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Mapping the interior: In search of an inland sea
No full textBACKGROUND: This project applied an archival artistic research methodology to investigate how reimagined narratives of colonial exploration might provide new ways for thinking through contemporary masculinity and vulnerability. In “An Archival Impulse”, Hal Foster identifies the archive’s emergence as a powerful trope within a strain of contemporary art practice that questions the relationship between past/present, memory/reality. Foster was influenced by Foucault’s "The Archaeology of Knowledge", which characterised the archive as a repository of what is recorded and what is silenced. Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean and Kara Walker create archival artworks as manifestations of particular temporalities and interventions into knowledge production. This project applied a queer gaze to an historical narrative, examining how different alliances of representation might challenge dominant constructions of colonial history.<br><br>CONTRIBUTION: Mapping the Interior: In Search of an Inland Sea is a cinematically scaled three-channel video installation that depicts four young men carrying a whaleboat through a harsh desert landscape. The work recalls Charles Sturt’s 1844 final exploration into the Australian interior with two whaleboats as he searched for a mythical inland sea. The research found that the queer gaze was able to reveal the failures of masculinity and colonisation by undermining dominant representations of colonial masculinity.<br><br>SIGNIFICANCE: The project was commissioned by the Victorian College of the Arts for their annual Solo Projects exhibition at Margaret Lawrence Gallery during the Melbourne International Art Festival. Mapping the Interior was also shown at the 2013 Palimpsest Biennale, Mildura, one of the largest biennales in regional Australia. The work was reviewed in Raven Contemporary, several national art blogs and The Age, where Dan Rule described it as “a tete-a-tete between blind colonialist ambition, loyalty, vulnerability and the sexualised queer gaze.”
Libr_array
No full textBACKGROUND: The power of audiovisual sychresis (Chion 1994) whether explored academically as a cinematic principle or creatively by artists such as Ryoji Ikeda (video) or Robin Fox (lasers) is well established. It has the capacity to provide a deep value-add when sound and image are structurally locked in a one to one relationship. Beyond the perceptual resonance of such simple suture (Gorbman), sound also has the capacity to confer authentication on narrative, being used to anchor images into meaning (Gorbman). Anchorage and suture are often viewed as discrete positions in audiovisual relationships. Libr_array, through its relationship with lighting, sound design and electronic music, was an opportunity to challenge this dichotomy. <br><br>CONTRIBUTION: This project takes Science Fiction's "imagination of disaster" (Sontag, 1966) articulated through a carefully sculpted sound design of engines, confirmation alerts and mechanical activity, and places this frenzy of narrative-articulating stress into tension with the detached sychretic logic of an audiovision more about gleeful groove than any inferred meaning. The site chosen to install the speakers and the lights - the perforated loading bay door of the library - further heightened the tension between a futuristic looking environment activated by light and the drift of meaning from cinematic authentication to mindless dance. <br><br>SIGNIFICANCE: This experimental work synthesizes two very distinct approaches to audiovisual relationships into a successful (and popular) installation for a large-scale public event. The collaboration brought together sound designers, lighting designers, industrial designers and system designers across multiple schools and programs. It was funded by grants from City of Melbourne as well as Geelong after Dark
Break in Transmission
No full textBackground: Current research in printmaking methods and philosophy acknowledge the need for ongoing exploration into the use of found photographic images in the digital age. This research continues to ask, how can these images be repurposed and represented through tradition print mediums to highlight gaps in public knowledge? This research recognises the ongoing use of archives-analogue and digital-investigated through a queer lens offering an alternative perspective to the broadcast news that is presented. Contribution: The artworks presented in Break in Transmission interrogated found public images from news broadcasts and the internet of gay oppression. This installation utilised the mediums of photographic screen printing with the materiality of mirror to enable a multi-focal approach to viewing imagery that depicted apparatuses of killing with portrait like prints of a murdered gay youth moments before death. The collection of artworks that make up the Break in Transmission installation contributes to an ongoing dialogue of oppression and persecution of LGBTIQ people globally to activate greater empathy and understanding. Significance: Break in Transmission was presented at Trocadero Art Space is an artist-run initiative located in Melbourne's west. For over ten years, it has been actively shaping Melbourne's inner west art scene by presenting work from over 400 artists across more than 400 exhibitions. The application process for exhibition is peer reviewed via committee and they have presented renowned artists such as Rushdi Anwar, Marian Crawford and Kate Just etc. The gallery's public program of presentations and artist floor talks attracted a diverse range of gallery visitors
Meatspace
No full textBackground<br>My research explores the nexus between the human body and contemporary media. This research, develops on from a PhD I completed on the topic of the abject body and technology in 2014. The broad field of this research is ‘art & technology’ and the narrow field is ‘representations of the body’. In addition, the research relates to the discourses of media installation art. My new work Meatspace extends this research further into the space of Virtual Reality. Initially the term Meatspace, was one of derision, first coined in the mid 1990’s first wave of VR (Virtual Reality) for those trapped by their flesh and the limitations of their bodies, this new research attempts to bring new and updated knowledge to the relationship of the body and VR.<br><br>Contribution<br>Meatspace extends my research into the confrontation of the human body into VR. One of the dominant narratives of VR is the idea of leaving our bodies behind in a wonderous unbounded new space of infinite possibilities. Running counter to this is the very real experience that VR at times can induce feelings of motion sickness and nausea, where our bodies are not absent but very much present. On one hand VR is all about the non-body but at the same time it dramatically amplifies the notion of embodiment, of being in a body. My research contributes to a better understanding of body awareness and confrontation in VR.<br><br>Significance<br>The work was funded by a city of Melbourne grant ($12,000) and assessed by a group of my peers. Meatspace was seen by a large audience in the newly refurbished Capitol Theatre. The work has since been exhibited at The Ann Arbor film festival in Detroit (as an online version due to Covid 19) The Ann Arbor film festival is the oldest experimental film festival in North America and was voted #1 film festival in North America in a USA Today reader’s poll in 2019
Demon Core
No full textBackground<br>Since the invention of the Atom Bomb, artists have engaged with the dark realm of nuclear physics and the terrifying agency of nuclear matter. Exhibitions such as “Black Mist Burnt Country” (2016) have presented Australian artists response to this, and other artists, such as Yanobe Kenji, have worked with radioactive materials. However, there have been no previous installation works have used nuclear materials in a way that engages with the specific experiment known as “Demon Core”. In 1946, a plutonium orb (made for the third WWII atom bomb but never used) accidently went supercritical, causing a fatal nuclear chain reaction in the research laboratory.<br><br>Contribution<br>Demon Core is a site-specific immersive installation commissioned for DARK MOFO 2019, selected by DARK MOFO director Leigh Carmichael. The project was specifically designed for the Queen Victoria Powder Magazine (a building designed to explode) in the Hobart Botanic Gardens. The installation manifests the energy within nuclear matter. Uranium and americium in the core of the Demon Core installation controls “Cherenkovesque” UV light emissions, and low-frequency tones, creating a dynamic and stochastic environment in which to contemplate, as Robert Oppenheimer stated, the sins of physicists. The project also manifests my own ethical dilemas in working with nuclear physics such as at CERN. Collaborators include curator Tony Lloyd, programmer Toby Gifford, and CERN physicist Matteo Volpi.<br><br>Significance<br>The work is significant in that it was personally selected for DARK MOFO, arguably Australia’s premiere arts festival. Demon Core was the first installation on the “Dark Path”, the main public art attraction for the 2019 DARK MOFO festival. The exact attendance figure is 16,371. The project had over $20,000 budget and a dedicated install team. Working with naturally occurring uranium, plus radioactive waste, in an OH&S compliant setting is in itself a complex and significant process
12th - 20th Amendments
No full textBackground:<br>Artwork researches reciprocal relations between political cartoons and drawing in an expanded field of practice The work considers how verbo-pictorial metaphor aligned with performative drawing methods operates as political commentary. Framed by the political cartoons of Saul Steinberg (19640 New World (The Spiral), New Yorker Magazine, ‘Figure-Device’ works of Jasper Johns (1959), ‘Device Circle’, and the politics of social gesture in Barthes (1977) Diderot, Brecht and Eisenstein, Fontana, London.<br><br>Contribution:<br>11-20th Amendments' series of works investigates through a sequential methodology and the form of large works on paper of concentric watercolour rings, from each of which a trailing drop falls to a balsa wood ‘receiver’, perturbing those rings over which it passes. <br>The series is displayed as a single installation in which the experience of intensified colour and gesture imposes on the viewer a codified experience of the social tableau. The research develops ideas of blended metaphor by Elisabeth El Refaie (2003), Understanding visual metaphor: the example of newspaper cartoons, Sage Publications. Exhibition catalogue states ‘works might also be read metaphorically: the titles, … suggest a political reference to the subtle alteration or decay of an ideal’, McInnes & Barber (2017) Greg Creek Amendments<br><br>Significance:<br>Works were exhibited at Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne, as a curated exhibition of solo projects with Australian artists Kate Daw and Nadine Christensen. Catalogue states the exhibition thematic explores ‘issues of authorship, narrative and creative process… synchronising the personal, the political and the popular’ across a group of artist with International profiles. Sarah Scout Gallery develops opportunities for “outstanding early to mid-career artists… in a range of local and international situations” Artists include Bianca Hester, Lou Hubbard and Sally Smart
Cats of My Neighbours
No full textBACKGROUND <br>Creative writers such as Olivia Laing, Garth Greenwell and J Bryan Lowder have explored the relationship between sexuality, identity, visuality, representation, and space. This photo essay is informed by Laing’s readings of queerness as constituted through sight lines, e.g. looking, seeing and cruising, and equally enabled, constrained and characterised by urban conditions of density and isolation, focusing on works by writer-artists such as David Wojnarowicz. My essay enacts a response to my built environment. My research asks: how can a visual nonfiction form (the photo essay) complicate these vectors by incorporating multiple points of view and multiple timelines, reorganising the experiences of watching and being watched?<br>CONTRIBUTION<br>The research is located in the interplay between the position of photographer, the choice of object, and structure of the essay. Cats are a symbol of boundary-crossing but here are used to describe a boundary, rather than crossing one; the photographer observes the cats from a limited vantage, but also shapes material to define perspective (e.g. the artificial choice to exclude dogs or people, which of course I also see from my windows). In making a visual essay it contributes to the feedback loop of Laing’s work which uses an art of time (text) to describe arts of space (visual works). According to Laing, artefacts that emerge from the lonely city include ‘things forged in loneliness, but also things that function to redeem it.’<br>SIGNIFICANCE<br>This essay was published in a special issue of AXON an internationally peer-reviewed journal on creativity and the creative process. It extends themes I have developed in book-length creative works THE ADVERSARY and SHIRLEY that are contracted to Penguin Random House and funded by the national and state-based bodies and has led to the development of creative and scholarly prose works under consideration (01/20) on the relationship between genre, form, sight and space
The Origin of Geometry
No full textBackground: The work draws on the example of kinetic and perceptually oriented installation art. Important precedents include the Zero Group and Art of Light and Space artists as well as contemporaries Olafur Eliasson and Carsten Holler. The work folds philosophical readings around perception and geometry through the mirrored rotating form of a Mathomat- a stencil of geometric forms once commonly used by school children, architects and designers. This folding references the example of artists Mark Wallinger and Mona Hatoum who enlarge everyday objects or popular culture references to induce philosophical insights. <br>Contribution: The Origins of Geometry addresses the gap between two key approaches to installation art. Specifically the introspective encounter criticised by theorists of Relational Aesthetics as individualist (Bourriaud, 2002) and the social encounter which has been criticised for neglecting the affective and aesthetic (Birnbaum, 2007 and Bishop, 2008). The work uses the theme of geometry to emphasise the delimitation between human subjects and the world outside. The works contribution to the field is the notion that the artwork is a parergon, an ambiguous frame that is part of what it delimits. <br>Significance: This work was selected to be shown at Deakin University Art Gallery by artist and curator James Lynch. The venue is a prestigious public gallery which has a rich history of exhibiting contemporary artists. The work was exhibited alongside artists of extremely high standing including conceptual artist Ian Burn from the group Art and Language, painter Dale Frank, and contemporary artists Nike Savvas, Chris Bond and Justine Khamara. The exhibition was opened by art critic Robert Nelson. The exhibition resulted in a further invitation to exhibit at contemporary art gallery Neon Parc in Hard Boiled. The work was subsequently acquired by nationally renowned artist and collector Deanna Georgetti
Ode to the OO
No full textBACKGROUND<br>The interdisciplinary Bauhaus and its continuing legacy in abstraction in visual art and design was an influence on the creative mode of Ode to the OO, a site-specific installation comprising sound, painting and sculpture. Laura Provost, Susan Phillipz, Samson Young and Carsten Nicolai, whose installations and sculptures are activated by sound, provided a context for my explorations of the permeability of mediums. As my research evolved, my focus became the relationship between abstraction and symbolism, between hard-edge and expressionist painting, in ways that connected with the site itself, and modernist artists such as Felix De Boeck, G.R. Santosh. <br><br>CONTRIBUTION<br>Made in collaboration with composer James Hayes, the project centres a soundscape honouring the ʻōʻō bird, once native to the islands of Hawai'i. Extinct in the 1980s, its song with no reply conjures many ghosts at a time of mass losses. I used electricity, colour, light, sound and magnetic fields as imprints on the ether as we all dissolve into particles of memory or data. Trapped in our grid of reason, represented by the architecture of the site, I imagined escape routes (or ‘bird’ paths) that bend and dissolve bars, lines and geometries – a series of traces or afterimages of bird or bird-ness. I used the grid of the architecture as an organising principle, escaping its rigidity and the ‘stuckness’ of lockdown by taking cues from expressive graffiti over our signage. Working quickly in response to a site when limited by lockdown was extremely productive.<br><br>SIGNIFICANCE<br>Ode to the OO was supported & funded by Gertrude Contemporary. It was a pivotal work in my career registering a shift back to my core interests in the tropes of modernism
Die Relation der Unschärfe
No full textBACKGROUND This project is located at the intersection of comparative arts and Ludwig van Beethoven studies, within a visual and sound art context, interrogating opportunities opened by Beethoven's works during his 250th birthday. The debate is current in exhibitions OH LUDWIG (2020 Bonn), Raum ist Partitur (2020 Bonn). A comparative arts methodology is explored in Peter Vergo's The Music of Painting (2010). This paintings and sound installation in specific asks: How might memory of sounds (referencing Beethoven's deafness) manifest in painting? How can the increasing fragmentation of Beethoven's late works be reimagined across painting and sound? <br><br>CONTRIBUTION "Die Relation der Unschärfe" was a major solo exhibition of 31 paintings and a 18 minute 3-channel sound installation. Created for this venue and theme, I composed the paintings and sounds to tension across two disconnected gallery spaces testing narratives withing installation memory. Here deliberately blocky compositional structures heard in the first gallery space frame the experience of a surround-painting installation seen in the second gallery space. In turn the gestural language of the paintings deliberately reference the sequence of composed duration and sonic memory. My contribution is to convey fragmentation as an expressive form in relation to Beethoven's late work through a uniquely sequenced installation.<br><br>SIGNIFICANCE I was invited to develop new work and present by the director of Das Esszimmer, Bonn, a critically engaged project space presenting major solo shows by international artists since 2011. Development and presentation were supported through Cat 2 funding from Australia Council for the Arts (Whole & Part, Translation Across Modality, Memory & Trace, 2019) and Stiftung Kunst Sparkasse. 2 critically engaged reviews appeared in newspapers, the exhibition reviewed as "exemplary for a contemporary engagement with the old master." I have subsequently released the audio composition as a CD