Awkward Beauty is curated and delivered by FORM, a Western Australian cultural not-for-profit which develops and advocates for excellence in creativity across communities, disciplines and sectors. www.form.net.au

In 2010 and 2011 one of Europe’s most respected artisans, Helen Britton relocated from Munich, Germany to Perth, Western Australia for a three month artist-in-residence at FORM’s Midland Atelier creativity and design precinct. Working from the Atelier’s studios, situated in the heart of Midland’s century-old former railway workshops buildings, Britton explored Western Australia’s creative landscape: meeting people, travelling, working with local materials and devising new ideas and bodies of work.

Awkward Beauty is an interdisciplinary collaboration between Helen Britton, Perth garment designer Justine McKnight and Perth photographer Michelle Taylor. The exhibition takes the complex notion of ‘beauty’ and spins a multi-layered, multi-material narrative around this; a narrative which is imbedded within the vast physicality of a 17 hectare historic railway workshop site.

Awkward Beauty is the direct result of the dialogue between Britton, McKnight and Taylor.

Each artist has created a body of 10 works (jewellery, garments, photography) as a direct response to the work created by the others. The work of all three artists is informed and inspired by the aesthetics, spatiality and suggestions of identity encompassed within the space of urban abandonment and its re-generation.

The railway workshops are in themselves an awkward beauty: at once majestic, fragile, industrial and domestic. Largely untouched and unrenovated, the historic workshops are poised in a rare and fleeting space between a crumbling history and a tangible future. As a photographic artist Taylor has captured this space, creating a visual narrative through her placement of Britton’s jewellery and McKnight’s garments among walls, floors, cornices, windows, shadows and shafted sunlight.

A complex and dynamic dialogue has emerged from the direct and reflexive process of exchange that has been ongoing throughout the making of this work. This artistic response to one another’s work creates a layering of garment, jewellery, body, space, light and architecture, as textures are built up by the juxtapositions and contradictions between materials, surfaces and forms. Awkward Beauty is a quality that enters each artist’s practice and work at many levels, and as such has become a point of commonality and convergence.

See the website here

What motivates you to work with this medium?
I predominantly identify as a media artist, I get excited by new technology and new ways that the we use it to communicate. I guess the thing that motivates me is knowing that I can use this media and manipulate it not for commercial purposes but to explore the narratives that interest me.

Who inspires you?
The late Mike Kelly is an american artist who I really admire, he used popular media to create these dark reflections on the way we communicate.

How did it all begin?
I studied Media Arts at RMIT which was an amazing interdisciplinary course at the time. I’ve been doing postgraduate study alongside exhibiting and lecturing for the last 10 years, my research all centres around looking at popular entertainments to generate ideas for my works. I’m also interested in horror films and the spaces of cinema.

How has the Melbourne digital Art/Multimedia scene evolved over time?
As a ‘scene’ I’d say unlike the early 2000′s its non existent and thats a positive thing. I no longer have chummy technology conversations with people, nowadays everyone knows how to put a video together, art students go and do film courses after their degrees. It used to be that everyone who had a computer thought they could be an animator or a film maker or photographer and what you got was crappy tech art. These days multimedia is ubiquitous and people don’t ask ‘how you did it?’, they ask why. This is a really positive thing and I guess it means the area has evolved (or disappeared?)

What sort of technology is most used now in projections/digital media/displays?
Depending on what I do I work with generally with consumer products, a short throw projector and a laptop. The quality of these products is incredible but the scope of what people want to do has grown. In time I hope we can get lighter, brighter and less power consuming products for projection, this will mean that as many people as can get hold of a computer can work with projection based art.

Why the interest in ‘dark ghost rides’ of our past?
I’ve worked with digital illustration and projection since day one, the challenge was to find ways to bring the world that I created on the computer into a real physical space. In a meeting years ago I described the work I wanted to make as a ‘Ghost Train’ and that struck a cord with the director I was working with. Since then i’ve been investigating the ghost train because I think it is key in understanding new ways to make narratives in space.

More information below:

Joel Zika – Miracle Strip
Dianne Tanzer Gallery
An exhibition of artworks that awaken a lost world

Artist Joel Zika creates prints, videos and sculptures that bring to life lost amusement parks from the past 100 years.

This exhibition will run in conjunction with the Gertrude St Projection Festival, with Dianne Tanzer Gallery hosting an enormous projection in their front window every night.

‘Miracle Strip’ refers to an amusement park in Panama City Beach (USA), demolished in 2006 after laying abandoned for over three years. The sight was earmarked to become a major property development only to be left empty in the wake of the financial crisis. Photographs of this site and others have become the inspiration for Zika’s brooding gothic landscapes.
Joel’s work has long been obsessed with the dark and mysterious world of the amusement park. The dystopian vision of an abandoned fair ground is a space rich with mythological importance in the world of popular entertainment and cinema. In this show Zika plays to that mythology but gives the rides themselves a new kind of life.
The architecture and detritus in the images seems to command a sort of kinetic energy; with beams of wood exploding and falling across the plane. In Zika’s world it is the architecture that has been re-animated and given life but the visitors of the past are nowhere to be seen.

Miracle Strip will run from the 15th June to 13th July

Projections will run nightly from the 14th June to 28th July

Dianne Tanzer Gallery

http://diannetanzergallery.net.au/

Tues-Fri 10am – 5pm
Sat 12-5pm
ph: (+61) 03 9416 3956
dtanzer@ozemail.com.au

For further information
Joel Zika

http://www.joelzika.com

joelmzika@gmail.com

Gertrude St projection festival (19-28 July)

http://www.thegertrudeassociation.com/

Charting the development of the Melbourne street art scene, Children of the Iron Snake looks at the last thirty years and tracks the journey of graffiti from railway junctions at night to festivals, abandoned factories, rooftops, drains and galleries. Comprising interviews with over 15 artists, as well as criminologists, anti-graffiti activists, and politicians, the film offers a in-depth look at one of the biggest art movements of our time.
“Melbourne’s Aerosol Age.”

You can enter the site here:

I couldn’t help feeling a sense of nostalgia recalling my years at school while the graffiti art and hip-hop scene was really taking off,before the stencil art thing hit in a big way.

It has been an exciting time, charting the journey of all the changes. A good question posed in the film- if it were to be made legal-would it still have the same effect?

The documentary also features Melbourne’s own, Mark Holesworth-you can read his blog here

How many artists create work just to sell and how many because they want to push and explore their ideas? Is there a middle ground? How much compromise has to be made?

Rick Amor
Afternoon by the Sea
Oil on Canvas
900×721
source: www.deutcherandhackett.com

The raw artistic talent of thirty international artists is the focus of a new exhibition, “Draw”, on show at Auguste Clown Gallery from 19th April to 2nd May 2013. Primarily works on paper, “Draw” explores illustration in its natural state and the transformation it takes as it turns into art.
The exhibition aims to introduce the individual style from each of the contemporary artists involved and celebrate the beauty of the drawing medium.

On the Photographic Front…

Leela
Schauble
Uncertain

In this exhibition, Leela Schauble examines human ambiguity and the role it plays within relationships.

17th April-4th of May -Blindside Gallery
Nicholas Building,level 7,room 14
37 Swanston Street, Melbourne,Victoria,
3000

Enter via lifts
in Cathedrale Arcade corner of Flinders Lane
Open
12-­‐6pm
Tuesday to Saturday

And for a bit of Collage action…

House of Bricks presents…

Jacinta Kyam – Exhibition One.
Opening night Friday April 12. 6-9pm
Kyam’s original collages take up to 2 months to complete. These collages are photographed, blown up and printed on metallic photographic paper. The effect is stunning. The viewer can observe the meticulous hand cut detail of the collages, viewing their sculptural detail and lucid, contrasting imagery as a photographic whole.
For the Facebook invite-click here

Melbourne Street Art, as seen on the Melbourne Street Art Tour

I thought”Reviews and Reflections”was an appropriate title for today’s posting. I know it’s not completely original, but accurately reflects
what it is about! I’m providing you with a link to here, my other side-side blog project, whilst a new other side project is
getting up and running (soon(. And so, it is all rather a reflection of my typical artists brain.
Always conjuring and reacting. I can assure you though, that this space is safe (for a while at least). I have every intention of
keeping it alive and feeding it everynow and again, until it comes to it’s ineveitable cyber death…Who knows?…

On that note, I have written a small article on digital archiving here. Because the net is a giant archive of sorts.

Here you can find an article on Tracey Emin, one of the Young British Artists who caused a ‘Sensation’(name of the popular exhibition)
with her comrades, Hirst and Lucas.

A review is also posted here on photographer Polly Borland and her portraits.

Happy holiday reading folks!

You can visit her here too:

Ballarat Regional Art Gallery
Got the message? 50 years of political posters
Until Sunday, April 14, 2013
(My past life as a political poster maker)

Two works in:

Elizabeth Gower’s curated show: Regimes of Value, which is in two venues
Margaret Lawrence Gallery Until April 13, 2013
(Work, play and sustenance  - my cast voids)
The Substation: Until April 7, 2013
(As long as it lasts - a DVD of many of my text works on hard rubbish)

You can read Robert Nelson’s review in the Age here:
Gearbox Gallery: South Yarra – Until May 3, 2013
Placeholders 1- 6 (Bronze casts)

Hatch Contemporary Arts Space (Banyule City Council Gallery)
HOME – reframing craft and domesticity - 4 April – 11 May
(Pyjamas and swatch books made from discarded mattress fabric)

Material Affect opening on April 12th at the Substation
(includes a series of large format 120 x 100 – Black and white photograms of her cast objects)

“I realised that I have my own language now-as far as my collage making goes. I have gotten to the point where painting is almost completely omitted in some of my works. Matisse regularly did this, he did cut-outs to the whole form of the shapes- he just used paper and not any paints. It becomes like sculpting except its 2 dimensional”.

The Pop Art Movement and cubism have also influenced Mark; which is evident in his compositions and shapes of his figures and landscapes. I asked Mark if he had ever considered working in a 3 dimensional way, to bring these forms off the canvas:

“I have never done sculpture. I have been a musician as well though, so that has been another medium. In that way I have been a multi instrumentalist, but the painting has narrowed it down, but with the fabric layerism, I feel as if I am almost sculpting in a way”.

One can be easily convinced that this is a type of sculptural form. Many layers are added over time to give a feeling of texture and depth to the works.

“I keep adding to them (the layers)-over time. Some areas have seven or eight layers and I add paint in sections to make it more graphic and give it more an edge.”

Mark uses acrylic paint a lot these days to accompany his fabrics as the acrylic is more compatible with the PVA.

“I used to use oils, but fabrics sometimes didn’t stick properly, it was a bit touch and go. Now I can layer up fabric and the drying time is fast.”

Mark shows me one of his works that has four different layers. Then comes an application of paint, then more fabric over the top. Another area has a transparent piece with a pink piece of fabric coming through. Sometimes fabric is patterned, or glistens and reflects.

“I love fabrics. I used to go and buy pieces from opp shops back in the 90’s, now I just buy reams of the stuff.”

I ask Mark if he uses any other mediums with his fabrics and paint:

“I use a spray of varnish to protect the work. I ‘m experimenting to see what effect that will have on the work. It’s a bit of a trialling process to see what chemicals are going to mix with the fabrics and things. It’s all a bit haphazard-no idea how archival it’s going to be, but I know the glue is good quality.”

So as far as the Gallery circuit goes, what has been Mark’s experience working with Galleries?

“I’ve been with a few galleries but I have found the Internet has been better for me as far as getting my work out there. I go at a slower place, as I have to also work during the day. One Gallery loved my work, but I couldn’t work at the pace that they wanted me too. I decided that I would work more monumentally on a smaller amount of work.”

And on that note, I asked Mark whether he would stray from his subject matter and get into something new:

“It’s been mainly female figures in interiors for a long time. I’m planning to incorporate some more with nature soon. There is so much to do conceptually and there has been progress.”

What I noticed about Marks work is that because of his unique qualities, it is hard to categorise. I wondered how challenging this was for art critics and galleries:

“Galleries aren’t quiet sure. Some of them find my work a bit edgy and some aren’t sure what it is- even when I tell them people like it and buy it, they find it can’t fit into a commercial box or anything. Thinking in terms of what the public will like, they seem to want work that is very polished and trendy—it can be representational or abstract but has to be polished. Its not that way out (my work)- it is quite different to what else is there. I think galleries have gone a bit conservative the last 10 years because of getting to a kind of saturation level with the market. That’s what happened a few decades back with music, so then there was a developing independent music scene. So it’s logical that visual art is starting to take that course too, and it seems that many people are wanting to access artist’s and their work more directly via their studios and the Internet”.

Mark is definitely like many artists past, staying on task and digging deeper into his subject, mediums and methodology, despite what the rest of the art world is doing.

“I have been reading about the cubists… and some of the artists used to shock each other-they didn’t like what each other were doing. If some one did something new they would be critical of it.”

On Mark’s website, he has blurb on why he thinks painting is not dead. We chatted on this further.

“Many of the lecturers’ and teachers in the 80’s were abstract biased, they were established in their own way. There was this sentiment with some of them that everything had been done. And it’s the same with collage, with some people saying, ‘that’s been done’. It’s like saying, at the end of Beethoven, that’s the end of classical, how can you possibly top that! But there is so much more to explore.”

I asked Mark, finally, where he saw himself in the next 10 years:

“An aim for the next 10 years is to establish this style more and travel and promote and sell my work. And to go to places like America and Europe and exhibit with others who are into the concept. I want to combine the traditional themes of the figure with interior and in the landscape and continue with fabric layerism. There doesn’t seem to be anyone else using that term. I even played around with the terms, and noticed someone had come up with the term ‘layerist’. If I key into the search bar ‘fabric layerism’, there is a lot of crafty stuff, but not as a concept in the way that I do it”.