Images from the depot residency by Marian Tubbs and SLUSH (Justin Balmain, Sarah Contos, Charles Dennington, Jonny Niesche and Marian Tubbs) for the development of shows, Have you ever been to the House of Cashmere? Maybe we could go and just roll around sometime, Opening: April 12, 6pm-8pm db project 19 Phelps St, Surry Hills and SLUSH, Opening: June 6, Firstdraft Gallery.
The future is known – my workshop as part of my residency at Firstdraft was held on really hot saturday in february at firstdraft’s DEPOT project space. People were asked to contribute their work and their stories from inner city Sydney in the 1980s.
Photos of the a workshop below are by Alex Wisser.
Recently I had the pleasure of working with a Back to Back Gallery in Newcastle. It was a project several years in the making. Right before the project was set to commence, a dear friend of mine, Abby Smith (an emerging musician from Bathurst), came to me with a song, a project and a challenge. This is the result:
Haircut, Darlinghurst Sydney
WHEN: Saturday February 25th 5pm – 8pm
WHERE: FIrstdraft Depot 13-17 Riley Street Woolloomooloo
There is a Russian expression ‘the future is known, its the past that’s always changing’ How people remember time and place is often determined by fragments. Individuals remember their part in the whole. Often that part is remembered to suit the present and changes over time. By bringing people from a specific time and place together The future is known will be an opportunity to re-remember the past anew, to bring together some of those fragments into a temporary present that will again feed and change the past.
Madeleine Preston’s residency workshop for Firstdraft’s Depot will attempt to remember a city and a state of mind through an exchange of work and stories about a particular time and place.
The evening will include work by
Uri Auerbach, Lisa Bloggs, Graham Brown, Megan Casey, David Claringbold, Wayne Connolly, Tony Cornaga, Joy Cornish, Peter Doyle, Einar Docker, Emmanuel Gasparinatos, Scott Holmes, Simon Hunt, Michael Hutak, Maria Katrivesis, Rob Miller, Karina Paine, Hugh Rammage, Tim Ritchie, Ashley Scott, Greg Shapley, Michael Sherman, Mark Temple, Phil Turnbull, David Art Wales, Miraim Williamson, John Willsteed, Maggie Woods, Toby Zoates and more.
If drawing is what happens when we take a line for a walk, then the way I see it, animation is what happens we when dare to watch. I have just moved into my new studio at the firstdraft Depot. I am uncertain about where my work will head over the next six months so I felt that the best thing I could contribute to the blog at present is a recent example of my work.
This film was created over three months during a recent residency a Waverley. It is hand drawn and an example of
the labour intensive process I engage in as a part of my practice.
The past 6 months have been a continued exploration of colour and shape placement in painting during my Firstdraft studio residency from June – November, 2011.
Primarily working within the square canvas, I have investigated pushing the relationships between colour and balance. This series began in 2010, after several years of travelling to major museums , two residencies (one in Paris and one in San Francisco), and with exposure to American and European abstraction; I have synthesised different influential styles into my own work from artists such as Malevich, Sol LeWitt, Josef Albers, Diebenkorn, Stella and Lee Bontecou.
As I develop a visual language, my organic rendering of geometric and lyrical abstraction is still shifting in palette, tone and shape. This flux or movement allows me to continue exploring different colour combinations and the spaces in-between major shifts in light and dark tone.
by Lila Afiouni
For random quotes from Eighty-Four Doors, a translation of 1984 using every language on Google Translate, you can follow this Twitter account.
I’ve been investigating Professor Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s visual illusions (see http://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/index-e.html). He studies the underlying mechanisms of visual perception in the brain and generates illusions that activate those mechanisms. It seems that advances in computer technology and neuroscience have pushed ‘Op Art’ into a realm of increased complexity and saturation.
I’ve been developing my own drawings in response to the Professor’s illusions, and the papers that he writes about them, by using some of the principals he employs.
Upon review of the Professor’s website and the work made, I’ve realised I responded to particular illusions because I read meaning into them. This meaning relates to concurrent investigations into yoga philosophy and practice, Sufi poetry, rhythms in nature, and new theories of time, space and the structure of the universe.
(To be continued…) Michelle Genders
The images below form the beginning of my studio residency – September 2011 to February 2012 – investigation into nostalgia. Using my mother’s photography from Beijing in the 1970s as a starting point, my time at First Draft Depot will be spent documenting places real and those no longer present. Some of the slides the work is based on include hazy images of Mongolia in winter. The images shown in the studio shots below show notional responses to those Mongolian images combined with attempts to address the sense of being on the outside of the particular history that was being written at the time.
http://www.madeleinepreston.com.au/
Below is an excerpt from Eighty-Four Doors, an experimental translation of Orwell’s 1984 using Google Translate, which is part of my upcoming exhibition at Firstdraft Lingua Franca.
Winston wrote in a blog in history.
Turn the all the door ans.Il humming current three, he was somewhere else.
There is almost no light. Young face, painted very thick. It is pure white mask and love the bright red lips. Party girls paint their faces in all. As long as $ 2 on the TV screen from the road for everyone. I -
So far, very difficult to move forward, closed his eyes, according to historical and finger two applications maintain stable vision regularly. Her voice was almost screaming Fallen tempting enemy most été.Votre obscene, he said, remember that you nerveux.Il
Well done to the poor that the paper is terrible how it can be bad. Sleeping In its more deadly threat to everyone. To avoid both, said he did not see how it sighs and printing.
Wall beds, tables, lamps, garden is very low -
Teeth on the edge of the abyss. It will throw the kitchen in the basement, said he believed it was Hubble yard femme.semblait Catherine. Proles just taste. It is mixed with the smell of treason near cœur.C: “This is serious, but life, but the sheep, the poor girl mort.Quartiers Want something you can sell a bottle does not cease to sell proletariat, the party forgives Condrieu weakness. Crime. It’s historical sexual activity, take all the fun as the target itself.
Interesting: Provide two, child marriage only ha repent for life. We are sex workers, poor foundation, consider the use of enemas.
The Firstdraft Emerging Artist Studio Program is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body
The Firstdraft Depot is supported by City of Sydney
Header image: Pia van Gelder, 'Signauxß', 2010. Image courtesy and copyright the artist.
