SIFTING
Paul Greedy
8/5 – 24/5/15
Paul Greedy – Sifting
×
Carla Cescon / Ned Jaric / Ruth McConchie / Hany Armanious /
Jesse Hogan / Raquel Caballero / Matthew P. Hopkins /
Ronnie Van Hout / Quinto Sesto / Mike Kelley
A Kitten Drowning in a Well – Tribute Exhibition to Mike Kelley (1954-2012)
Curated by Iakovos Amperidis
21/11 – 14/12/14
I, on the other hand, stumble. Weak-kneed, I totter forward, still deluded that I chart my own course. I live a lie. I believe that I have matured, when I have only aged. I fancy that I have constructed my own history. It is all shit. The law is there. And in my last breath, like all lapsed believers, I will whimper and ask for forgiveness. I will die groveling, begging to be reinstated into the ranks I never truly left: the ranks of the law-abiding. Stupid me. I was a believer all along.
Goin’ Home, Goin’ Home, Mike Kelley, 1995
Mike Kelley’s stature as an internationally acclaimed American artist obscures his initial aspirations for a “planned failure”. When he set his ambitions on entering the art-world, Kelley claims that artists were vehemently despised, and so he was assured he’d become a bonified social drop-out. In this he failed miserably by pursuing and building on a career that made him an art-world luminary. However to the side of the institution he became are the remainders, a sprawling clusterfuck of activity – Kelley’s artwork.
The mythology of a resolved and glorified subjecthood was at core everything Kelley pushed his art towards unraveling. He found all social structures from built environments to one’s own identity, riddled with cracks, punctures, and fictions too obscene and pathetic to be ignored. It is in these fissures that Kelley resided, ultimately succeeding in kicking open a symbolic back door, inviting all manner of failures into the arena of his art-making. His art remains pungent, loaded with peripheral debris in both form and content. From the cryptic ‘Monkey Island’ series (1982-85) through to the pathological spectacle of ‘Day Is Done’ (2005-06), there remains no visible end to the abyssal complexity he let loose.
In Australia exposure to his work has been and continues to be scarce. His biography states he was in the Biennale of Sydney in 1984, two group shows at IMA, Brisbane in 2009 & 2011, followed with two tribute screenings of a video work at GoMA in early 2013. Apart from catching glimpses of his work in international art journals, it wasn’t until more seminal publications appeared in the mid to late 90s that Kelley’s work began to be more widely accessible. A common route of exposure occurred via the text ‘Return of the Real’ by art historian Hal Foster (1996), collaborative works featured in Paul McCarthy’s Phaidon publication (1996), and then Kelley’s own Phaidon publication (1999). With those listening to Sonic Youth, these loose threads reach back to their copy of ‘Dirty’ (1992) where Kelley’s stuffed animal photo portraits appear on the album’s packaging.
Despite this limited visibility Kelley’s art has had a profound influence across several generations of Australian artists. A Kitten Drowning in a Well bears witness to this fact. The tribute takes the form of a curated installation over both of 55’s gallery spaces, composed of new works by Carla Cescon, Ned Jaric, Ruth McConchie, Hany Armanious, Raquel Caballero, Matthew P. Hopkins, Ronnie Van Hout, Quinto Sesto, and Jesse Hogan.
In a third room adjacent to the galleries viewers will have the opportunity to see a selection of Kelley’s video works, most being debut features in Australia. The following will be screened throughout the duration of the exhibition:
– The Banana Man (1983)
– Blind Country – with Ericka Beckman (1989)
– Heidi (1992) – with Paul McCarthy
– Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #1(Domestic Scene) (2000)
– Day Is Done (2005-06)
Many thanks to the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, and Electronic Arts Intermix for their generous support.
Lucy Clout
Shrugging Offing
Presented by Nick Strike
19/6 – 5/7/15
In the single channel video Shrugging Offing, UK artist Lucy Clout uses the model of online ASMR broadcasts to discuss the positioning of intimacy, sexuality and comfort on the surfaces of the female body.
Through their sound and image structure Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response videos claim to create a calming feeling within the body of the audience. They are used as sleep aids and relaxants and made almost exclusively by young women, and so are prone to sexual readings. ASMR involves role-play to camera, whispering with soothing tones whilst acting routines such as wrapping presents or applying make-up to the absent audience. Popular ASMR creators rack up hundreds of thousands of views on their YouTube channels.
Shrugging Offing begins in a London factory that manufactures modest clothing for women. The floaty, discreet garments disrupt focus and exist within the video as an insubstantial, moire patterned, refusal of surface. The video is paced by shrieking and flirting voices, squeezing and picking at unseen friends and lovers.
Lynne Barwick
Protocol Malady
Presented by Nick Strike
19/6 – 5/7/15
Lynne Barwick makes text-based paintings and installations. In Protocol Malady the dematerialisation projects of art and information technology meet up with paint. Melancholic objects sound out their changing status with a series of propositions, strategies and attempted alliances. Longstanding tensions between the embodied and the incorporeal play out in a network of association and feedback.
Luke Parker
Hey Mystery
21/8 – 6/9/15
Claire Lambe
10/7 – 26/7/15
Presented by Anna John
Raspberry Honesty School
Alex Vivian
Presented by Anna John
10/07 – 26/7/15
What is time?
What exactly does it mean for a year to pass? What is a day, week, month….?
What does it mean to speak, talk, think out loud?
To be, silent.
What is this?
Is, it, …….compliance?
Stephen Burstow / Ellen Dahl / Melissa Howe / Salote Tamale
Perfect Strangers
Presented by Consuelo Cavaniglia
11/9 – 27/9/15
Emily Morandini / Peter Blamey / Nathan Thompson
In Fields
Presented by Paul Greedy
20/11 – 6/12/15
Tanya Lee / Amanda Williams / Nathan Beard /
Penelope Lowes / Simone Johnston / Ocea Sellars
E S T A T E
Presented by Elise Harmsen
11 – 20/12/15
Z.O’
Distressed Aquisitions
19/3-3/4/16
(This exhibition is made from waste, it is its sole qualification, and it will return to waste, and not without waste. Technology has advanced to the extent that all human labour is waste. There are more artists than ever before. Generations aspiring to movements defined by scarcity with virgin pre-fab materials creating indirect landfill. What is called Contemporary, being so, in this first time in human history where nothing has any value.)
Another future, an alternative to the inevitable, this was what consisted of human consciousness. Where waste is only to waste, fraught eternities of obsolescence, of procedural applications of feelings derived from each hackneyed and patriarchal trope suggested by increasingly lazy media sources, no source material, equidistant knowledges between empirical and that of the Empire, the fathomable and unfathomable, tested against the means of millennia… means as much as anything… the only meaning behind the means… knowledge never to know, but to somehow make possible, or even probable.
Bonita Bub / Nuno Rodrigues de Sousa / Zainab Hikmet
Frankie Chow / Yiorgo Yiannopoulos
Presented by Iakovos Amperidis
5-21/2/16
Notes:
Bonita Bub
Some objective points about the work are that it’s a sculpture that is based on a chair trolley. It is also, at least for me, a line drawing in stainless steel. The curves and angles are pedantic and stem from an interest in proportions, weight distribution – formal concerns. I am consistently interested in equipment used in industry and the aesthetics of steel yards etc. I want to make objects look impossibly light, preferring objects that tilt and balance.
Nuno Rodrigues de Sousa
A painting by Kazimir Malevitch (Black Pentagon, 1915) is the starting point for these works involving the book ‘Flatland, A Romance of Many Dimensions’, by Edwin Abbott Abbott – a satirical and scientific novel published in 1884 – which I relate to the Suprematist system of Kazimir Malevich in the 1910’s. These works are a speculation about two different worlds, two different places, flat places, to be exact, 29 years apart.
Zainab Hikmet
These Half Moon Bay beaches hold personal significance to myself and – while they are tied together by their name – a time zone and a body of water separates these two bays. In an attempt to collapse the space that separates these places, this one and a half year project has seen me travel to and from both countries in order to create glass souvenirs specific to these sites. Their lifespan is unknown – embodying an attempt to hold onto a certain moment that refuses to exist as anything but temporary.
Frankie Chow
Cheap quick easy: twenty-something lower middle class art school graduate having some quality time.
Yiorgo Yiannopoulos
Two prints from a series called “Checkmate”. These prints are maps made with droplets of semen that mark sexually transgressive spaces in Sydney – mostly public/semi public spaces like toilets but some are homes, saunas, parks, general cruising areas, etc. The placement of each droplet is accurate in relation to a traditional map of Sydney. So, (before) is the semen as semen is naturally and (after) is the semen once I’ve dripped a drop of the chemical from the CheckMate Infidelity Test Kit, into the semen.
Nick Strike
Time On Ice
26/2-13/3/16
Room 1
TIME ON ICE
For the last two years I’ve been focusing the sun through a magnifying glass onto the figures of ice skaters in the consecutive frames of two 16mm films. One is from the late 1930’s and the other from the 1970’s. Acetate film resembles ice.
This iconoclastic tally of burnt cells, (at 24 frames per second), is the result of an obsessive attempt to recapture that rare moment when a figure in motion on the cinema screen would abruptly freeze. For a split second, the blink of an eye, a flood of obtuse meanings was ignited that bore no relation to the prior narrative trajectory of the movie. Then the image, caught in the film gate of the broken projector, melted under the intense heat of the lamp. The audience, suddenly released from their screen-trance, would awake en masse in the enormous room.
The liberating potential of this event, this disruption to the visual flow, (its afterimage burnt into my memory), is without ground in the era of the touch screen: i.e. is on ice.
Here I offer work to give a taste of this burn.
Room 2
CROSS-EYED COLLAGES
These collages use reproductions of 1930’s photos with pasted images cut from 1970’s magazines. The doubled images are stereographic collages, achieved by putting the same elements in both works slightly out of register. In order to see the 3-D effect without a device, you must stand relatively close, cross your eyes and try to bring one image into focus. While initially difficult, perhaps even painful, the time spent will result in a richer vision, as both eyes work together. (The skater achieves better balance by pulling the laces of their boots as tight as possible. This is how to ‘walk on knives’).
Narrative 1: Nick Strike’s Time on Ice
Mise en scène
Throughout his installations and his imagery, Nick Strike returns again and again to the same settings: a forest, or an ice lake, or a cell. A scene waiting for a narrative, for history to meet it. The forest obscures and reveals. The ice screens off the depths. The cell is inescapable, a shape‐shifter: it is the prison, the cinema, the gallery, the studio, the film strip, the frame, the rink and the mind.
Characters
Strike’s last solo show at 55 Sydenham Rd, October, was punctuated by images of divers plunging into water. In Time on Ice, the divers have been replaced with ice skaters who endlessly circle the impenetrable surface of their frozen ground.
Two film loops screen side by side in a silent, stereographic projection on the main gallery wall. One half of the projection field is black and white footage from the 1930s. The other is colour film from the 1970s. At the centre of each frame is an ice‐skater in motion. The figures spin, twist and lunge across the ice, but in the place of identifying features is the transfixing flicker of seared acetate. Each individual film cell has been precisely blistered by the sun, focused and directed through Strike’s burning lens.
On a return wall opposite the dual image, another section of the 1970s film is projected through a vintage 16mm projector. Extending from the burn field is a single leg footed by a bladed skate. The limb pivots with forceful precision on the ice, like a drill intended to penetrate the surface, or a stick briskly rotated for the purpose of starting a friction fire. The noise of the film projector takes the place of a soundtrack; the whir of metal and acetate approximating the sound of a metal blade grazing the ice.
The fourth projection, a short loop on a monitor, is visible when leaving the gallery by the stairs. In a close‐up shot, hands pull laces tight through the eyelets of an ice skate. Then, an abrupt edit: a man’s face fills the screen. His eyes are missing. His eye sockets scorched by twin burns.
Nick Strike is an auteur. Like Hitchcock’s interchangeable blondes, Strike’s characters are ciphers. They don’t require internal lives: they are symbols, and stand‐ins and doubles, for the real action taking place somewhere behind the screen and below the surface.
Narrative rupture
Strike’s work is often concerned with the mechanisms of vision: the anatomical, technological and perceptual means by which we see and make sense of what we see. His work is equally preoccupied with impediments to vision: to physical blockages, mechanical failures and misreadings.
In a statement that accompanies the exhibition, Strike writes that his labour intensive burning of film is intended to recall the rare occasions a celluloid film would ignite, mid‐screening, in a cinema projector. As the film perished under the heat of the lamp, the image on screen froze; and the audience were shaken collectively awake from their viewing trance. The rupture in the narrative awakened the audience to their own lives, just as the moving stream of images had suspended their awareness.
When Strike’s own film reel broke in the projector during the exhibition, he sliced out the damaged section of film and lodged the strip, in storyboard rows, between two pieces of perspex. It was a restating of the workings of cinematic illusion, the multiple still‐lifes that create the appearance of movement and of narrative.
With his practice of applying a burn to every cell of a film, Strike ruptures the existing narrative while overlaying one of his own making. He reinforces the illusion of cinema while taking it apart; waking his audience while lulling them into a trance. He makes, in effect, a stereograph of sleep and wakefulness: a cognitive prompt to consider narratives and images from both states.
Narrative props/motifs
There is more material to view: a sheet of perspex covers the stair landing; the gallery window is cracked; there is a film still of a woman, without a face, touching the screen her son is imprisoned behind; a hole in the gallery floor is reflected back on itself; a photograph of a forest is obscured by perspex strips. Strike sets in play the narrative of the space; his installation a perpetual signifying machine, amassing links and associations between matter and concepts.
—ice—perspex—glass—skates—blades knives—razors—eyelets—eyes—stereogram—magnifying glass—sun—projector—focal point—lens burn—friction-fire—frostbite—ice hole—cracked screen—
Strike draws from a roll call of imagery related to the eye, to seeing, and to technologies of vision: Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou, Bataille’s Story of the Eye, Walter Benjamin’s concepts of the optical unconscious and the dialectical image, Hieronymous Bosch’s painting Temptation of St Anthony (with its camera obscura and ice‐skating bird) and Roland Barthes’s essays ‘The Metaphor of the Eye’ and ‘The Third Meaning’. Strike has often mentioned these references when talking about his work; it’s only as I type them that I notice that all the surnames start with B, and that B looks like a pair of glasses, or a stereoscope, on its side. It’s the kind of coincidence that Nick Strike tracks and incites in his work. The analogous narratives of the unconscious: revelatory, erroneous, punning and erotic; the absurd, the wishful, and the horrific. All as indispensable as the next.
Point of view
Like a cinema foyer walled with film stills, the front gallery at 55, is hung with Strike’s collages. Six are actual stereograms. Two near‐identical images mounted in the same frame are an invitation for the viewer to cross their eyes, adjust their focus and by the diligent, and somewhat painful, application of each eye, create one single, composite three‐dimensional image.
As with the ice‐skating films, the collages are made up of photographic imagery from the 1930s and the 1970s. Strike is nodding at the proposition that the precarious economic and cultural terrain of both decades is matched by the fragility of our own. By overlaying the image banks of the two decades in a stereographic process and method, Strike speculates that something of our present time will be revealed.
Scenarios float in and out of view. Place and time are indeterminate. There is war and there are dreamscapes. There are mass gatherings, uniforms, and wayward bodies: outsized, morphing, fragmenting. There are skewed monuments and unstable landscapes. There is the forest, the ice lake, the cell. And a screw, a drill, an orifice, a carcass, an eye, twin pools of water, a pair skating couple, an amputated leg. Obstacles in search of a narrative. Evidence in search of a crime.
Lynne Barwick, March 2016
Beth Dillon
Should I have stayed home, and thought of here?
15/4-1/5/16
Poncho the peripatetic, shaped from wooded wanders through the flatlands of the Dutch-German border.
A solitary spectacle of sweat weather systems.
Internal and external circulations of fluids snacked, spat and squatted.
One wet whistle singing silence, space and strangers.
A performance with no words, only tongue.
Enter the flow.
Should I have stayed home, and thought of here?
Beth Dillon
15/4-1/5/16
Jelena Telecki
Opening Night (painter, sitter, muse)
15/4-1/5/16
Ben Terakes
A Table for Zeus
6-22/5/16
Wood, caster wheels, rake handle, pine cone, gaffer tape, polyurethane expanding foam, rose quartz, hand soap, funnels, coffee filters, codeine/paracetamol tablets, Fanta bottles, chopsticks, oranges, colour photograph, wok spoon, baijiu, doorstop, towel, sodalite (unknown), Apache tears (unknown), green calcite (unknown), rubble (Christchurch, NZ), rubble (Thomas St, Chinatown, Sydney), stones (mum and dad’s backyard), volcanic rock (Iceland), purple amethyst (unknown), obsidian (unknown), boulder opal (Western Queensland), iron rock (Coolah, NSW), tooth rock (Coolah, NSW), pumice (Maroubra, NSW), glass (unknown), assorted rubble (Alexandria, Lane Cove, Lewisham NSW), plastic shepherds crook, Bonds undies.
Moiriana Chinzoka / Maria Cruz / Hurtle Duffield /
Mikala Dwyer with Dorothy Dwyer and Olive Dwyer /
Tina Havelock Stevens / Swampmiasma
GRLZ
6-22/5/16
Shane Haseman / Mitchel Cumming
Jewel Case
3/6-12/6/16
Camperdown, Saturday June 4rd
At nine o’clock I went to the meeting of the Committee. I met with the architect once more, and K_, both of them old comrades. We remained there until one o’clock, looking at the exhibition of minimalist paintings by Vit-Kulle, a Dutch/Swedish duo. I was attracted to their discrete colour fields and impersonal variation on the frame. We broke for a long lunch at a restaurant next door that overlooked an oval where men played Rugby and chanted monosyllabic war songs at each games conclusion. I made a good impression on the leg of lamb and carafe of house vodka. I felt perfectly content and free – bordering perhaps on smug – as I sat gazing through the window pane at the passersby, some of whom were making their way to the muted exhibition. We said our goodbyes’ at seven o’clock in the evening, and I wished K_ all the best with his Fourierism. In good spirits I decided to skip the train and instead walk, heading first through the babel and dereliction of Parramatta Rd before cutting through the university campus. The ambiance shifted abruptly as the ceremony of the Quadrangle’s south-east corner came into vision. Lit in the foreground, overlooked by the quad’s collegiate gothic, appeared a plain brick column. Affixed to the column were the names of forgotten and future lovers competing for the affection of passing strangers. I noted down a date as my appetite returned.
Daniel Boyd
A Selection of Works from a Personal Collection
3-12/6/16
Sarah Newall
Fashist (Winter Wardrobe)
17/6-3/7/16
The new and exclusive, engineered zero waste designer clothing label “Sarah Newall”, made by me for me.
Since 2014 the focus and direction of my practice has been on sustainability. I am trying to live by the zero waste principles of refuse, reduce, recycle, reuse, and rot. In line with this I am rethinking my wardrobe to bring it in line with sustainable principles, and to bypass the possibility of buying unethically produced clothing that is poor quality ‘fast fashion’. To create Fashist (Winter Wardrobe) I used stockpiled fabric from a fashion project I did in 2007, as well as acquired materials from Reverse Garbage, fabric remnant shops, donated materials and wool from family and friends. Fashist will now be forever ongoing and evolving.
Undies x2
Bra 1
Socks x2 pairs
T-shirt 1
Long sleeve T-shirt 1
Shirt 1
Jeans 1
Skirt 1
Sweatshirt 1
Jumper 1
Scarf 1
Hat 1
Gloves 1 pair
All made 2016 NFS
Simon Yates
Total Perspective Vortex
17/6-3/7/16
Michael Goldberg / Sach Catts
Terms of Engagement
8/7 – 24/7/16
Ben Denham / Paul Greedy / Sean O’Connell
Threshold
29/07 – 14/08/2016
Quinto Sesto
Hunting Ian
19/8-5/9/16
Hunting ‘Ian’
In 1989 Greek/Australian filmmaker Adonis Klucic began a project that would consume him for the next five years. It would take him across three continents, alienate him from family and friends and ultimately leave him abandoned and on the brink of financial ruin and psychological collapse. Klucic’s quest to find and interview on film the last remaining leader of the militant arts collective QUINTO SESTO would become a case-study in frustration and thwarted ambition. The photographs, documents and objects in this exhibition are drawn from this ill-fated odyssey.
Below is a brief chronology detailing Klucic’s efforts to contact QUINTO SESTO leader Quinto Santo, regarding his intention to produce what the filmmaker described as a ‘Revolutionary bio-pic’ about him.
Mar 1989.
Australian filmmaker Adonis Klucic meets by accident (and unbeknownst to him at first) Jeannie Morecombe, one time member of QUINTO SESTO at Barons Nightclub, Kings Cross, Sydney.
Klucic has been more or less secretly obsessed with the little known activist/artist group QUINTO SESTO for years. Morecombe has been in India researching creative spiritual practices and had agreed to meet her ex-husband Quinto Santo while she was there.
Alerted by Morecombe of Santo’s whereabouts in Calcutta, India, Klucic contacts one-time QUINTO SESTO leader and radical Santo whose political ambitions and personality he identifies with.
Apr 1989.
Klucic, receiving no response to his first letter writes another in the hope that Quinto Santo will respond.
Santo does respond but in an aggressive and dismissive fashion. Klucic discovers that Santo has taken to calling himself ‘Ian’. He refuses outright to have anything to do with Klucic’s proposed bio-pic unless there is some financial reward. He incidentally mentions ex QUINTO SESTO member Tracey Cox with extreme disdain suggesting that they may have been recently in contact.
June 1989.
Klucic writes again to Santo detailing the extent of his ambitions as well as his ‘noble’ intention and denies any link with Cox. Santo responds brusquely while asking for an advance of US $200 for his participation in Klucic’s film.
After arriving at Santo’s hotel in Calcutta, Klucic learns that Quinto or ‘Ian’ has travelled to Bangkok, Thailand, on “urgent business”. Klucic follows. He begins shaping a shooting script for the film.
Jun 1989.
Klucic discovers the contact address he has been given for Santo in Bangkok is incorrect and spends valuable time and resources trying to locate him with the help of backpackers and local police. With only a single photo and uncertain what name Santo is currently using, Klucic is unable to locate his whereabouts. In desperation he writes to Morecombe in Sydney. His obsessive travels have exhausted his funds. He is left stranded in Bangkok waiting for money from his family to return to Sydney.
Aug 1989.
Morecombe replies to Klucic’s letter informing him that Santo had returned to Sydney and is uncharacteristically flush with funds. Klucic is incredulous and disappointed.
Aug 1989.
Klucic eventually returns to Sydney because he believes he can ‘work better from there’. After several months and with renewed enthusiasm for the project, Klucic meets up with Morecombe for information about Santo’s current whereabouts. Morecombe tells Klucic that Santo has returned to Thailand and has spent the last month in the area known as The Golden Triangle, on the Thai/Burmese border. She suspects he is involved in drug trafficking.
Sep 1989.
Klucic writes again to Jeannie Morecombe. He has saved money and claims to have finally found a producer for his film. Armed with an address for Santo, he expresses his intention to return to Thailand to interview and film him ‘this time in secret’. He takes new camera equipment he has recently purchased and an advance of US $300 to give to Santo. Klucic emphasises his excitement about the prospect of finally meeting Santo.
Nov 1989.
In Sydney, Jeannie Morecombe receives a desperate and distressing letter from Klucic. Klucic has been arrested in The Golden Triangle on suspected drug charges along with Quinto’s current partner Destiny Sharpe. He claims to have temporarily bribed his way out of his predicament. He has been beaten. His money and equipment have been stolen. He accuses ex QUINTO SESTO member Tracey Cox (also recently arrived in northern Thailand) of setting him up after being refused payment for her ‘part’ in his film and suspects her of the theft of his equipment. Sharpe’s fate is not mentioned while Quinto’s whereabouts remains unknown .
Morecombe, fearing the suicidal tone of Klucic’c letter, contacts the Australian Embassy and Australian Federal Police. Neither express particular concern although they claim they will look into the matter.
Epilogue:
Australian and Thai authorities fail to locate Quinto Santo/Ian Sutcliffe. Adonis Klucic returns to Sydney to pursue a career in film/television production. His film Australian Revolutionary remains unmade.
Quinto Sesto: a brief chronology 1975-1976
Jun 1975.
The kernel of the pacifist group, soon to be known as ‘Quinto Sesto’, is formed. Its founders are Robert ‘Quinto’ Santo and Warren ‘Sesto’ Mitchell. The men meet at the University of Wollongong. They are both committed activists. Dismayed with what they see as the University’s ‘anti-progressivism’, Santo and Mitchell quit and move to Sydney believing that here they will meet kindred spirits willing to perpetrate anti-state actions.
Jul 1975.
With no money and no work, Santo and Mitchell establish a squat in innercity Newtown. Self-appointed leader, Quinto Santo marries long-term partner and fellow activist Jeannie Morcombe who henceforth adopts the moniker ‘Mad Dog’.
Aug 1975.
A fourth member of the group joins. Little is known of her background or specific activities. She is known only as ‘Head Girl’ already suggesting a level of internal competition within the group.
Sep 1975.
Santo begins writing Quinto Sesto’s manifesto stating their pacifist and anti-state aims. The manifesto remains unfinished due to Santo’s conflicted desire to produce both a local equivalent of the Communist Manifesto and a work of serious literature. While the tract is ultimately abandoned it provides the group with its enduring slogan ‘Fighting for Peace’: the structural paradoxes of Quinto Sesto are, even at this fledgling stage, fully evident.
Dec 1975.
‘Sesto’ Mitchell introduces lover Tracey Cox to the group. Cox is never formally admitted to the organisation. Santo in particular views her as a disruptive element especially once her taste for drugs becomes apparent. Tension grows between Mitchell and Santo.
Jan 1976.
Mitchell and Cox wanting the group to embrace a more creative outlook are ultimately indecisive and descend into drug dependency. Santo is infuriated by the ‘aesthetic turn’ the group is taking – as is the increasingly unpredictable ‘Head Girl’ – but fears the disintegration of his marriage to Jeannie who is open to it.
Feb 1976.
Quinto Sesto on Mitchell’s initiative, begin a series of rehearsals for a proposed ‘rock opera’ Fighting For Peace’. It incorporates fragments of Santo’s unfinished manifesto set to music.
Mar 1976.
Rehearsals for Quinto Sesto’s political rock opera are a disaster. Efforts to entice ‘socially aware’ session musicians fail. Santo is enraged and humiliated and returns to his militant ideals. Santo kidnaps Mitchell’s lover Cox and holds her for eight days.
Apr 1976.
Mitchell retaliates threatening Santo in broad daylight outside a local pub seriously threatening the anonymity of the group’s members. Following what was by all accounts a tense and lengthy group meeting, Quinto Sesto nonetheless reemerge cathartically, its members agreeing to a number of mutual concessions.
May 1976.
At first Quinto Sesto’s new political/creative direction appears promising. A number of activist theatrical pieces are rehearsed successfully. However, additional tensions arise when Santo’s interest once academic interest in Satanism assume a less than wholly ‘politico-academic’ dimension.
Jun 1976.
Santo begins to introduce a new disciplinary edge to group activities. Quinto Sesto’s ‘artistic’ members became more and more alienated. Betraying this mood, Jeannie ‘Mad Dog’ Morecombe also criticises Quinto Sesto’s ‘macho bias’.
Jul 1976.
Completely disillusioned by now by the dysfunctionality of Quinto Sesto, Cox leaves the group and Mitchell. ‘Head Girl’ vanishes without a trace. In a desperate last ditch effort to reassert his leadership and the continued viability of Quinto Sesto, Santo holds Mitchell captive for 36 hours in the same warehouse he had held his lover Cox. The organisation is finished. Santo takes Morcombe with him to Thailand to escape police prosecution.
Del Lumanta / Elena Betros + Eleanor Weber /
Enid Boyd / Ilya + Iakovos Amperidis
Mars Square Jupiter
19/08 – 05/09/16
Sean Kerr
55 Times Over
9-25/9/16
Hany Armanious / Tully Arnot / Tom Arthur / Mitch Cairns
Lucas Ihlein / Stephen Ralph / Nick Strike / what
Un Leg
Presented by Nick Strike
9-25/9/16
On the 3rd of September 1972 in the North Sea, an oil rig diver (my father) was trapped by his leg inside one of the eight legs of a fixed-platform drill rig.
I have carried his story, with the babushka-ish image of a leg inside a leg, inside me for some time. Now one leg is in my head, and there it turns over and over to spark a friction fire, a signal.
A single leg draws attention, like a lipogram, to the other which is missing. Thus, a cluster of manmade legs resembles the letters in a word written without vowels. It cannot be sounded but will be recognised in the constellation it forms.
Eight single legs: each contains a story of the man who made it. They are the fuel that make this group show turn.
Nick Strike
1. A deep-sea diver is tasked with securing an oil rig to the North Sea floor. He inserts himself into one of the eight flooded legs of the platform and descends 120 feet. The man just fits into the metal column, he’s only able to flinch a centimetre or so either way before striking a wall. There is a plug at the end of the leg. The diver’s job is to locate the iron chain attached to the plug and shackle it to the crane poised above. As the man feels for the chain in the darkness it topples from its perch. It rapidly unfurls onto his leg, pinning him tight. He is unable to move. His breathing escalates dangerously. He has no way to communicate with his crew. A leg trapped inside a leg, this is the first of our eight limbs.
2. A phantom leg is a missing leg, gone, but not erased. It haunts the body it formerly co-existed with. The body in turn hallucinates its presence. There is no scientific test to verify the existence of a phantom. The evidence takes the form of a case study narrative: a first-person account delivered by the sole witness. An equally subjective phenomenon is the strange leg or negative phantom: a leg that is present yet absent. Abandoned and disowned by its body, left off the neural map, the estranged leg has no owner, no general to issue it orders. A body is able to proceed without a leg, and a leg it seems is also able to continue on, however uneasily, minus a body.
3. It’s a fallacy that the Victorians covered up their piano legs for fear of exercising the sexual potency of objects, but it’s a revealing myth nevertheless. Legs are associated with exposure and shame, with con men and fake legs used to milk hearts and wallets, with clandestine compartments for disguising truths. Consider Rolf Harris and his smash hit Jake the peg: kitsch turned creepy: an exhibitionist’s toe-tapper, a pedophile’s ditty. And Oedipus who slew his father and slept with his mother having correctly answered the Sphinx’s riddle: What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon and three in the evening? (A: man)
4. Historically misfortune has befallen the genders in different ways. Male legs have been more prone to disarticulation. WW1 and WW2 were periods of mass fragmentation of male limbs while women’s legs, in a telling echo, were photographed, pinned up and painted onto weapons of mass destruction. Men, if so inclined, can be ‘leg men’, foot fetishists, stocking afficionados or amputee enthusiasts. Castration and fetishism: the fear of dismemberment, and the devotion to objects, or parts, that represent a substitute for any such loss. Fevered and primarily masculine narratives should you believe in that sort of thing.
5. A living leg is the stuff of narrative. It regulates movement from one situation to another. It supports, propels,conveys; it hops, rests, kicks or shakes itself free. Even a motionless leg is aligned with a verb as it rests or waits. Single legs are often put to work in a synedoche, as in pulling a leg, legging it, getting a leg up, or a leg in, or a leg over: a leg standing in for an intention, an agent standing in for a drama.
6. A leg can morph into a thing: an object, a relic, a specimen. Once separated from its body, a part becomes abject: repudiated, uncanny, a source of horror. A replicated body part, such as a leg, retains some of this frisson but evades the full force of the horror, avoiding its clutches, suggests Julia Kristeva’s Powers of horror,by cloaking itself in the same garb. A leg in the process of becoming a thing is perhaps then engaged in a disrobing: a stripping away of all coverings including those of office.
7. Prostheses and phantoms form a symbiotic pair. Successful use of a prosthetic leg can be determined by the intensity of its corresponding phantom. The pain and the discomfort of the missing limb are nerve signals that can be harnessed to control its replacement. The prosthesis is then able to lessen the ache of the phantom by rewiring its loss. In a sympathetic doubling each takes a turn in the other’s place: the phantom becomes the prosthesis, and the prosthesis becomes the phantom.
8. Legs are sociable structures, dependent on their fellows as well as the community bonds between feet, ankles and knees. Multiple legs are also able to operate in unison: witness an eight-legged spider, or an octopus, or a phalanx of scuba divers’ legs artfully kicking down to the ocean’s depths to extract its fuel, playing out the precarious balance between subject and thing, between part and whole, between life and its imminent severing.
Lynne Barwick, September 2016
‘Trapped’ written by David Strike – https://nektonix.com/2015/09/03/trapped/
Timothy D / Tom Smith / Marian Tubbs
Exhibition Standard
30/9-16/10/16
Thought, sight, hearing and communication are delimited by bodies and by devices. Human activity is constrained by physical, anatomical, social, and technical limits. Within these limits, patterns of difference and sameness produce genre, equivalence, standardisation, and the generic. Genre is a recognisable pattern of sameness. A standard is both a constraint and a generative locus for that which differs from it. The generic is an uninteresting iteration of a standard. Equivalence is any discernible continuity between two entities.
Exhibition Standard explores these propositions. All three artists use limited, constrained, or inadequate means of production and/or communication to locate difference in the standardised. Through the use of consumer grade technologies and techniques, the works explore the generative potential of the standardised and the generic.
Marian Tubbs
They stay intact until they meet a force, 2016
Plasmid genetics, 2016
Messmates ii, 2016
Plastic is perhaps the most standardised material, enabling the most diverse applications. Despite its utility, plastic congregates in the Oceans where its use value is transferred from humans to micro- organisms, plasmids and other creatures. The work features games that cannot be played and screens without images. This apparent unplayability produces only a facsimile of interaction – a space of thwarted utility, a surface without depth that gestures at the emptiness of customisation. Foam Octopi constitute the game’s innards, they are carved from the foam that infests their habitat.
Timothy D
No archive necessary, 2016
I collected junk and rubbish from Sydenham Rd to insert in a video game space developed for a previous exhibition. The pieces of rubbish are available to purchase for $66.60 each, or all together, including the game for $666. If it is not purchased the game will be deleted after the exhibition.
Tom Smith
Stay gold, 2016
Stay gold traces the default routines and absurdities of interstate travel, non-diligent research and the minutiae of networked cultural production. Stay gold reproduces the banality of transaction, waiting, browsing, searching, form filling, desiring, shopping and clicking. Stay gold makes private administrative rituals public. Stay gold features an auto-tuned soundtrack with lyrics taken from Clare Milledge’s Tinder paintings.
1. A little amoeba roaming the earth
2. All turbo everything
3. At the end, actions speak louder than words
4. I used to be conceited but now I’m perfect
5. I’m always happy
6. I’m looking for the next new thing
7. Loyalty is everything
8. Not funny or interesting
9. Trust your instincts, learn from your mistakes
10. Stay gold
11. Loving life one adventure at a time
12. Not here for games
13. Fun and playful, stress free
14. Spiritual, loyal, faithful and true
Anna John & Koji Ryui
Six Films
30/9-16/10/16
Papaya Sleeve:
Catch the scene
And watch it turn
In order to merge
Watch the merging
Flush with you
A gap appears an invitation
Dancing canvas as silhouette reference
Alongside
Thru-joining
One to many
Through overlay
Objects and materials as reconditioned monuments stand amongst others in new scenes
A papaya sleeve you say
Every object a key player – providing their contribution to the scene, some pulling more focus than others. Some play main roles, others in support.
no one left idle
the addition of a person, merging with the scene
a social scene
forming one complete papaya sleeve as in the body that sees everything and regenerates as a whole
a mind as a sophisticated broadcast system
transmitting
and recording concurrently and thus constantly re-veiling itself
the papaya sleeve transmits its aura whilst recording the shifting complexions of the scene; it’s holographic living
As the scene dismantles feel free to join other scenes
– Emma Ramsay
Kate Beckingham
To those who keep going
21/10-6/11/16
To those who keep going is about the value of labour and time and how we work through these things as artists and as people. Because of my lack of any quantifiable skills, I think endlessly about how precarious my position is – both in terms of having a sustainable art practice (what does that even mean?) and my general ability to generally survive. This ongoing anxiety leads to cold sweats and over thinking but this is the way that we live now, right? Relentlessly preparing for an end which never seems to come or has already passed. There is no self-care or gentleness here only boredom and frustration and competition and the getting up, moving things around and sitting back down again.
At my old job I used to pace, paper in hand, pretending to be busy. And just constant and mindless snacking – filling my body with endless fuels. Here these fuels are made visible: slowly rotting and fermenting and fizzing in place. I think a lot about mouth feel and whether that is important or whether the nuts and fruits and flour and coffee and fat are just the basic fuels for continual labour – the getting up and sitting back down. Or whether when a thing eats another thing, both things end up being the same thing. Or whether the thing that leads to the making of the thing is also the thing that is made. It’s complicated.
For now, though, please enjoy To those who keep going because it is for you.
Clare Peake
Certain Passage
21/10-6/11/16
Historically the carpet is seen as containing or depicting the hopes and dreams of the maker for a better life, physically and metaphorically woven into the carpet. Through the long journey to complete this work, and through many failed starts and ends, weaving this carpet became a form of slow, repetitive, procrastination. It became a meditation hovering between two states of mind; my physical reality and an imagined space of were I’d rather be. The final work and the addition of the text after the completion of the carpet became a declaration of the works failure, and my efforts, which ultimately and unexpectedly achieved the original aim of the carpet by creating the possibility for hope, potential and personal resurrection.
Shireen Taweel
tomorrow, InshAllah
21/10-6/11/16
Luke Parker / Mary Teague
Sydney Crystal Show
11-27/11/2016
Matte Rochford
Video Shop
2-18/12/16
Jelena Telecki / Alex Gawronski / Jasmine Guffond
Piles
2-18/12/16
Michael Filocamo + Madeleine Preston
Darlinghurst Eats Its Young
3-19/2/17
‘Outbreaks of nostalgia often follow revolutions; the French Revolution of 1789, the Russian Revolution, and the “Velvet” revolutions in Eastern Europe were accompanied by political and cultural manifestations of longing. In France it was not only the ancien régime that produced revolution, but, in some respect, the revolution that produced the ancien régime, giving it a shape, a sense of closure, and a gilded aura.’
Svetlana Boym – Nostalgia and its discontents.
Darlinghurst Eats its Young (Collaboration) is a poetic meditation on gentrification, nostalgia and image saturation under the sign of technology. The collaboration between Michael Filocamo and Madeleine Preston began over 3 years ago and explores the implications of gentrification, technology and the digital revolution on the past. The nostalgic reactions to previous Darlinghurst exhibitions by those too young to have been born in the 1980s became the departure point for this collaborative project. The work aims to provoke a reassessment of what makes community and place, images and longing. This exhibition documents that process to date and includes documentation from previous Darlinghurst Eats its Young exhibitions as well as the collaborative documentary of super 8 and digital video footage.
Simon Yates
Mind Maze
3-19/2/17
Francesca Heinz
Werk
24/2-12/3/17
Taking inspiration from both historical and fictitious female characters Heinz is interested in how the female body can act as a visual vessel or a conduit in contemporary societies, often reflecting current tastes and political values. Her work aims to question this with tongue firmly in cheek. The use of latex as a substitute for skin means Heinz’s sculptural forms are often visually grotesque, lumpy and flaccid. The melding of human and animal forms is an essential component of her practice, often providing humour or absurdity but also speaking to greater ideas of ‘femininity’ and role-playing.
Sach Catts
Hot Worked
24/2-12/3/17
‘Hot work: processes where metals are plastically deformed above their recrystallization temperature, allowing the material to recrystallize during deformation.’
–
‘[T]here is no more epic way of bringing down much loved or even much hated tree (for example a neighbor’s overgrown maple) than with an American felling ax.’
—
This is the third time I’ve sharpened this axehead. The process involves using a file to shape the bit (cutting edge) to form a convex bevel on both faces. This bevel is then ground and polished with progressively finer-graded stones. Apparently, you should be able to shave with it once it’s done. I’ve spent roughly six hours filing, grinding, polishing and repeating so far in search of the ideal edge. In between stages I scour the Internet for logs.
The axe has been rendered romantic by the chainsaw. There are few instances when one wouldn’t use a chainsaw to harvest and process timber. They’re fucking brilliant. I borrowed mine off my dad and neglected to ever return it. It races through timber with a full-throated, sawdust-frothing snarl. I like people to know I own a chainsaw. I like them to see it in my studio or in my car. It makes me feel dangerous.
The axe will make me feel like a man, however.
James Newitt
To Attempt to Become Other, Secretly or Not
7-23/4/17
Sitting in the dark, a man who looks to be in his mid thirties has his head pressed into the palms of his hands. His fingers wrap over his forehead and into his hair. His fingertips massage his scalp by pulling the skin of his forehead down then releasing, pulling down, then releasing. The pressure from his palms push his eyeballs back into their sockets, distorting their shape slightly behind his closed eyelids.
In this position he tries to imagine the perfect subject, something that can be loved to death. He imagines the subject to be ecstatic, like a child, made of innocence and crime.
An image emerges as a figure stumbles in from the darkness. The man watches it curiously. The figure seems to be moving irrationally, its behaviour is unreasonable and illogical. It also seems to be unable to see… because it doesn’t have a head.
The figure withdraws, it touches itself like an animal in a zoo, unaware or perhaps indifferent to the man’s curiosity.
Elise Harmsen
Tout Va Bien
7-23/4/17
She can no longer muster the force to slip out of bed; she claws at her face as the ceiling continues to descend.
The ceiling is a mere few inches away.
The room seems like a coffin. The dark descends, thicker and thicker, enveloping everything until the image is effaced by darkness.
Mark Shorter
Test Excavation
28/4-14/5/17
Something terrible has taken place and you can feel it. A fight, a murder, an affair: intense body contact. They say that you can smell it. But it’s not just a nasal thing. It’s that thing where a lot of sweat has evaporated so fast and couldn’t get away. An uncanny humidity; a thickness in the air, you’re a barometer now.
Nick Strike
(Box of Clouds)
28/4-14/5/17
‘Before film appeared, there were little books of photos that could be made to flit past the viewer under the pressure of the thumb, presenting a boxing match or a tennis match…’
Walter Benjamin. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. 1936
The pressure of the thumb bookends the history of moving pictures from the flip book to Facebook: individual acts of viewing that bracket the collective dream-world of the cinema.
The collective has migrated to the cloud via the iphone.
The phone relieves me of the need to see for myself.
The thumb run over the screen is slowly honed.
It draws a cloud across the sun.
Cut to Rocky in the ring corner: “I can’t see nothing, gotta open my eye. Cut me Nick. Go on, cut me.”
Sanja Pahoki
Floorwork
19/5-4/6/17
‘Floorwork’ consists of a 3-channel video-work and customised gym mats. The videos were filmed in the artist’s parent’s home in Queensland and portray the family performing various floor actions. The mother is caught in a perpetual loop doing her early morning exercises. The father is seen crawling along the ground straining for the couch. In the third video, old scores are to be settled, with brother and sister embroiled in a ‘bitter’ wrestling contest.
Aging bodies are shown in a struggle against gravity. The gym mats have been placed to help cushion the inescapable fall.
MP Hopkins
Murmuring House
19/5-4/6/17
Four things:
1. Words from elsewhere are transcribed and shaped
2. Sounds: non-musical ones in the flat,
many imagined ones,
3. Words gathered at random from shelves,
inscribed chalky,
on wet wall
4. A murmuring house,
many could be’s
________________________
As part of his exhibition, MP Hopkins also performed a score titled ‘Rooms into a Room’, which is a 39-page text-based score that was based on 3 things:
1. various domestic ambient sounds from two places: a flat Hopkins lived in in Melbourne, and current house in Marrickville
2. notes from Hopkins’ musical compositions
3. invented, fantasy, nonsense sounds
The performance took place on Saturday 3 June 2017, and its ensemble included:
Matthew Brown (electronics)
Lucy Phelan (electronics)
Tim Coster (electronics)
Laurence Williams (violin)
Elise Harmsen (cello)
Peter Blamey (guitar)
Emma Ramsay (organ)
Ruark Lewis (voice/objects)
Anna John (voice/objects)
Zoe Robertson (voice /objects)
Brian Fuata (voice/objects)
MP Hopkins (voice/tapes)
Andrew McLellan (voice/objects)
Event images + video by Rafaela Pandolfini
Clementine Edwards + Isadora Vaughan
Tess
9-25/6/17
How does heterogeneity persist? For Tess, Clementine Edwards and Isadora Vaughan bring their practices together to test out and materialise femme modes of endurance. Their installations in sculpture and sound give rise to mercurial, unpindownable states – states that express narrative elliptically. After all, a single line is an infinity of discrete points connected, and the line can also be closed, as in a circle.
Brian Fuata / Latai Taumoepeau / Get To Work
Splashback 2
9-25/6/17
Over the course of three weeks, Gallery 1 was a workshop, stage and catchment for three new performance works by Brian Fuata, Latai Taumoepeau and collective Get to Work. Performance events were scheduled each Saturday of the exhibition duration at 4pm.
Detritus, props, texts and research materials remained in the space over this period, accumulating what is to be considered the exhibition, external to the performance events. The framework aimed to decentralise notions of time and space in the typical exhibition program, and foregrounds fluidity of authorship across the events as objects, texts and materials absorbed into a collective stream of dialog and action.
Splashback 2 is the second occurrence of the Splashback performance program, curated by Anna John.
Saturday 10 June, 4pm – Brian Fuata: ‘I will most likely die from suicide by Brian Fuata’
Brian Fuata performed a structured improvisation about apparition, occupation and kinship.
Saturday 17 June, 4pm – Latai Taumoepeau: ‘I WAS HERE’
For a week, 55 was an open studio where anyone was been welcome to drop in and join Latai in uncovering invisible narratives from the neighbourhood. This performance is the first development of an on-going exploration.
Saturday 24 June, 4pm – Get To Work: ‘GTW TRADING LTD’
In this performance, Get to Work scaled the site, constructed a relationship to the space, and worked together in completing collaborative tasks.
Event images + video by Rafaela Pandolfini
Nicole Breedon / Waratah Lahy / John von Sturmer / Tim Ungaro / Simon Yates
Big Numbers
7-23/7/17
Big Numbers is an exhibition of artists whose work shares a common theme of charting space and time, often incorporating some mathematical or numerical component. These works explore potential approaches to examining information about the world, finding patterns that might otherwise not be immediately apparent, or creating maps and signposts to territories that might otherwise be lost or go unnoticed.
In 2016 Waratah Lahy created an image a day, to record each day over the course of the year. The series of 366 images are here reconfigured to move beyond chronology, forming subjective associations. John von Sturmer’s work collects found objects and images to build an evolving narrative. Nicole Breedon’s star field of connect-the-dot numbers invites us to decode its meaning. Tim Ungaro constructs hypothetical journeys and histories through found objects and archival technologies. Simon Yates presents research into the history of an infamously unfinished graphic novel from the 1980s called ‘Big Numbers’, on the subject of shopping malls and Chaos Theory.
The Twilight Girls
Why Can’t I Be You?
28/7-13/8/17
Vicki Papageorgopoulos
Greek Treat
18/8-3/9/17
This exhibition presents four paintings that bring together elements of Papageorgopoulos’ connection to her Greek family and culture. These paintings include visual references to Greek Mythology, her favourite Greek sweets, the 2004 Athens Olympics and of course the unexpected 2004 UEFA Euro cup soccer win.
Del Lumanta
Dog Gamut
18/8-3/9/17
link – interview with Jake Atienza on SBS Filipino
(1) An examination of identity between connection and confusion, recognition and division.
Jason Markou
Sunroom
9/9-24/9/17
Luke Parker
Moons/Mirrors
9/9-24/9/17
Aodhan Madden
Viper’s Traffic Knot
29/9-1/10/17
Debris Facility Pty Ltd
Entropyneur Net/Working Infestment Portfolio
29/9-1/10/17
Athena Thebus
Dreaming About You Woke Me up
5-22/10/17
How do you describe a feeling? Kylie
asks at the beginning of the song
In My Arms
I’ve only ever dreamt of this.
In that glimpse of you pressed against a set of bars—
I knew how to touch you
I want to be humiliated and for that to be my penance
I want you to be the source of my daily pleasure
Excerpt from DOGGY 2016
Vanessa Berry
Mirror Sydney Maps
5-22/10/17
Mirror Sydney is a city of undercurrents and overlooked details, illuminated by memory and imagination. Its maps present an alternative Sydney, of suburban anomalies, mysterious infrastructure, anachronistic businesses and underground networks. Like star charts, the Mirror Sydney maps show constellations of urban and suburban details, from the objects lost on trains, to the unlikely landmarks of Parramatta Road and the multiple Harbour Bridges that appear throughout the suburbs. Created for the book “Mirror Sydney: An Atlas of Reflections”, they combine detailed line drawings with typewritten and Letraset text to reveal the relationships and trajectories that can be drawn between the details of the urban environment by those who seek to reimagine it.
Jelena Telecki / Andrew Hazewinkel
Ecce Homo Homo
27/10-19/11/2017
JD Reforma
Princes Highway
8-24/12/17
The Princes Highway came into being when pre-existing roads were renamed ‘Prince’s Highway’ after the visit to Australia in 1920 of the Prince of Wales, who would later abdicate the throne as King Edward VIII.
Filmed on this arterial (and somewhat abdicated) connection between central and South-western Sydney, Princes Highway is a reflection on doomed masculinity: a cycle of concrete, cracked, congested, confused, chromed emblems.
Jake Atienza
Work 37.5, 150, 1800 hrs
8-24/12/17
Cleaning is studied as a series of behaviour that act as a paradigm of social currency. The repetitive nature of the audio recordings capture the repetitive nature of cleaning. Work 37.5, 150, 1800 hrs looks at the loneliness of cleaning, making visible a sense of entrapment and the accompanying state of constant questioning.
Dexter Fletcher
Fully Automated Dexter Fletcher (Beta Version)
2-18/2/18
Fully Automated Dexter Fletcher (Beta Version) is a game that enables those who play it to create artworks as Dexter Fletcher. Fully Automated Dexter Fletcher is an enquiry into the basic philosophy of games. Is it possible to create a set of rules that can be followed in order to produce work indistinguishable from Dexter Fletcher’s existing artworks? The final version of Fully Automated Dexter Fletcher will be a game that can be distributed to other people, who, as players of the game, can create Dexter Fletcher artworks, thus expanding the membership and production capacities of Dexter Fletcher, potentially without end.
Paul Greedy
Untitled Wire No.6 (semi-structure)
2-18/2/18
Laura Hunt
Guidance 417
23-25/2/18
*two day event
George Tillianakis
(2) Male (3) Cunt
23-25/2/18
Debut screening of two new video works by artist George Tillianakis.
View the full video works here – https://vimeo.com/274608634 / https://vimeo.com/274609164
A follow up to 2017’s (1) Faggot – featuring Liam Benson and Ladonnarama, a performance video trilogy regarding the featured artists perspective on men.
*two day event
Sarah Goffman
I Am Not Gina Rinehart
13-29/4/18
Gina and I share the same birthdate, February 9 meaning she is an Aquarian as well. I wonder about her, and all the wealth she was born into and subsequent dealings making her one of the richest women in Australia, indeed in the world. Gina and I are both fat, and in some photos I’ve seen her looking like me, or I like her. We both have quite straggly hair, yet she’s so wealthy I’m amazed she doesn’t have a stylist rectifying her look… in that vein I’m also noting that she is one of the very very few rich women who are fat, and who allow themselves to be in the media despite not looking a certain way.
In the boardrooms that Gina occupies there are more men than women, always. I wonder how things go for her when she’s in these places. Standing on George Street one weekday I was waiting behind three very broad-shouldered giant men in pinstriped business suits, I’ve tried to simulate this physical effect. These reflections have been on my mind while making the work for this exhibition.
Nick Strike
Foot Picture: The End of the Reel
13-29/4/18
The 16mm film shows a man as he practices diving skills on an outdoor trampoline. Just up and down – repetitive facts. With a glass lens I focus the sun onto the figure within each frame of film and burn it out. A molten hole pulses in the midst of a forest, a river and a rectangular trampoline on the sand. To concentrate an event into a single image, and to hold this fragment still, makes it volatile, like a frame of celluloid caught in the projection gate. The mind also resists being held and runs to follow rhythmic links and chains of association. In the final moments of Coppola’s film ‘The Conversation’ (1974), the main character holds in his hand a statue of the Virgin, uncertain if it conceals a listening device. He hesitates, sweating, but then it and the room, with its fixtures and walls, its floor and ceiling are torn apart. He finds nothing and nothing remains intact except his sax. After a run of 7 years 55 is calling it a day. An afterimage will remain, fixed – unexploded and dangerous.
Elise Harmsen / Nina Knezevic / Nicola Smith
And So I Left
2-18/3/18
The want to leave waxes and wanes. There are many reasons why one decides to leave somewhere/someone/something.
Sometimes voluntary, sometimes forced, sometimes with the option of returning. If you do return, there’s always a familiarity and a strangeness to the thing that you left. Like a film you have watched for a second time, you remember parts of it, familiar images flicker past. You know how it began, and how it ended.
Film is the closest thing we have to time travel.
Each work in the show pulls apart, stretches out and laments over cinematic time. Each artist has selected a film to work from, preoccupying themselves with a particular scene from their chosen film.
……….
Nicola Smith has returned to a film by Belgian structuralist filmmaker Chantal Akerman that she looked to for a series of fifteen oil paintings upon moving back to Sydney in 2015. Je tu il elle (Belgium/France 1975) was Akerman’s first feature and is in three parts. Written, directed, and starring Akerman, it is emotionally complex, aesthetically spare, and permeated with Akerman’s characteristic long takes.
Painted in oil directly onto the gallery wall, Nicola’s work for And so I left looks to the first act of the film. The scene depicts Akerman’s character Julie laying on a mattress on the floor. The walls are bare, she has consumed copious amounts of granulated sugar with a spoon, straight from a paper bag. She writes unsent letters to her former lover, and moves the furniture around. A month passes. The camera often staying static as the action moves in and out of frame. This activity/inactivity continues until the
second act where she decides to leave the apartment.
……….
Elise Harmsen has currently been working with scenes from two films in Roman Polanski’s Apartment Trilogy. Within each of the films, Repulsion (1965) and The Tenant (1976), the central character is haunted by the space they occupy. Her work forms a critical eye on the source footage she is using – both a synthesis with and aversion to the original films. A re-imaging of these scenes from her own perspective, where she parallels architectural forms and moments of domestic noir with her own living/working environment.
The work included in And so I left returns to a scene that she has previously used from The Tenant (1976) where the central character (played by Polanski himself) moves towards a window in a dream of terror. The first video in the series sees the artist stumble out the gallery’s first floor window in a manner that evokes Polanski’s final leap from his apartment dressed as the previous tenant who has been haunting him. The work pays homage to 55 Sydenham Rd (and its immanent closure), where the three artists have also shared a studio for the past four years (also nearing its end).
The second work in the series is two synchronised projections that yet again reference the same scene . A print of a window hangs slightly in front of the wall with a projection of Polanski moving towards it. The print is an image of a studio window that Elise shared with her former collaborator Jürgen Kerkovius in Dijon, France. Alongside this work is a second projection, however this time around it is of Elise moving towards a projection of the Dijon studio window.
……….
Nina Knezevic has used Antonioni’s The Passenger as a point of departure for her work. In the film, the central character played by Jack Nicholson assumes the identity of a man he finds dead in a hotel room identical to his and who also has a distinct physical likeness to him. He first swaps clothes and later swaps the photos in their passports.
It is this switching and swapping of identity that Nina has drawn from, using it to examine her own experiences of immigration and the ability of immigration to both amplify and dissolve an identity, making the self seem more fluid and its construction more evident.
The work takes it’s form from the structural nuances in the film – the way the film marks time, memory and the construction of identity. Nina’s imminent departure to her home city of Belgrade further informs the work. In her video, Nina lays on the sand at Botany bay, planes fly overhead, folders that are constructed from materials used to make passports fall from above. Red for Serbia, mid blue for New Zealand and dark blue for Australia -each drop punctuating a new stamp on her passport from the past 20 years. Alongside her video work sits her studio table, a lonely shoe and scattered photocopies of documents. Remnants of someone who
got up and left.
Bonita Ely / Claire Lambe / Nina Mulhall / Campbell Patterson / Madge Staunton / Madonna Staunton / Caveh Zahedi
They Say I Look Like My Mother
Curated by Chelsea Hopper
2-18/3/18
This exhibition is dedicated to Diana Hopper (1946 – 2015) and Madge Staunton (1917 – 1986).
Kuba Dorabialski
Seven Revisionists
23/3-8/4/18
Kuba Dorabialski’s video installation Seven Revisionists (2018) is the second part of his Invocation Trilogy series of video works. The first of the series was last year’s Floor Dance of Lenin’s Resurrection (2017).
Seven Revisionists continues on from the first instalment, combining themes of political hope and disillusionment, restless myth making and vague, sugary memories of the 20th century socialist project. Shot on the centenary of the October Revolution of 1917, the video takes as its starting point Soviet cinema of the 1970s, distorting it with dance and slapstick.
The titular seven revisionists refer to a photograph of the leaders of the seven Warsaw Pact nations meeting just before the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Speaking a fictional hybrid dialect made up of various Slavic languages, an unnamed narrator recalls intimate memories of each of them (an insincere courtesy, a hostile smatter of gossip, a forgotten flirt in a health spa…). Meanwhile, two young boys cross a vast wilderness in search of a magical, mystical icon that will restore history and deliver us from evil. Finally, in a crescendo of 1970s retro synth sounds, religious incantations and grandiloquent communist phraseology, everything collapses into a single unifying moment of highspeed dance.
David Greenhalgh
The Eyes of the Power Company
23/3-8/4/18
An Archival Loop
By Rebecca Gallo
Compared to painting and sculpture, video art is new, but since the 1960s it has been taken in a number of distinct directions. It is documentation of live performances and public dissemination of private ones; it is moving photography, stop-motion wizardry, protracted documentary and minimalist arthouse. Video is also a medium for collage and remixing, starting from Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978-79). Birnbaum ripped footage straight from the popular TV series Wonder Woman, repeating over and over the moments where the character Diana Prince transformed into the titular heroine. Birnbaum was using TV as the medium to reveal its own mechanics, its treatment of gender and ultimately its absurdity.
David Greenhalgh works in this tradition, using the recorded image as both medium and subject. Trained as an artist and also in information management as an archivist, Greenhalgh is a digital scavenger: he samples the archive, reviving fragments from obscurity and tending to them with hours upon hours of tedious rotoscoping: tracing outlines at 24 frames per second. His is a process of trawling, cutting, layering, splicing and re-stitching. The archive itself is the most unpredictable element in an otherwise careful and deliberate process.
The starting point for Greenhalgh’s The Eyes of the Power Company was a journal article of the same name (i), but the work itself was shaped by the raw material of its construction: an extensive archive of public domain videos (ii). Available clips become the language through which he communicates, and it is not always easy – or even possible – to find the exact image to express a particular thought or mood. It’s much like spoken language, where we deploy signs and signifiers with the wistful hope that they will be correctly decoded at the other end.
In Greenhalgh’s The Eyes of the Power Company, a German narrator, subtitled with deliberate inaccuracy, speaks to us directly. These subtitles explain that the narrator has invented a new way of speaking and listening. There are no words, only sounds. Rather than corresponding to words – those imprecise intermediaries that only serve to complicate and obfuscate – the sounds are actually electric images. The suggestion here is that images, broadcast via sound waves, are a more direct method of communication than words. This flips conventional wisdom about art and writing on its head: art, with its still and moving images, objects and sounds, is generally considered obscure and indirect, requiring lengthy textual explication in order to pin down its meaning. In The Eyes of the Power Company, the opposite is posited as true.
A deliberate move away from the primacy of words could suggest a frustration at their inadequacy: a fear of being misunderstood (surely misinterpreted text messages and emails cause countless relationship breakdowns every day). It also implies an anti-intellectualist stance, and a move towards a universal mode of communication. To think that we could learn to communicate from the start again in a new, more direct and universal way is also a profoundly utopian suggestion. That we might develop new senses for perceiving the world that we can’t conceive of now – as the narrator says, it’s like having a cochlear implant in your visual cortex. We are inside Plato’s cave, and dimensions exist out there that we cannot yet perceive with our underdeveloped senses and limited understanding.
Here we loop back around to the practice of archiving itself: we archive with an acute awareness of our own deficiencies. We archive so that researchers from an inconceivable future can look back on our present and perhaps find profound meaning in the minutiae that seem irrelevant or insignificant now. We hold onto clues from the past and present with the expectant hope that future developments will unravel current mysteries. Archiving is a profoundly hopeful belief system. It rests on faith that humans of the future will be better equipped to make connections, to extract more detail and meaning from cultural material, than we are able to now. It believes, in short, in the idea of continuing human progress towards further enlightenment and understanding.
The reasons we archive echo the reasons we make art. The significance of both practices may not be immediately apparent, but both archivist and artist hope that over time, meaning will emerge – both for themselves, and for a future audience. Some might be proclaimed geniuses posthumously (they were just ‘ahead of their time’). Mostly, though, we persevere with the hope that someone will look back on our work and draw some kind of modest meaning from the sedimentary layers we leave: a shock of insight; a glimmer of recognition; a reflection of themselves in a time and place of the past. We hope that a thought or idea will travel along the channel of time, reaching out and reminding someone that their feelings are not new. A moment of solidarity sparked from the archive.
i Veinot, T. C. 2007. ‘“The Eyes of the Power Company”: Workplace Information Practices of a Vault Inspector’, The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, Vol. 77, No. 2, pp. 157-179. Sourced from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/517842
A long and rather dry academic paper for such an evocative title, Veinot’s article examines the work of vault inspectors, who examine and repair underground electrical equipment. Kind of obscure, but also surprisingly relevant. The author talks about what information is generally sought and collected – privileged – by researchers in her field of Workplace Information Practices, pointing out that there is a bias toward more white-collar, upper-class professions. This is interesting in its analysis of what information is gathered, and therefore archived, suggesting that the archive, like history, can never really be complete.ii https://archive.org/, a website with the noble mission ‘to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge’. It houses books, movies, software, music, websites, TV shows and more. Not all of archive.org’s materials are held in the public domain, however all the clips used by Greenhalgh are. As I understand it, this forms part of a noble attempt to function at the edges of capitalism: the only required space and materials for Greenhalgh’s work are a desk, computer, software and internet access (which includes, admittedly, access to archive.org’s massive servers. But he’s not making huge paintings from raw canvas and excessive oil paint in an overpriced inner-Sydney warehouse. It’s a step in the right (left) direction).
A long and rather dry academic paper for such an evocative title, Veinot’s article examines the work of vault inspectors, who examine and repair underground electrical equipment. Kind of obscure, but also surprisingly relevant. The author talks about what information is generally sought and collected – privileged – by researchers in her field of Workplace Information Practices, pointing out that there is a bias toward more white-collar, upper-class professions. This is interesting in its analysis of what information is gathered, and therefore archived, suggesting that the archive, like history, can never really be complete.ii https://archive.org/, a website with the noble mission ‘to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge’. It houses books, movies, software, music, websites, TV shows and more. Not all of archive.org’s materials are held in the public domain, however all the clips used by Greenhalgh are. As I understand it, this forms part of a noble attempt to function at the edges of capitalism: the only required space and materials for Greenhalgh’s work are a desk, computer, software and internet access (which includes, admittedly, access to archive.org’s massive servers. But he’s not making huge paintings from raw canvas and excessive oil paint in an overpriced inner-Sydney warehouse. It’s a step in the right (left) direction).
——————————————————————————————–
The Eyes of the Power Company:
A Berlin Wall beneath your feet
An internet drop, the modem’s reach
a radial fern from a finger click
an ice sheet detaches and reaches Sao Paulo
a man with no arms makes beautiful music
a city is levelled and sanctions soon follow
a brand-new bag designed for your dog
a racist attack at a tram station stop
an exploding phone
an internet tone
The Eyes of the Power Company is a short film made of other people’s films. It is a film about the limits of our understanding of the world and the inadequate tools and vocabulary we possess for knowing how things are: we must make do with what we’ve got, just as the film relies on second-hand footage.
Soundtrack contributions by Daniel Pliner aka Paleface.