PLAY IN PLUSHTOWN

Hogi Tsai's latest work is in the window of Sydney's Gallery 4A. Across the road from Capitol Square where computer markets and Japanese skill-testers lurk is the perfect place for Hogi's work. Hogi is a UTS student PhD student from Taiwan. He's been involved in a few shows around Sydney and this work at Gallery 4A is a fun rainbow wind-chime of human motion. We should warn you though, we received a few funny looks while exploring this work.


Tony Curran and Sonya Gee

MAKING RADIO

On Saturday last Tony Curran (myself) and Jonathon Valenzuela (16 Tacos) were a radio twitter partnership where my iDrawings of "Action-Jon" were retweeted to FBi's twittership of almost 3,000. Collaborations don't always work well but thanks to Jon's not-so-diva-like attitude to my portraits he was happy that only one of them made him look like a "guido". His special request was a unicorn.

IN WITH THE MATCHBOX PROJECT

16th JULY 2009

While we were at the opening of Acts of Disobedience featuring The Matchbox Project at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sonya Gee expected that soon the thousands of matchboxes she had provided for her show would disappear and that she would soon have to replace them.

PRESENT DAY

Sonya Gee of the Matchbox Project takes me to check out just how many matchboxes she needs to replace. Along the way Sonya drops off a matchbox and uncharacteristically allows me to document the process.

The idea is that you take a Matchbox from the vase (see the top photograph), place it somewhere for someone else to find (see bottom photograph), then email or SMS the location of the matchbox from the details provided at the ACP.

Q & A with WATCH THIS SPACE

We received some questions about our selection criteria on a our facebook fan page which we thought might be useful to any readers endeavouring to have an exhibition with us.

We just received the following questions and thought we'd share them and their answers in case anyone else is wondering the same things:

Q
1. if we are accepted are we just allocated to a space?
2. what's the selection process?
3. when will works chosen be exhibited?

A
1. If you are accepted it will be because we like your project. We won't always have the ideal place for your project as soon as the artist is ready to exhibit it. So what we will first try to do is place you in one of our spaces we already have. Our spaces vary in what they can offer the artist. For example we have one space which is only open at nights and on certain nights requires a cover charge to be in. Because of our unique spaces some are suited to different disciplines and media from others. Some spaces might be too big or too small for particular works so once we decide we would like to work with the artist then we will contact them and talk about what we have to offer them.

2. The selection process is simple. We work out how successful the artwork will be for the spaces we have. If we select a work that won't work in our spaces then we will endeavor to find a space that does. This means that the selection criteria comes down to a succinct and articulate proposal: what, how, why and when, who the artist is and what their experience is (CV). Many applicants will not have had a show before so their proposal and sample images will need to be particularly strong to outweigh an uninspiring CV. The panel made up of two directors will choose make painstaking decisions only accepting works which we believe to be any attractive combination of: beautiful, relevant, talented, contemporary, theoretically grounded, controversial and legal. Once we have chosen works that we are happy with we will contact the artist and notify them of out interest in their work. After that we will contact any unsuccessful applicants and notify them.

3. Works chosen will be exhibited at a time decided on together by the gallery and the artist. If you ave a preferred time to exhibit then you should include that in your proposal. We are currently hoping to decide on an exhibition program until July next year.

News and Where To Get It In the Artworld

It used to be art magazines, then blogger: The Artlife. Mags cost too much and are full of crappy ads and The Artlife started making a tv show and now only blog once a fortnight and only blog something worth reading every third fortnight.

Now the place to go for good info from artists and art institutions is artbabble.com and The Art Newspaper. Art Babble is a database of video podcasts from artists, museums and academies which is free to watch. The Art Newspaper is exactly how it sounds - a newspaper particular to the artworld and art economy. Both will do more for the aspiring Fine Arts industry profesh and if you want the latest news on what's happening when and where get twitter and start following some galleries.



Tony Curran

ADOLF HITLER

They said he'd never make it because he "wasn't talented". But Hitler finally made it.

http://player.sbs.com.au/naca/#/naca/wna/Latest/playlist/Artworks-possibly-the-work-of-Hitler/

Click on the above link to see the fruit born of a little patience with your art practice.

A push, a shove and a whole load of sugar

Sometimes I really do need a good kick in the pants to get things going. Being given the opportunity to have a show with just under one and a half weeks notice is one such occasion. My last exhibition was produced very slowly and gently, with a few real stakeholders involved so it was fun to do something spontaneous and silly.

This was very silly. There were hundreds and thousands everywhere! On the floor, in my hair, they turned up in my tea cups and will forever be stuck in between the cracks of the floorboards. But it made for a very popular box!



The Wall hosted a Bid-A-Box night for a project I've been working at steadily for just over two years now. Normally I make them and abandon them once a week but these were particularly extravagant.



I'm a new exhibitor, mainly because my work normally appears in print and that I'm apprehensive to call it art. Nevertheless, I've discovered that for all the anxiety of showing - it's actually really fun and addictive! I most enjoy getting very immediate feedback and chatting to people who are into similar things. There was some very interesting talk about the Creative Sydney project that's coming up, something I'd never heard about until that night and am interested to find out much more about.

I've been stoked to find that people really like the matchbox project, regardless of whether they find or get a box, mainly because it's an excitement about gift-giving and an indication that basic giving is increasingly devoid in life. I never set out to prove or offset this when I started the project but realise now that the small amount of joy the project gives people is well worth the effort it takes to make it. I loved making tiny things for the boxes! And am now off to make a tiny patch of wool green grass for another box, to nestle a very precious hand-made toadstool pendant in it courtesy of Michelle Vandermeer.

Thank you to Tony Curran and Dan Chin for their help and cuddles on the night.

History Lesson

A buddy of mine got me onto a TV series called This is Modern Art and told me I could stream it on youtube.

The show is unlike any art history program I've watched. It taces the steps of humanity and how they are manifest throughout the modern age. Art as the symptom of humanity's wonder.

Fastidious foam: the not so exquisite corpses of Hany Armanious

Hany Armanious
Empathy Chart

The old surrealist game of exquisite corpse was once again rinsed off and hung out to dry at Roslyn Oxley9 last Thursday night. If unfamiliar with the game, its what Breton and the rest of the surrealists used to make - something from bits of nothing in the early days of the movement a century ago. This was of course, the sculptural beginnings of found object turned modern mythical edifice that filtered on through the rest of the 20^th century.

And now here again almost one hundred years out of date, Hany Armanious has given us something that can only be distinguished from a retrospective by the fact that he worked fastidiously with foam to reproduce found objects instead of simply using them: a manikin head on a sphinx on a box; cardboard tubes, under a log, under a gray thing...it was beautiful. At least that's what I overheard. The 20-something up-and-comers in attendance went out of the way to exercise their extended adjectives that night, though all their theater only fell on deaf ears while the older patrons of Oxley9 simply wandered around seeming a little more puzzled than usual.

Everyone agreed with admiring relief on one wall piece-slash-torn notice bound. Seems it was the only work that was almost similar enough to something that could safely be comment on...sounds confusing...go see the show and find out for yourself.

But seriously, Roslyn Oxley9's press writer Amanda Rowell leads us to believe that through these works we find an 'otherness' in the slippage of the real and unreal of every day objects. Hmmmm...despite the ambiguity of these works delaying our judgment, in no way do they transgress the object/observer relationship to mitigate the encompassing experience of the 'Uncanny Valley'. Juan Munoz or even Felix Gonzalez Torres have been extending further into anthropomorphic sculpture and found object than Armanious' work dreams of, and with no need for expensive fabrication techniques for validation. Really, these sculptures don't boil down to answer the 'intriguing' question “What is it”, as Rowell claims, they only incited the assumption that 'they don't mean anything'.

Art should insight us shouldn't it? It should move us deeper into our understanding of the human condition. And isn't there a much greater discussion of 'otherness' in that than in a reductive, labored critique of the uncanny?

A bitter taste came to my mouth whilst watching the next generation of art school students work their way through the free beers and giggle about finding their next sculpture in a wheelie bin. Seems the only insight from this show was a cheap hangover and a couple of contacts.

A.A. Gabriel

ARTIST PROFILE: James Jirat Patradoon

My pants got a hole in them. I went to DJs to get another pair that didn't have holes. I stumbled upon the handiwork of an old aquaintance's printed onto a Mambo t-shirt.

JAMES JIRAT PATRADOON

I first saw Patradoon's work while frantically getting a form signed in the printing building at COFA in my student daze. The image struck me as hip, now, and awesome and when I bought my first copy of "Empty" magazine it had a Patradoon on the cover. It was the Semi-Permanent issue and Patradoon was that gold nugget of graphic design bliss.

If Warhol was Tech-Noir Punk then he would have lived in the shadow of James Jirat Patradoon's pop style. Patradoon's art is the bad boy of artworks, his figures hyper-masculine, donned in lucho-libre masks munching on obscene quantities of nutri-grain or violently battering an opponent of sorts. His would send a shiver down my spine if it weren't for the sugary delight of his colour palettes. His work follows a leading crusader through a journey outside place and time. His images are linked by subject matter but not event, they speak of comic books but they aren't sequential the figures wild and the compositions considered. A show at the Firstdraft here and a few clothing label deals there Patradoon is definately one of the promising talents of today making it!

James currently has his art on display at Oxford Art Factory until the end of April.

Anthony Bennett

Anthony Bennett, self-portrait in the bathroom discussing beauty, bukowski and brett whiteley with my ex, now a stripper, who likes to dress as wonder woman, 2008

This guy is definately THE artist to watch. Making it into the Archibald, The Wynne and The Sulman prizes with three different works and being the only artist whose work I actually like in any of the prizes (except Del Kathryn Barton) this artist is one of the strongest Aussie's of today. While Jasper Knight and Ben Quilty might be leading the young artist race, Anthony Bennett can paint more than just portraits and figure-ground and he drips better than Jasper! He ought to work on his titles though.

I took a photo of his landscape of insufficient green… where mountains are crushed for speaking out, but the gallery attendent made me delete it in front of him. When he wasn't looking I managed to get this snap of the idea of a michael hutchence haiku... wasn’t it nietzsche who first said god is dead and tom cruise is a dick?