The Missing Link?

For those looking for a bit more of the Bill Henson biffo the MCA has a FORUM this Thursday at 6pm - with lots of different concerned types in attendance........

Meanwhile the Alter egos of Schappylle Scragg and her hot hubbie Darryll McGurk are donning their protodoctor caps this friday for a bit of a high falutin femininst gabfest on Performance, Porn and critical theory.

Be in the Wester tower of the camelot of camperdown (sydney uni's main quad) at 2pm as Getchen O'Riorden, Cath Davies and yours truly address "the subtle abyss"......

It's free, and should be entertaining......

It's also the first time I've attempted to theorise schappylle scragg......

Milky bits and Pink

On the theme of Mates.... err, well... here's another plug.

Mayhem's partner in Crime - aka Schappylle's hubby darryll has an astonishing project about to gush forth onto the streets of dulwich hill

don't Look Gallery are hosting 10 days of nonnomrative lacto-madness by the performance artist and evolutionary humanoid Zoo who will sit in the shopfront making milk and doing all sort sof poetry/performance/collaboration and play with it

Her words are better than mine so check this out:

Exhibition title: Curdle
Artist’s name: Zoo

Exhibition details: Don’t Look Gallery, 419 New Canterbury Rd, Dulwich Hill, NSW, Australia (a block back from the corner of New Canterbury Rd and Marrickville Rd)
http://www.myspace.com/dontlookgallery or email dontlookgallery@gmail.com
Opening hours are 11-5, every day for the duration of the exhibition
Opening night: Wednesday 9th April 2008 6-9pm. Small informal launch, statement of project intentions, few beers.
Closing night: Saturday April 19th, from 6pm. This is the big one- art created during the installation will be on display, and I will have more to say about it!
Contact details: Through the gallery or www.galactablogue.blogspot.com

What it entails: Curdle is an endurance-based installation piece, where the main activity performed is inducing lactation. This is achieved by regular pumping and the ingestion of a variety of herbs including fenugreek, fennel and milk thistle. I have done this before, but not to the same degree, so one of the main focuses will be on seeing how much milk I can produce. The first part of the piece will concentrate on the process of inducing, documenting the changes to my body and what milk I produce. The second part of the piece, once lactation has been achieved, will involve myself and other artists creating a series of milk-based pieces, by using the lactation process and the actual milk itself as inspiration, as material, or both. Already I have photographers, painters, sketchers and musicians taking part, and am open to any other suggestions for collaboration. Artists can just turn up as they wish, but for larger, longer pieces which involve serious input from me it is best to contact me and schedule a time, or at least discuss the nature of the work. The public is invited to visit at any time during opening hours, to record their responses, stories and ideas about the work in the journal provided, to ask questions, to observe the work in progress and engage with it in any respectful way they wish.

The main point of the installation: This is part of a larger body of work that has previously centered on other body fluids and processes, most usually blood and bleeding. It has its roots in body modification practice in that it is concerned with altering the form and functionality of the body. Curdle, and the entire induced lactation project I have undertaken, grapples with questions of how bodies (and more specifically, body fluids) are gendered, how they communicate with other bodies, and what happens when bodies and embodied practices are allowed to drift loose of their traditional boundaries. Clearly, lactation is traditionally the preserve of mothers and their babies (and the odd lucky husband), but breastfeeding is not the only context in which it exists or the only function it performs. Lactation and breast milk can be used to cleanse the body of toxins, to inhibit fertility, to access new ways of thinking, to gain sexual pleasure, to nurse a partner, to comfort oneself and others, to transmit cultural knowledge, to cure or to contaminate. This installation is also largely concerned with investigating milk as language, a text, and the lactating body as producer and conveyor of meaning.


For the record: This is not positioned against maternity or breastfeeding, but rather an attempt to consider what knowledges and experienc

es lactation and breast milk might offer when allowed to speak freely outside of patriarchal, heterosexual discourses.

OMIGODOMIGOD!!!!

I tried to pretend that January consists of some sort of major art hiatus just coz the ACGA galleries are closed till feb, but it's a lie... a silly fantasy.

Sydney art NEVER stops, just like the parties and the cockroaches.

Having sworn off red wine and tomato sauce, I've decided to brave the SEEN again.... so we'll see what my liver reckons.

First port of call will be Sydney's answer to Mathew Barnie crossed with the straight worlds version of Sexy Galexy.
It's happening THIS WEDNESDAY at FIRST DRAFT.
Mark Shorter survived a rough hewn apprenticeship in the welded steel school of blokey formalism to emerge a decade later as a neatly shaved icon of masculine sex appeal: Renny Kodgers. Having spurned a career path of annual appearances in SIX INCH SHOWS, he managed to flabbergast all and sundry at China Heights last year with a masterful display of refined masculine subjectivity. Having embracing Lacanian slips of the REAL, this year Shorter is moving on from THE PHALLUS and has headed straight for the 'objet petit a'. According to the press release for his new show: American Anus, Shorter:

penetrates deep into the relationship between scatological desires and caricature in the visual arts. Historically and formally linked to the grotesque, caricature provides a window into the primal machinations of the human psyche. Drawing on these ideas and the potential of the anus to provide a passageway to enlightenment Mark Shorter aims to tease and manipulate the forbidden passage through the strategy of the alter-ego.

I'm not even sure that Uncle Kev could top that one.

Shorter will be copralogically supported by the other collective collaboration opening on the same night: a group installation by Koji Ryui, Shane Haseman & Vicky Browne.

The three headed for the hills and have returned with something... I'm thinking of a Beuyss in a brown bag meeting chocolate drinking straws, but maybe their title is more evocative:
"We'll keep our cow shit in the country if you keep your bull shit in the
city"

If this isn't enough sock knocking then Lauren Brinkat has finally devised the ultimate tribute to late 20th century phallic mastery in "Live when I'm alive and sleep when I'm dead" - which promises to combine ROCK n ROLL and painting....

time and date details of this fabuloussness are:
Exhibition opens Wednesday 30 January, 6-8pm
and continues to 16 February 2008
Artists Talks on Saturday 16 February, 4.30pm.
Firstdraft open hours: Wednesday-Saturday 12-6pm
116-118 Chalmers St, Surry Hills NSW 2010
t: +61 (0)2 9698 3665 e: mail@firstdraftgallery.com


BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!!!


There could be a nice continuous Lacanian little theme emerging for this post, but I'm a bit of Deleuzian so I'll avoid any references to the mirror phase.

But one of my favourite artists to play with identity, and reflection and the shifting contours of the slippery shallows of feminine subjectivity is SARI KIVINEN.
Her nail biting extravaganza in the Lempriere was a joy to behold, and she has taken the personas of various feminine stereotypes: the drunk, the bureaucrat, the trashy girl, the country singer, the experimental music artist... and pushed them into space way beyond satire, but into a quite subtle and sensitive play with the edges of her own body, and the interactions with the spaces where these personas manifest.

This is a long way of saying that her work is funny, but deep.

In Roles to Make or Break
Kivinen promises to create an intimate and confronting experience for those who seek it.

She has taken the weird sensitive spaces between herself, and her personas - or what is presented as an alter ego and she's directly toying with it... in the same spot where they've had a hologram for the past month.

There are 2 pieces, and i've enclosed the blurb from DON'T LOOK:

"Mimic" is a work that centres on the determination to fulfill a role and breaking free from a role through destruction. In this work, Kivinen attempts to mimic perfectly two ceramic faces in one video piece, and in its stark counterpart, destroys them.

"Self Determined" is an intensively created work, developed from two hours of video footage in which the artist, in front of the camera, sat alone, read books, played games, listened to music, watched television and ultimately, drank a bottle of red wine. The final result on film is only the aftermath of this binge, an erratic but intimate episode of self destruction. "Self Determined" explores the pressures of fulfilling roles and the desperation for distraction that ensues, such as alcoholism.

I reckon this will be the ideal counterpart to Kodger's stark satire, and you get 48 hours and a short bus ride between the openings too.

Roles to Make or Break opens at DON'T LOOK gallery on Friday February 1, 2008, 6pm
with a performance on Saturday February 2-9 (Thur-Sat 11-5)


DON'T LOOK Experimental New Media Gallery
419 New Canterbury Rd (Near Marrickville Rd), Dulwich Hill

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