Now Showing: Pulp Fictions @ Westspace

These pictures are from my current exhibition Pulp Fictions, a collaboration with my friend and fellow paper-mâché-ist, Jonas Ropponen. The works for this show were developed using the metaphor of paper-mâché as a premise for deconstructing existing objects and making them anew. We both swapped a number of things - including original sculptures, books, pictures, written phrases and verbal instructions - which were reinterpreted in various ways. Some of the final works were made directly from the original material, while others were developed from ideas that emerged from the encounter. The result was a very playful and yet sincere response to a highly diverse range of materials and ideas.

I found myself unintentionally embodying Jonas' sculptural style, and creating a number of highly anthropomorphic - or to be more accurate, pareidolic - sculptures. And I don't mean this in a creepy, Rosemary's Baby kind of way, it was just a different way of looking at things. The overall process was not only incredibly fun, but also very liberating;  it was an ideal opportunity to step outside our usual modes of working and be more experimental in our approach. In some ways, it even helped me confront my fear of abstraction, as I managed to create my first ever abstract painting (see below). It's funny how an exercise like this can bring to light how easily you can end up (literally) painting yourself into a corner by never attempting something markedly different from your previous artistic output. To that end, I'd thoroughly recommend it.

As part of our project, we also produced a limited edition artist book/catalogue, which has a hand-printed wood-block cover, and a number of images of the development of the project. It also contains a brief essay by Jonas outlining the process undertaken to create the works, and an 'exquisite corpse' style story - which revealed a number of unusual and unexpected parallels...

The books are available for $15 at the Westspace bookshop until they run out. (There was about 20 left when I last checked!)

Pulp Fictions runs from May17th  until  June 8th at Westspace, Level 1, 225 Bourke St, Melbourne.
The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, from 12-6pm.

*All photos on this post courtesy Kim Jaeger. Thanks Kim!

Tarantism by Joachim Koester

This film is currently on display at the Ian Potter Museum at Melbourne University. It is a choreographed dance, based on accounts of a medieval Italian ritualistic dance that was employed to prevent poisoning from spider bites (I'm not sure that there are Tarantulas in Italy, though?). Unfortunately this captured version doesn't do the original film any justice, so if you are in that neck of the woods, I strongly encourage you to spend five minutes or so to watch it - it's quite mesmerising.

Coming Up: "Pulp Fictions", with Jonas Ropponen

I have recently been working with my friend and colleague Jonas Ropponen to create a collection of works for an upcoming exhibition, titled Pulp Fictions. This show uses the process of making paper-mâché as a kind of metaphoric departure point for a collaborative exchange of materials and ideas. Given that Jonas and I are both frequent users of this medium, it seemed an appropriate way of engaging each other's practice. At its essence, the making of paper mâché requires the deconstruction of one object in order to construct a new one (newspaper into piñata, for example), so we have adapted this approach as a system of exchange and transformation. 

We have been giving each other objects which the other has been transforming, or using as a conceptual springboard to create something new. Sculptures, pictures, found objects, rubbish and studio ephemera have been swapped, and are currently undergoing a process of reinvention. The exhibition will be a collaborative installation of the final products.

Pulp Fictions will be on display at Westspace, from 17th May to 8th June, 2013.
Opening event, May 16th, from 6-8pm.

Kurt Schwitters

V I D E O A R T - Guy Ben Ner

2013 ought to be exciting. One thing in particular I plan to explore further this year is video. I have only ventured into that realm once (in any serious sense) and it was, in my mind, a successful undertaking. It involved a number of studio-based experiments with ephemeral or unpredictable materials such as mud, ice and expanding foam - and the documentation of these materials and their behaviour. The final result was presented in an immersive, sculptural environment. Sadly, my documentation of this was grossly insufficient, but there are a few images of the final result here.

In my search for ideas for my new project, I recently discovered the films of Guy Ben Ner, and Israeli video artist.  Ben Ner makes seemingly very simple, yet beautiful and funny films apparently shot in his own home, and employing occasional props to embellish the story. The inclusion of his children as actors in some of the films makes them incredibly endearing, and helps to find a tone that balances the absurd with the profound. They are reminiscent of Buster Keaton or Chaplin's films, in their lack of sound, the use of text panels in the narration, and the way simple devices such as slapstick and visual trickery are employed to bring humour to the story.

Below is his adaptation of Moby Dick.

Enjoy!

h a p p y n e w y e a r

Hi there.
This is just a brief note to say that one of my resolutions for twenty thirteen is to take the blog by the horns, so to speak; to put to good and proper use this thing that lurks mostly in the periphery of my digitally enhanced life. I hope that this new era will be beneficial for the both of us [you and I].

On that note, here's a song to stir the spirits...



speak to you soon.

Andy
x

Forgetting the Ordinary, Pt. II @ Sawtooth ARI, Launceston

To those of you who have taken the time to occasionally have a look at this blog, I apologise. Whenever I have a (forced or otherwise) hiatus from updating, I inevitably come back to it feeling like a parent who has suddenly realised that their kids have grown into teenagers and no longer want to speak to them, and are suddenly overcome with regret that they didn't spend more quality time together in the 'golden years' before...

Luckily this blog is unlikely to get bad tattoos, take drugs, listen to emo music or just generally ignore me.

Gross generalisations aside, I recently traveled to Launceston, in northern Tasmania, for the second installment of the exhibition Forgetting the Ordinary, with Paul Wotherspoon and Michael Georgetti, and this time with a newcomer to the group, Ross Coulter. The exhibition continued our collective examination of the everyday, and the absurdities or moments of profound banality that may occur within the realm of 'the ordinary'. 

Sawtooth gallery, Launceston's local ARI, is a really beautiful and professional space, and seems to run very smoothly under the captaincy of Fernando do Campo, the gallery director. On the whole Launceston was lovely; I saw macaques in the park, ate delicious southern-style ribs (pork, not macaque), saw some amazing old brick architecture and almost went for a trek up Cataract Gorge. I'm looking forward to visiting again when I go back to hike the Overland track...one day.

The pictured art works below are attributed as follows (I'm sorry everyone, I've forgotten the titles - even to one of my own works...):

Galah/boots - me

Bananas, titled One small step - me

Big black structure - Paul

Fluorescent painting - Michael
Ramshackle tower, titled Shrine to the absurd - Michael

Shelf with paintings - Ross

Modes of Display

Studio listening for cold weather

RIP David Weiss

David Weiss, one half of the Swiss collaborative duo, Fischli & Weiss, died on Friday.
A very sad day for the art world, and no doubt for his family and long term friend and collaborator, Peter Fischli.
Their work was imbued with a delicate combination of humour and poignance that I feel is absent in so much contemporary art today.

I'm sure he will be missed by many.

But as they themselves pointed, this is 'the way things go'...

Paul Wotherspoon: Reverse Monument

This is a video of a 2009 work by Paul Wotherpsoon, a member of the collaborative exhibition group*, Forgetting the Ordinary. Paul was telling me about this work today: It is comprised of a shell of clear sticky-tape, which was painted in layers as it was constructed, resulting in a sort of three dimensional colour spiral. The monument- structure in the centre of the cylinder is motorised, and as it spins, it gradually unravels the exterior structure, and collects the tape, building upon its own form. This work is reminiscent of many things about art that I love; Jean Tinguely, and his occasionally self-destructive sculptures, or Roman Signer's deliberate mechanical accidents...

I also found in this a reference to Robert Smithson's essay, A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey. In his spontaneous, observational musings on this out-of-the-way town in New Jersey, Smithson discovered an array of sites that to him represented the process of entropy in the banal and everyday: building sites, industrial architecture, a sand pit. He described some of these sites as 'ruins in reverse', 'all the new construction that would eventually be built', and in its turn, fall apart. Paul's sculpture, with its carefully and laboriously painted geometric forms equally foresees its own destruction - it was literally made for it - and there is something beautiful about its final pathetic manifestation as a crumpled mess that memorialises its former, albeit temporary, grandeur.

Although it's not immediately relevant to this work, I thought of Paul when I read this sentence in Smithson's essay, so in a way it seems like an apt way of summarising :

'I am convinced that the future is lost somewhere in the dumps of the non-historical past; it is in yesterday's newspapers...in the false mirror of our rejected dreams.'


*This title may be vaguely inaccurate, but for the sake of identification it'll do for now.

Jessica Hans

Just stumbled upon this blog by Jessica Hans of Baltimore. Lots of photographs of plants in hothouses and cacti. I love that stuff. She is a ceramicist, and a good photographer too by the looks of it. Sometimes when I see photographs on other people's blogs I feel that maybe I don't get out enough...

Photography

I've just spent the weekend undertaking an intensive digital photography course with Matthew Stanton,  author of the above image of one of my old works on display in The Order of Melbourne. I must say, if you are in need of education in this field, I highly recommend Matt's intermediate DSLR course; after two intense and kind of exhausting days (although I can't begin to imagine how he feels...) I no longer feel like I am at the mercy of the camera, and I can finally begin to start reclaiming control over the beast. Of course putting all this new-found information to use will no doubt prove to be another story altogether. Stay tuned for results on that front...

In the meantime, I thought I'd share some images by photographers whose work I really admire, and which have been flooding back to me over the course of the weekend. (click on the links below each image if you want to know more about these artists)

Bernd & Hilla Becher, industrial/landscape typologies

Thomas Demand, sculpture as photography

Jeff Wall, manufactured scenes

And for further reference, I really love Richard Mosse's series of crashed aeroplanes or his images from abandoned palaces in Baghdad. 

There's plenty more, but I think it would be preferable to infuse them slowly over time, rather than dumping them all this one post...

Strange Harvest

Strange Harvest is a blog by Sam Jacob, of the British architectural firm, FAT.

I'm not sure how I stumbled upon this blog, but I was immediately attracted to the various 'obscure design typologies'. These photographic archives present the kind of objects and spaces that we are only occasionally confronted with [obscure, right], but when presented as a group their weirdness or their unusual approach to practicality are brought to the fore...I particularly liked the 'Life Guard Chairs' set, partly because they are all photographed against plain backdrops, as opposed to at the pool or by the beach.