Barakat Crackerjack

While it's part of the radio spin for me to promote art according to a criteria of free piss, I've been finding it a tad hard to attend free openings and still make some sense of the ART.

Mayhem will do her best to attend the opening night of

"Like Talking to a Brick Wall" by Josie Cavallaro

At Loose Projects: Level 2, 168 Day street, Sydney

(opening wednesday 26th july 6-8pm & continues to saturday 12th august)


As well as some scary spikey thing at Gaffa on thursday night (see cut and paste job on press release below)

::Vices & Devices: Machinations of Flesh::
Tales from the Great Subconscious by E. Armanious

at Gaffa: 330 Crown street Surry hills

the latter makes me thing of the show I straggled over on a sodden friday night at chrissie cotter gallery.

I'd already been sinking guinness all afternoon at the FLODGE (god academia is a tough life ain't it?)- and bedraggled my umbrellad frame up the road and round the conrer to the nice room at the back of Camperdown Bowling club.

After the SHAM project, mayhem has become fully convinced of the acute compatibiity of art and bowling greens and reckons more art audiences should be required to wear pristine white uniforms - just so the wine stains stand out more, but that's another story.

OK the pretext was not just the free goon in 3 flavours and 2 colours and some damn nice hoummous and probably my only source of fresh veggies last week, but for the art.

nicole Barakat is a damn fine seamstress. she teaches textiles at COFa and is known in some of the seamier circle sof the lady loving set as WIFE. Not because she is one - but coz of her whacky perfomative pisstake/well dressed fifty something exqusite stitching hysterical mimetic pisstake of the whole domestic fmeininity caper.
My favourite was her promenading around the performance space with a Ghetto Blaster screaming out that crayz turkish pop singer - it almost topped Texta's sister 'cheese single' doing Vinyl disc spinning - and inspiring a NO NET extrmeen sports karaoke collaboration... argh! those halcyon days of the early noughties.......

If you've been down to AGNES to admire the postmodern pastiche of Ghada Amer’s sexy stiched ladies on canvas… well you’ll wet yerslef over the barakat/collet combo at the cotter.

(Sorry for excessive alliteration)

Clarie Collett and Nicole Barakat both present rally involved fun pictorial works and objects – evoking the sensuality of stitch, weird mnemonic residues of text….textile and nice colour furry felty form……

I loved Collett’s tryptich “My heart is a Great Black Bird” and adored Barakat’s fine work over canvas book linings…… (It reminded me of this nice chapter in Ulrich Lehman’s tiggesprung/tigerspring about Prousts palimpsests as textiles……)

Mayhem loves two things deeply in this world: the infinite coloured ooze of divine drippy stuff and intense piercing intensity of good textile work. So sewing, pulling, felting…touching finding remaking, made birds, fierce flights of dragging imagination, sense, and the way woven things hold memory, touch, connection… well they get my juices going

I found some of Ghada’s canvases at AGNSW worked well, and the threads meshed madly into something not sewing and not paintings – other’s were just too crude/clunky & ostentatious.

By contrast the Collett/barakat show was all amazingly exquisite and the work is cheap and I’d put the show as hot tip for the mayhem budding art investors guide to starting small. Cheaper than a haircut. The show goes to 30th July. Chrissie Cotter is on Pidcock street Campo. Very close to parramatta road

meanwhile back to social calender:


Australian Centre for Photography and Institute of Modern Art present

An evening with Olaf Breuning
Artist talk with the star of Home, Brian Kerstetter

Paddington/Woollahra RSL
Oxford Street
Wednesday 26 July 2006
6.30pm - 8.30pm

Cost: $5
Bookings: Purchase Tickets Online
Please book early as numbers are limited

New-York-based Swiss artist Olaf Breuning will visit Sydney to present this artist talk for Australian Centre for Photography as part of a joint production with Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane. Supported by Pro Helvetia/Swiss Arts Council.

Drinks available from the bar

In his videos, photos and installations, Olaf dishes up a fantasy world of glam-trash quotations, an archive of alternative realities. Equally enamoured with heavy metal and counter-culture, historical romance and serial killer splatter, the courtly and the bogan, he constructs bizarre intersections of reality and simulation in which pop culture's interlocking clichés are amplified and exploded. His eclectic work provokes contrasting feelings of discomfort and fascination, repulsion and seduction, embarrassment and intrigue.

ALSO at Sherman

DETOURS AND VARIATIONS

an exhibition of work by: JOHN YOUNG

The Director, Olga Harrison, and the Curatorial Director, Ricardo Silveira, invite you to attend the opening night of Col Jordan and Chris Langton's exhibitions.

Opening - Wednesday 26 July 2006, 6pm
Exhibition Dates - 26 July - 12 August 2006

Exhibition to be opened by Ken Reinhard and Anne Loxley

Harrison Galleries
294 Glenmore Road
Paddington, NSW 2021
t: 612 9380 7100
email: info@harrisongalleries.com.au
www.harrisongalleries.com.au

opening this thurs 27th July 6-8pm (runs 28july - 8th August)

::Vices & Devices: Machinations of Flesh::
Tales from the Great Subconscious by E. Armanious


Vices & Devices is an exploration into the nature and subjects of secrecy and the subconscious through the imagery of medical and cultural oddities and the literature and language of the hidden desires. The significance of these pieces rests in their function as tools for measuring the immeasurable interiors of the mind.

Vices & Devices take the form of hand held, physical and metaphysical tools, solid pieces of my fantasies and dreams that reside somewhere between the subconscious and reality, the grotesque and the seductive. They reference medical oddities such as Dermography (practiced on hysterical women in nineteenth century France) Phrenology as well less unusual historical and current medical trends, ideas, and design aspects, ritualistic tools of the past that mark rites of passage and states of emotion, such as tools for tattooing and scarification, and ideas of murder and prolonged suicide.

Utilizing a broad range of techniques and materials, this series resides in a unique position in regards to genre. My background in jewellery has allowed me to construct these metaphysical tools in a small scale with obsessive precision, but although their interplay with the body is of supreme importance, they are not by any means ‘Jewellery’. I have also been studying with a master swordsmith with whom I have been experimenting with Tamahagane Steel (also known as Damascus Steel), a exceptional metal, practically unknown in Australia, that originated centuries ago in
Japan for Samurai swords and blades. Other materials used in this series
include surgical steel, stainless steel, dental gold, sterling silver, graphite, glass, bone, mercury, gazelle antler and a single queen European wasp.


Gaffa
330 Crown Street, Surry Hills
www.gaffa.com.au
ph (61) 02 93806266
gallery hours mon-fri 12-6 sat 11-6 sun 12-5

Actuallly the same night and kind of up the road, there's a KNOT event thing:

they say "Knot on the other side" say the addie is the coner of Selwyn & Albion streets in Paddo, and apparently it sosme exhibition of some french dude called ARTEFAKT.

nvite looks kinda cute - so it moytt be orroytt