What does a wetland and laundromat partnership look like? Can the two live together in domestic bliss?
After moving a lovely community of wetland plants, a few hundred kilos of gravel and a couple of hundred litres of water into FirstDraft depot, the wetland is coming along swimmingly…
With the aim of making a work about Sydney the Depot was an apt place to be working from. From my bolt-hole in Woolloomooloo I could regularly hear an orchestra playing in the PCYC next door and boys hammering balls on the basketball courts, a friend and I watched as paramedics from The Cross moved a body from beneath the overpass. The proximity of the Botanic Gardens, Harbour and Hyde Park reminded me that Sydney was at my doorstep and that it was Sydney that I was aiming to render. I would walk, trolley in tow, from the depot through The Domain and into the city to hit the hardware stores for lights, nut, bolts and other materials.
The city is always in conversation, always dishing out scrutiny. One night as I hauled my trolley over Macquarie Street I noticed a woman staring at me, I pulled off my headphones and asked her if I looked crazy. “Yes,” She said, looking grim. “I thought you were a homeless woman, but then you looked so young.” Returning to the studio I would sit and stare at my supplies and hope that the work would appear, unaided, from the tangle of receipts and plastic packaging strewn across the floor.
The depot gave me the space to prepare all the production materials I needed to shoot Second City off site in Glebe. I used the depot as a space to imagine, test, scrap and define the elements of the work that eventually emerged as Second City.
Glebe Youth Centre Staff and The Artist. Second City. Two channel HD Video projection.2011
Stella Rosa McDonald is a video artist based in Sydney. She is currently completing her Master of Fine Arts by Research at COFA, UNSW. Her current practice and research focuses on community based performance and the city of Sydney.
Charles and Tully’s previous exhibition Bozo & Bozzetto at SPI Space March 2011
Double Or Nothing is the second in a series of ‘split-solo’ exhibitions exploring the merging practice of sculptors Tully Arnot and Charles Dennington. Works in the exhibition are created through a ‘collaborative practice’ model where conceptual development of artworks is shared and discussed, whilst maintaining a singular approach to materialization of form. Outcomes are personal, but exposure to one-another’s process produces commonalities evident in the dialogues between works. Ideas (and sculptures) are scraped from the cutting room floor and finished, or again discarded, as one artists trash becomes the others treasure and vice versa, ad infinitum.
This playful cycle of creative communication explores the (il?)logical approach to problem solving in studio practice, while also establishing vague ‘psychological self-portraits’ of each artist, through neurotic choice of materials and thematic idiosyncrasies.
Individual sculptures often stand as idiomatic elements who’s interpretation in isolation varies greatly from a reading of the show as a whole. This tension between sculpture and ‘installation’ develops on Arnot and Dennington’s investigation into the role of the maquette as artwork, and the theoretical/physical ‘openness’ of ‘unfinished’ artworks.
Furthermore, the short duration of this studio residency has encouraged each artist to approach their work with an immediacy that is expressed through temporal, highly experimental, and chance based works.
Through 4 weeks of intensive studio involvement, the artists hope to achieve either ‘Double’ or ‘Nothing’.
Arnot and Dennington are local emerging artists working in a cross-disciplinary practice, particularly interested in the heuristic philosophy of experimental sculpture. Charles is currently undertaking a MFA at SCA researching the role of absurdism and the individual in simulated aestheticised reality, and Tully is undertaking a MFA at COFA researching non-teleological invention and the unfinished object in relation to the alchemical change of object to artwork.
This exhibition is the second of 3 split-solo exhibitions that they are working on this year, alongside their individual practices.
I’ve had such a great time being part of the Firstdraft Emerging Artist Studio Program. Looking forward to next Wednesday evening.
Thanks Fran and to everyone at Firstdraft!
Paul Williams
work produced by participant Michelle Genders
The dead are without function, for death is nothing but ultimate neutralising uselessness. For the French philosopher and literary theorist Maurice Blanchot, a dead body is a former being that finds itself elevated to its disembodied resemblance.[1] The idea here is that only by dying can a living thing surrender itself to its own image and appear. The cadaver, he writes, “no longer has any relations with this world, in which he still appears, except those of an image, an obscure possibility, a shadow which is constantly present behind the living form and which now, far from separating itself from that form, completely transforms itself into a shadow.”
More than a simple displacement of found everyday objects, Marian Tubbs’ assemblage installations indicate continued reflection on the conditions under which such objects can be brought together. In Lightning Said Being, mortal remains of late (very late) consumer capitalist detritus, especially kitsch domestic paraphernalia, are once again removed from all familiar contexts and recomposed in new potential relationships. In the absurdly contrived and blatantly non-functional-limbo-space of the art gallery, these eschewed relics of daily life and language are precariously arranged amongst icons of utility. Here we have erected scaffolding without the purpose of that erection immediately visible and self-assembled shelving by IKEA that somehow lost touch with its functionality in the process of being assembled.
Tubbs renders the newfound uselessness of these objects (and by extension the uselessness of all art) self-consciously evident. In the kinetic VHS assemblage, an object of outdated technology is dissected so its curling black innards, previous media of ordered time and duration, are exposed all at once in a subtly moving object of elegant futility. Sign is no longer separate from signified.
Near the anatomical VHS experiment is an HD video work, where the camera’s lens has reduced/elevated the ritual of the nail salon to its perfect disembodied resemblance. While the artist’s foot is methodically massaged, clipped, polished and painted, the footage objectifies the intimate and mundane act of the pedicure, splits it from itself, and re-presents it as an absolute image, an ineffectual corpse that is no longer the living thing but the consummated expression of it. It’s all part of her perpetual evasion of didacticism – she realigns and reassigns the pre-existing, in order that we form connections and meanings on and of our own. It’s an exercise in interpretation and pure potentiality, which, as Tubbs adamantly clarifies, must include the possibility of failure.
Just as the useful living do not yet have resemblance, our man Blanchot tells us that a utensil only takes on its own image when it becomes damaged and useless. If the ideal expression of an object is “its presence freed of existence, its form without matter”, we can consider Tubbs’ controlled gallery space as a mortuary (the word has etymological roots in the French morgue meaning ‘to look at solemnly’ or ‘to defy’). Here, in this place designated for the storage, identification, sterilisation and beautification of corpses, the once useful are once and for all removed from their prior possibility of utility in order to appear to us, finally, as themselves.
[1] Two Versions of the Imaginary in “The Space of Literature”, 1982, University of Nebraska Press.
Exhibition runs at Firstdraft Gallery February 23 – March 13.
Tumult is done. Although I had a few problems getting the webcam I’m using to control the installation to work with my laptop, in the end it all came together and I’m really happy with it. There’s a photo of the full setup above. Now to install it.
I needed to get a subwoofer for Tumult as cheaply as possible and luckily I found this little beauty. It is supposed to run on auto-electrics, which means it needs 12v and has a REM terminal (essentially a remote switch to turn it on and off) along with the usual positive and negative terminals, so I had to get a power supply for it and run some voltage to the extra terminal to power it up but that was easily fixed. Once I got it going I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the sound it pumps outs, it matches with the speakers really well and gives the installation the bottom end it needs.
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.
