Paddington is not quite dead

There's lots of stuff happening in Sydney this week, starting with an opening tonight at KUDOS.KUDOS is the COFA student gallery and is the last stronghold of funky youf out there kulcha on the eastern suburbs.

REVEALING AND RELIVING
Tim Anastasi and Angelo Polizogopoulos

The Greek Festival of Sydney presents an exhibition exploring the many interconnected ways in which past present and future correspond to create a modern experience for Greek Australians. The gallery space will have a dialogue between sculpture (which represents future), photography (which represents past) and the viewer (the participating audience) who create the link between past and future.

KUDOS: 6 Napier St. Paddington NSW 2021 (St. Sophia Hall)
exhibition continues to 31 March 2007
open Wednesday to Friday 11am - 6pm, Saturday 11am - 4pm

On WEDNESDAY there are 3 openings happening simultaneously (bloody hell) so take your pick.

I posted a promo last week about the Shapley Mckendry installation at Addison Road gallery, which opens THIS WEDNESDAY MARCH 28th.

You can get double the bang for your buck in marrickville that night because around the corner at FACTORY 49, they've got a viewing of - Wall Sculptures by MARLENE SARROFF plus a viewing of the Outside Wall Work painting by KATE MACKAY

at Factory 49 Showroom 49 Shepherd St, Marrickville, Sydney.
(Shepherd St runs off Addison Rd)

The same night in town, LOOSE have an opening as part of their A regular feature of "impromptu and responsive events, projects and activities (talks, sound nights, publications,workshops, exhibitions, production space) coordinated by the rotating
roster of Loose players."

this month...they're featuring a rather enigmatic happening by Shane Haseman entitled:

New Mysticism or The Steam Boiler Effect or You're Not Getting Out of
Here Alive, NO WAY NO HOW

Which Iäm not sure is the best promotional text for an exhibition, but maybe it will bring in all the suicidal claustrophobic extreme art buffs.....

opening wednesday 28th march 6-8pm and continues to saturday 31st march

Loose projects, level 2, 168 Day St Darling Harbour, Sydney

gallery hours: thursday and friday 12-5pm, saturday 1-6pm

On FRIDAY you can check out a great initiatve: featuring the sterling collaboration between Adam Hill and MArgaret Roberts

THE SURVIVAL EXPRESSO BAR Opens at 6.0pm this Friday 30th March at 137 Redfern Street (cnr Renwick) in Redfern.

hel it's a great title, linking the life giving elixir of expresso with the cultural survival of originary strine peoples AKA kooris.

There's an art gallery upstairs and downstairs will have performances by Emma Donoan and Rhonda Grovener wit lashing of the elixir of life and nibblies. Contact bonny.briggs@gmail.com for more info

On Sunday - airport doyen Melissa Laing is involved in performance art at, yep, the performance space.Coz its theatre and not art - they charge admission - I guess coz they doät expect people to do it all for free and love and free love...But they got dodgy goon so I reckon its worth a shot

Melissa says she has created a 3 minute work with two friends for their
Night Time series. (http://www.performancespace.com.au/event_8.php) A
combination of Kung Fu and insecure sound.

Sunday 1st of April, 7 pm, Performance Space @ Carriage Works, 245
Wilson Street Eveleigh

Happy April fools

Capitalist Realism

Maybe it's been a quiet week in Sydney, or maybe i really have fallen off the edge of the earth.

Mayhem was off-line for a week in the wilds of finland and forgot to poste the great stuff like the graf battle at May's, or Diablo's latest show of curly organic things at the botanic gardens, or... or...

anyway - I've received notices of only 3 things of interest - and all mostly next week. Loose has an artists talk on Saturday 24th March and Addison Road Gallery has a sound art installation opening next wednesday 28th March. (details below)



In blogland, I just read the artswipe's latest posting on the artlife - about video art which made me think of Tacita Dean's recent installation at the Guggenheim. Dean had a single screen projection in a room with comfy chairs - showing the last days of manufacture of celluloid film..... (I've cut and pasted the Guggenheim blurb coz i'm too lazy to type it up).

After discovering that the Kodak factory in Chalon-sur-Saône, France, was closing its film production facility, Dean obtained permission to document the manufacture of film at the factory with the soon-to-be obsolete medium itself. The resulting rear-screen projection Noir et Blanc, filmed on the final five rolls Dean acquired, turns the medium on itself. The 44-minute-long work Kodak constitutes a meditative elegy for the approaching demise of a medium specific to Dean’s own practice. Kodak’s narrative follows the making of the celluloid as it runs through several miles of machinery. On the day of filming, the factory also ran a test through the system with brown paper, providing a rare opportunity to see the facilities fully illuminated, without the darkness needed to prevent exposure. Also on view is Found Obsolescence, a strip of unexposed 16mm negative that Dean found in the factory’s sprocket machine, the holes abruptly stopping before its production was completed.

the above worked for me. I sat on my arse, right through the 45 minutes on a single screen. And watching it was tedius and strangely compelling. Maybe i'd just been frightened by the guggenheim's architecture and way too many spooky spanish paintings but it was really nice to watch vivid colours, and weird slow murky dreamy quality of every day life refractorised.

Anyway - technology moves on. Some frogs are organising a "Pocket Film Festival" of mobile phone film clips! Deadline is 30th March.

IS THAT A FILM IN YOUR POCKET?
The Pocket Films Festival is calling for artists developing video creations using the humble mobile phone. Selected films will be presented at the international festival June 8 - 10 in Paris baby. For more info contact pocketfilms@forumdesimages.fr

Meanwhile in the land of snow, I wandered out to the
Tampere Artists Union with my friend, where they had an exhibition of works by
"Kalle Lampela"

Some of the texts were in English and the link to Kalle's Website has more english text about his work. the image above is probably the strongest piece. Most of them looked like rerun's of Sigmar Polke's vintage Capitalist Realism pieces citing photoshop or illustrator instead of ye olde screen printe thang that Polke liekd to play with.

And some of the grande statement manifestos - substituting christianity, communism and capitalism with iconic images of Marx, Mao, Jesus, Bill gates, thatcher etc. were a bit too art express for me. All that earnest angst and messaging. I know Berecht's comment "Art should not be a mirror held up to society but a hammer to shape it with" is a moving testament to the social responsibility of the A R T - but i reckon being bludgeoned over the head just brings on a migraine.

ho hum. Maybe it's just a slow week.

Back to video channel installations (artswipe - why did you skip this one?) Riszart Dabek is giving a talk this saturday at Loose projects
Saturday 24th March, 4-5.30pm
level 2, 168 Day St, Sydney CBD.

The talk will be informal or conversational and aims to foster discussion
and the opportunity for dialogue between the artist and the audience.

Fervent fans of this blog may remember me discussing this insallation as a new space of intimate architecture - not that i've been able to see it - but it sounds great!

Meanwhile Don't Look Denizon greg shapley has an aural instalation with Kylie McKendry opening on Wednesday March 28, 6pm at Addison Rd Gallery, Addison Rd Community Centre, 142 Addison Rd, Marrickville

Being Not Becoming: Aspirational longing in everyday life
is a new multi-media installation that creatively
mashes together snippets of Beckett, Beethoven, Goethe and original
material to illustrate the concept of the 'Deferred Happiness
Syndrome'.

According to Clive Hamilton of the Australia Institute, in this modern
disease we "persist with life situations that are difficult, stressful
and exhausting in the belief that the sacrifice will pay off in the
longer term". A number of factors have led to this situation,
including "growing aspirations for more expensive lifestyles",
"preparation for retirement" and fear of job loss.

Just like victims of the 'deferred happiness syndrome', romantic
literature, music and art often harbour pent-up tension - holding back
gratification so that the release - the climax - is more fulfilling
(this was particularly so with the movement that Goethe is most linked
to - 'Sturn und drang' - or 'Storm and stress'). By taking a number of
works and removing this tension, thus making a state of 'being' from
'becoming', we will be metaphorically illustrating the subversion of
the deferment of happiness.

Our visuals consist of detourned romantic imagery. The humble storm
cloud, for instance, instead of being a mere symbol of brooding menace
on its way to reap havoc, becomes an object in its own right. It
becomes playful and ever-present, offering no threat of precipitation.

For the sound we have 'crunched' Beethoven's Fifth into a series of
elongated four-channel super chords. By doing this we have removed the
implicit direction, the impending release of the flood gates so
associated with nineteenth century Western music. Text from Goethe's
'Faust' (the classic tale of a soul sold to the devil) is also
incorporated seamlessly into the work as well as contrasting snippets
from Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot' (the ultimate arrival deferred).

'Being Not Becoming' is the result of a year of work and we would just
like to take the opportunity to thank Marrickville Council and Reverse
Garbage for their enormous support.

FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT GREG SHAPLEY ON 0401 152 434 OR
EMAIL dontlookgallery@gmail.com

Everywhere but Here

I'm meant to be packing because I'm getting on a plane to finland tomorrow. Meahwnile I think I'm being a guest blogger on the artlife coz they're making TV.

so my artlife review is a kinda Robert Hughes act where I rave about New york Art wiht some pretense at authority - but actually by the time it gets posted I won't be anywhere near any big apples.

so in honour of geographic confusion im going to plug 3 shows opening simultaneously in 3 east coast cities of Australia. they are all of artists who I respect and like so the reasons are sheer bloody nepotism.

i got no shame

On 13th March (Tuesday?) I'll be so jetalgged so I don't really care

ARLENE TEXTAQUEEN has a show wiht her pen pal Olivia Edith
"I'm hunting and pecking: feed me your troubles"
Seventh Gallery
155 Gertrude Street
Fitzroy, Melbourne

“I’m hunting and pecking: feed me your troubles” presents their felt-tipped and brush stroked renditions of luscious ladies from Oz and the US of A including Michelle Tea and local lasses....

On WEDNESDAY: Paper Waltz
opens at DON'T LOOK Experimental New Media Gallery
419 New Canterbury Rd (Near Marrickville Rd), Dulwich Hill

WHO: Laura McLean and Andrew Newman

CONTACT: Greg Shapley - Ph: 0401 152 434
EMAIL: dontlookgallery@gmail.com
WEB: myspace.com/dontlookgallery

Paper Waltz
Laura McLean and Andrew Newman

If 'the first casualty of war is truth' then is it also the case that
this truth lies somewhere between the extremities; between right and
wrong, good and bad, between being 'with us' or 'against us'?

'Paper Waltz' explores the binaries that are foisted upon us in times
of conflict; how we are forced to make decisions 'one way or the
other'. The middle ground is gone, swept away in the polarisation of
fear and suspicion. The 'sensible option' becomes an uninhabitable 'no
man's land' and desperation seeps into all areas of life, including
personal relationships.

The young boyfriend-girlfriend inhabitants of pre-war playgrounds are
turned by the insecurity of the battlefield into husband-wife (the
stark noir-ness of WWII movies echo these rushed consummations). This
'war-time' is accelerated and exaggerated; it is, by its very nature,
sentimental. Reminiscences of these moments therefore become
hyper-sentimentalised.

McLean and Newman portray this hyper-sentimentality with a series of
black and white figures -- cutouts that dance like clockwork, on
clockwork. They move jerkily to the binary tick-tock of timepieces
that count down their impending separation. But this dance never ends,
because it never really began. It is a figment of our collective
imaginations that is invented in times of dire consequence to humanise
these experiences. These apparitions stick in our minds and in our
throats, marking the only bearable moments in otherwise inconceivable
circumstances.

FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT GREG SHAPLEY ON 0401 152 434 OR
EMAIL dontlookgallery@gmail.com
on St. Patricks day: friday 16th March - a date well honored by getting pissed in the name of culture.....

In brisbanal
Julie Fragar has a show called DADISLIKITOO opening at the college art galery of queensland college of art on griffith uni. aks a local where the hell it is, It's north of balmain. The show is going to works from her current doctoral project that 'll be the Martin kippneberger goes textured and textual that she does so well - taking intimiate little scenes and drawing out the weirdness.

In sydney, Gallery 4A has a show: called Identity thieves - also opening on Fridya night.

they sent me a gif file - which can't be cut and pasted and is reluctant to be uploaded as an image file and i'm too tired to retype all the names - so you'll have to assume it's good. i'm sure it will be. - even though their PR is blogger unfriendly.

4a is 187 Hay Street. show opens at 6pm, on 16th March

Pink Bits and Milky

Generally I try to keep my blog realms separate - but the latest show has gotta be one for my friend zoo - lactating femme faggot and one of the stars of the latest SLIT



Owen Leong has just completed a respendently milky website which replaces his former blog - which is an increasingly popular interrim measure for artists wishing to get info and images up on a web address somewhere.....

Anyway to coincide with his new online presence, Leong has a show at the big white box down at darling harbour. There promises to be fresh new works to check out in an embdied as well as virtual form

OWEN LEONG
Opening THIS WEDNESDAY March 7th and running to March 28th
at Mori Gallery, 168 Day Street, Darling Harbour

Readers may get a bit sick of me plugging mori gallery all the time - But there's actually not that many contemporary commercial art galleries in Sydney -(Kaliman, Ros Ox, sherman are some others) THAT DON'T HAVE ANY NORMAN LINDSAY'S SECRETLY STASHED IN THE BACK ROOM - or some other golden age of boringness vintage stock room tideover material - so I wanna support what's good. Besides Mori is right next to Loose - which is the most amazing artists run initiative since Squatspace - and both are well serviced by public transport.

But back to Leong - whose evocative egg white, honey dripping prints and video's got me really happy and gooey at artspace and 4A in 2004. His images PERSONIFIED the best bits of Alphonso Lingis, and so much more.... fluid economies, exchange, flow, surface ambiguities etc. the work was slick, meticulous and yet incredibly ENGAGING - really meditative and seductive and disturbing all at once....

fluid becomings finally made sense.....
sigh

His latest show - promises to "explore race, gender and masculinities." This is the standard stuff that he does so well, Oh the exquisite paradox of "uber-weisse" from an asian man!, ohh, the exquisite ambiguities of food, becoming semen like, milk like, plastic like... and of so gently, exquisitely oozing around the deepest feminine ambiguities of milk.

Owen promises the viewers a video performance based on being held
"in a prison of white light and his body is penetrated by milk that flows with a will of its own. In 'Milk Ring' the artist is trapped under a ring of dripping milk and struggles to solve a honey puzzle that binds his hands."

If the exquisite affect of fluid ambiguities (SEE WHY i'm a PAINTER???) get a bit too much punters can always trap upstairs to Loose where they've gt an opening the same night of Ryszard Dabek's piece called "Between".

This is a twin channel vdeo installation that is all about space, objects and remants. Bodies will be evoked but not displayed. but they will be evoked... hell the images are all about bodily imprints on spces and objects and the " specially designed system of projection" promises "to both transform the video image and re-position the viewer's relationship
to it." So this is going to be creepy ghostlike interstitial embodiment. (I think this means that we're meant to feel the phantasmic but intimate gaps of things we leave behind, like the gaps between our teeth.... whihc is what interstitial means)

On a slightly less intense note - SHEFFER has a fun figurative show opening on saturday Arvo at 38 Lander Street, chippendale. (or whatever that suburb that got eaten by Sydney uni is....)

NAUGHTY is group show featuring works by Tanya Chaly Lucinda Chambers Kate Dorrough and Tracy Keogh. the invite has a Jeff Koons goes primitive ceramic piece (the artist ain't listed on the invite so you'll have to guess that fer yerselves....) and Tanya Chaly's pieces are painterly reproductions of film stills, that are small and erotic and a bit creepy but quite exquisite (I know this coz she had an ARTSPACE residency last year.....)

so I RECKON it's worth a gander.. and besides Scheffer is another commercial gallery space that is pretty cool.