character, of gradually evolving inner life. But to a stranger, these things cannot have the same interest."

Christopher Allen, Moments in Time, The Australian, April 18.

Labels: Le Coq

"Born in Shanghai in 1930, James Ballard came to England with his parents after the war, where he became a boarder at the Leys school in Cambridge; stepping, as he put it, "out of one institution, into another." After studying medicine at Cambridge, which he dismissed as an "academic theme park", he studied English at the University of London, before taking on a succession of jobs and writing short fiction in his spare time.

"His first published story, a tale of singing plants called Prima Belladonna, appeared in the magazine Science Fantasy in 1956, the same year as an exhibition at the Whitechapel gallery which marked the birth of pop art. In this and the work of the surrealists such as Max Ernst, René Magritte, Salvador Dali and Paul Delvaux he found the inspiration for what he later called a "fiction for the present day". The Guardian obit

"[Ballard's] work embraces dystopian scenarios, including the archetypal non-space often characterised as a deadening feature of late capitalism. But this is not simply a call for nihilism. Ballard's characters are not disengaged from their world. Rather, they embody a sense of resistance that derives from full immersion, a therapeutic confrontation with the powers of darkness, whereby merging with dystopian alienation negates its power. This is predicated on concurrency: Ballard's writing turns objectivity into subjectivity, opens up gaps where there is room for new subjects. His scenarios are what I term 'affirmative dystopias', neither straight utopia nor straight dystopia, but an occupant of the interstitial space between them, perpetual oscillation between the poles – the 'yes or no of the borderzone', to use a phrase from his work..." Ballardian.com

Labels: fiction, JG Ballard, sci-fi

Our three recent polls have been running as a rotating poll - that is, whenever you refresh the Art Life page you get a new poll... Magic! Here are the results of democracy in action:

It's time for a new director of the AGNSW?

Yes 72% 74
No 5% 5
Hell no 23% 24

103 votes total


The Venice Biennale 2009 Australian selection

It's great to see old favourites getting another go 23% 13
Great mix of young and not so young 4% 2
Hedging bets 9% 5
Ignored my suggestion of sending me and my friends 16% 9
Who gets the short straw and exhibits in the pavilion? 9% 5
Where's my cheesecake? 40% 23

57 votes total


Artexpress

Encourages young people to be creative 16% 10
Encourages young people to embarrass themselves 25% 16
Gives conservative art critics a chance to beat up on post modernism 38% 24
A great way to promote handbags 6% 4
A great day out at the gallery 16% 10

64 votes total

Labels: poll

Cities Tango: Sydney, Melbourne links the Powerhouse Museum with Federation Square. In each city the work will collect images from the screen location and react to them. The analysed information will also influence the work's behaviour in the other city. Changing colour stripes will be interleaved with segments of images of the remote location at different times of the day and mixed with real time snapshots of people at the remote site.

Cities Tango is an extension and combination of Tango Tangle (an interactive urban screen work, previously shown in Federation Square) and the Shaping Form series (generative visual works whose behaviour and forms are influenced by the activities detected by a camera, shown most recently at the Conny Dietzschold Gallery, Sydney). These earlier works are abstract and deal with colour, form and time through sets of changing vertical stripes of colour.

In the case of Cities Tango, some of the stripes are segments of images of the remote location at different times of day. They also include real time images of people at the remote site. Images of and from the remote location are dynamically revealed within the otherwise abstract structure. The colours used, the times of day selected and the pace of the work are influenced in each location by a combination of the detected audience behaviour at both locations. The two cities, Melbourne and Sydney, interact with one another across Australia. Although the timing and the
colours of the stripes are driven by movements at the remote location, the real time images from the remote location are influenced by the local audience. A live connection is sensed through the real time images of audience as they interact with the work.




runway is an independent, not-for-profit publication managed by a group of Sydney-based artists, writers and curators. runway supports and presents practices that are experimental, conceptually driven and community based; and promotes and encourages critical dialogue within the local art community. An integral component of runway is the themed artist pageworks section, which encourages artists to conceptualise new projects within the published format.


runway accepts submissions from contemporary visual artists, writers and curators. Emerging and early career practitioners are particularly encouraged to submit.

Submissions should address the theme of the issue, however lateral approaches to the theme are encouraged.

DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS FROM WRITERS: Wednesday April 15.

DEADLINE FOR FINAL SUBMISSIONS FROM WRITERS AND ARTISTS: Wednesday May 13.

PLEASE NOTE: there are two deadlines for this issue. The first deadline is for writers proposing to submit feature articles, interviews, reviews and other critical texts. The second is the deadline for the approved proposals for writing, and for final submissions from artists.







The April 2009 exhibition features the sound archive of David Ahern. As an experimental sound artist Ahern's seminal Australian work is now highly regarded. The program considering Aherns radio work 'Journal' from 1969 has been curated by Ruark Lewis. And this project forms part of a renewed focus placed on Aherns significance will also forge links between other significant works presented by Fiona McDonald and Ian Milliss.

Ruark Lewis will also show 48 drawings he first exhibited in 1989 and, a documentary for viewing. That work looks at Ruark's own investigation of 'Alpha Solstice', a computer music piece by Sydney composer Robert Douglas. There is an upcoming ABC documentary to look forward to.

During the show in April, and to be held on Thursday April 16th at 6pm, there will be a special public floor talk given by Geoffrey Barnard & Andrew McLennan.

Please rsvp if you wish to attend that talk to: info@sno.org.au

Labels: press releases