Seventh Up @ FELTspace

These are some installation shots of the Seventh Up exhibition at FELTspace in Adelaide.

My work is the one in the black recycling containers, titled 'Nu-Mystic'. A very daggy title, but the work is a bit of a joke...a little dig at the emerging trend towards the esoteric, and a proliferation of shamanic or 'tribal' references in art work I've seen around the place. It seems that more often than not, these kind of references are purely fashionable gestures and not grounded in any real investigation of ancient or foreign cultures...

Also pictured are [and apologies, I've forgotten some of the titles] a miniature, portable protest by Rebecca Agnew, the video 'Everything I will Inherit' by Emma Morgan pictured with Jonas Ropponen's phallic ceramic cactus; Amy-Jo Jory's floor-projected film of an amusement park ride which morphs into a mechanised monster or blossoming flower; Peter Thomas' dramatic sculpture of a Roman-style stadium; Kim Jaeger's Jesus Rulz, which was the subject of an art-heist during the exhibition: the inscription 'Anyone who takes this ruler Dies' proved irresistable to the now doomed thief.

Thanks to FELTspace and all the wonderful artists involved for providing such an enjoyable experience of Adelaide and showing us where the good bars are.

Adelaide and back

I recently visited Adelaide for a group exhibition at FELTspace, a little ARI [Artist Run Initiative] in the centre

of the city. The premise of the show was the artists involved in Seventh, where I volunteer, and the artists from FELT would swap galleries and have exhibitions in eachother's spaces.

While I was in Adelaide, I visited a small museum located in the centre of the botanical gardens. I had read about it by complete coincidence whilst rifling through a magazine in a coffee shop. It is called The Museum of Economic Botany; it was built in 1881, and has recently been refurbished. Within the ornate display cabinets are hundreds of paper mache apples, pears and mushrooms which were commissioned from a group of German craftsmen. These fruits and mushrooms are so lifelike, it is near impossible to tell they are replicas. Even the sheen of the skins has been recreated so some look more waxy, and some of the mushrooms look quite slimy - and decidedly dangerous.

As opposed to the contemporary lust for the hyper-real - the substitution of simulation for reality - these objects emphasise a tender engagement with the original objects, and, in a way, have been crafted as a creative tribute to the diversity of species.