ABOUT | CURRENT | ARCHIVE | CURATE | NEWS | LINKS
IMPOSSIBILITY OF LOSING IN THE MIND OF SOMEONE WINNING | PLEASE STAND BY | STOP THE CLOCK | COLD CASE CANBERRA | SLIDE SHOW LAND DOROTHY | HODDLE STREET MASSACRE | BEFORE AND AFTER | SLIDE SHOW LAND | DEDICATIONS | FOUND PAINTS LANE | HOUSE |
The impossibility of losing in the mind of someone winning
James Dorahy Project Space, Sydney
2007
Impossiblity of losing in the mind of someone winning 56 Pieces found and burnt silver trophies re-silver plated
10 x 102 x 60cm
2007The works in THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF LOSING IN THE MIND OF SOMEONE WINNING are from my silver trophy collection ranging from premiership cups and 21st mugs to wedding goblets, making explicit the competitive references of trophies to all facets of our lives. I have then poetically transformed these items through a experimental trial by fire resulting in a variety of shocking but beautifully slumped and shattered outcomes. These fragments are then re-honoured with silvery preciousness for public display.
Impossiblity of losing in the mind of someone winning S.T.B.C
found and burnt silver trophies re-silver plated
2007
Field Study #2
archival divital print 100x45cm
2007
Please Stand By
Clip Art curated by Daniel M Cunningham, First Draft Gallery, Sydney 2007
Video Lounge Australian Center for Photography, 2008
Elastic Online Project 2008
Please Stand By is a 5 minuite animated DVD. The work starts as a series of drawings on paper using coloured pencils, felt tip pens and gouche of TV Test patterns used by local, national and international television networks. The TV Test pattern is a pictorial devise used to calibrate screens and monitors, it is generally generated digitally and utilizes lines, colours and fields to assist in fine tuning for television reception. TV test patterns were broadcast by networks when there was no program being transmitted generally after hours. This is of course a thing of the past as most if not all television networks broadcast 24 hours a day seven days a week.
Each drawing is then animated where each component moves, revolves, flips and fades in and out to the old english folk tune of Greensleeves. Greensleeves was selected as the soundtrack for the animation for its references to the joy of the Mr Whippy truck and the promises of a treat, as well as the familiar on hold music one might encounter when calling a Bank or government department.
The whole effect this DVD is trying to achieve is one of waiting, being on hold, in a queue, a visual statement that nothing is going on. A political interjection is made half way through the video reminding us of our passive intake of information provided by network tv - the prevailing mass media.
The conceptual endpoint of this project will be making available each individual animated drawing for download as a computer screen saver which will be available on the new Elastic an Online Project.
Stop The Clock
Domain, commission temporary public art, Canberra 2006
Stop the Clock
vinyl banner
Public artwork for Domain 2006 a temporary public art exhibition funded by the ACT Government Community Outreach Program and managed by the ANU School of Art 2006Stop the Clock combines the visual icons of a clock face and audio visual controls to playfully comment on time; how we use it, spend it, remember it, recreate it, and control it and yet don't seem to have it. Monday-rich and time-poor are expresions we are now familiar with to describe common cultural experiences of having a high disposable income through economic growth and high employment rates, but having verylittle leisure time as a result.
David Broker (Director of Canberra Contemporary Artspace)writes in the Domain 2006 catalogue
"...The Alinga Street Post Office, unlike those post offices that are the historical centre of cities, this central post office blends into its surroundings modern architecture. Almost invisible, this post office appears to eschew history and by way of its slab-like clock tower focuses only on the current time. Elvis Richardson's work occupies the lower reaches of its clock tower and hangs ironically as a reminder of how time and times change. Stop the Clock, a banner with the familiar icons of audio-visual controls, constructs a commentary on time, how we use it and spend it, remember it, recreate it, control it and perhaps most importantly - how we no longer have it. Focusing on contemporary issues of time and in particular how leisure time is but a pipe dream in affluent societies, Richardson returns the post office to its formerly central position. Where the post office sometimes represents the extended span of history her work relocates the building in the central context of an amusing yet worrying critique of life in the immediate present."
Cold Case Canberra
Shelf Life curated by Daniel M Cunningham MOP Projects, Sydney 2006
An Edge meets and edge - Edith Cowan University Spectrum Project Space 2007
Cold Case Caberra rope sculpture and platform, dimensions variable 2006In 1986 while driving along the coast from Melbourne to Sydney with my boyfriend we took the wrong turn and ended up driving over Mount Kosiosko in an old Rover 2000 that almost never made it. Early the next morning we arrived in Canberra where we decided to sleep for a while in the car. We parked in a suburban street, just off Northbourne Avenue before it turns into the Federal Highway, reclined our seats and tried to get some shut eye.
We couldn’t sleep. It was too strange and quiet. It was like we were surrounded by evidence of people, but it was completely empty of people. No lights, no cars, no activity. We drove to a 24 hour service station and slept there.
Later that year in my interview to go to art school I said I would like to make a horror film set in Canberra thinking about my recent sleepless night and its enchewing fantasies. Twenty years pass and it is 2006 and I have been living in Canberra now for eighteen months, in Downer, the very same suburb just off Northbourne Avenue before you enter the Federal HIghway.
I made this work when I also discovered that I lived only blocks from Keren Rowland (also a resident of Downer) and the victim of a 1971 unsolved murder who was the subject of a work I had made in 1999 titled "I am missing".
Slide Show Land Dorothy
If you leave me can I come too curated by Bec Dean Australian Center for Photography Sydney 2006
Solo exhibition Canberra Contemporary Artspace 2007
Rooms curated by Mary Pridmore, Plimsoll Gallery Hobart 2008
Ocular Notes George Paton Gallery Melbourne 2007
Runway Magazine Issue 13 DEATH 2009
Slide Show Land Dorothy dual slide projection 160 35mm slides Dimensions and time variable 2006
This most recent episode of my ongoing project Slide Show Land was compiled from an extensive collection of 35mm slides purchased on e-bay of a photographer named Dorothy E. Elsberry dating from 1952-1976. Dorothy was fond of photographing particular subjects such as her husband Jack, still lives, food she cooked, the dinner table, and her horses and farm.
I filled two carousels of slides, one with Jack and the other with her dinner table arrangements, that were projected side by side on an automatic timer. Nearby a durotran of a self portrait by Dorothy with the inscription on the mount 'self portrait for Jack'.
Download Catalogue (1.1MB .pdf)
review by Madeleine Hinchy
Slide Show Land in Runway Magazine Issue 13 DEATH 2009
Hoddle Street Massacre
Solo Exhibition Ocular Lab Melbourne 2005
Hoddle Street Massacre DVD with surround sound 35mins 2005
When I visited Melbourne in 1998 one of the places I was compelled to go to was the site of the Hoddle Street Massacre. I saw the event while watching TV, when regular programming was interrupted by live footage of darkened streets lit by helicopters sweeping lights, with a soundtrack of gunfire and cuts to a news reporter’s anxious excitement as they struggle to describe the scene.The Hoddle Street Massacre is the name given to a tragedy that occurred on the evening of August 9, 1987, that resulted in the deaths of seven people and serious injury to nineteen more, when nineteen year old Julian Knight opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle in Hoddle Street, Melbourne.Violent events of this kind, where the indiscriminate and cruel slaughter of people takes place, the site itself takes on new meanings. Enlarged through media repetition the event adds new connotations to an otherwise un-extraordinary place. Although the details of how many people died that night or who the killer was faded in my memory, the name and imagined space of Hoddle Street stayed with me. Unfamiliar with Melbourne, I left my friends house with a recording walk-a-man and a plan to ask people on the street their memories of the massacre, what they were doing when they heard about it, and if they could direct me to the site where it occurred. The result was a remapping of memory and place informed by my respondents recall of the event and their description of my spatial relationship to the site. The recording creates a networked text of signifiers through which we gain access to the event via several entrances.
As a method I was interested to recreate the work seven years later (2005) to plot how these memories have changed over time, and to injvestigate the erasure of the publics memory of the Hoddle Street Massacre from one of a personal connection to one of a myth.
Hoddle Street Massacre Installation at Ocular Lab Melbouren 2005
Before and After
Free Time curated by Philip Watkins CAST Hobart 2004
BEFORE & AFTER DVD with interactive sound track1 Hour 2004
Before and After projects a split screen through which video footage recorded from two angles thread continuously from the beginning of a train journey to the end forever coming and going.
The visual cross over of simultaneous camera shots assume positions where the same thing is never recorded at the same time. A list of songs offer the viewer the choice of compiling the theme track strongly influenceing the mood of the compiled video footage. The video pauses when the song ends and resumes when the viewer chooses another. By completely submitting to the element of sound to objectify the emotional content, allows the lyrics to narrate each story, creating a moody cinematic experience.
Before / forwards : the approaching landscape evokes the epic journey. The familiar train ride to my job transversed 3 days a week forms this passing backdrop of a mundane suburban landscape. Its specificity of location is sublimated through its movement of persistent forging.
After / backwards : offers the advantage of hindsight, as well a glimpses of objects in the foreground before they appear in the first screen. The future rapidly becomes the past.
Slide Show Land
MFA Graduating Exhibition, Columbia University, New York 2002
Room 35 Gitte Weise Gallery, Sydney 2002
Physics Room Christchurch, New Zealnd 2002
Univerity of Alabama Visual Art Gallery, Birmingham USA 2004
Slide Show Land is an ongoing archive, started in 2001 of 35mm transparencies purchased on e-bay. The work catalogues the incredible number of images available for purchase and staggering evidence of the all-pervasive nature of image taking during the last century that so many could ahve been jettisoned and lost.
The personalized family snap-hots draw attention to the photographer as author and reveal family dynamics and customs. Narratives are created through reading the images in sequence adn further the viewer into an investigative process of piecing together a probably fiction or identity based on a 'true story'. Individual slides have been selected to form photographic and video works about the collection. The photographs are printed as cibachromes to retain thier material authenticity. The selected photogaphs arecomibned in small groupings to emphasise thier narrative adn portrait qualities.
Slide Show Land is for the nostalgic and lost.
Dedications
Mummy curated by Philipa Vietch Chrissy Cotter Gallery, Sydney 2005
DEDICATIONS13 inked photocopies 13x19inches each 2004
printed by Master Printmaker Lisa Mackie, NYThe dedication pages from the 13 books that had been printed by 2005 on the unsolved murder case of Jon Benet Ramsey printed as inked photocopies.
People who bought this book also bought ... Americas’ Sweetheart. So it being Christmas, a very young accoladed beautiful white girl, murdered, a rich successful businessman and a former state beauty queen, who stage mothered her daughter through this same pageant convention to great success, all add up to spectacle enough. But there was more. The parents. Their expensive lawyers, and what appeared to be their elusive but showy behaviour and unco- operativeness with the police investigation into their daughters murder. A dark cloud of suspicion hangs over them to this day, in particular JonBenet‘s mother Patsy. This story has become referred to as the JonBenet Ramsey Case.The persona of JonBenet Ramsey’s has always been uncomfortably represented in popular culture. The combined vilification by the media of her objective status as a tiny tot beauty queen who met a tragic end,and devotion to this objectification through its continual repetition have now established JonBenet with some heavy
duty cultural icon status.Unsolved
DEDICATIONS13 inked photocopies 13x19inches each 2004
printed by Master Printmaker Lisa Mackie, NY
type-c photograph
100 x 70 cm
1996This is one of the earliest found images I used in my work. The title states where I found the image - in Paints Lane Chippendale, Sydney where I was living at the time and in the habit of walking my dog looking for stuff. It was lying in the gutter the white edges of the slide caught my attention as I walked past and had to decide to walk back to see what it was - I was not dissapointed.
House
Artspace Sydney 1999
Dowling Center Windows Performance Space Project 1999
House 100 square meters of 'Trophy' grey carpet removed from a youth refuge, dimensions variable 1996300 square feet of trophy gray synthetic carpet flooring retrieved from a housing project for homeless youth, where I worked for four years as a youth worker.
I liked the idea of laying a specific structure physically, philosophically and emotionally, one over another, in this case a housing refuge for homeless youth and a public art gallery, operated with almost identical management structures put in place to satisfy government funding guidelines.The physicality of the work is humbled by its invisibility, emphasized by using a long hallway as an entrance carpet into the space exploiting the references to accessibility and accountability and to whom?
My initial desire to show this carpet piece was as a whole floorplan intersecting all gallery walls, was not possible for artists exhibiting as finalists for The Helen Lempriere Traveling Art Scholarship, a yearly round up of emerging artists vying for this publicized prize. The majority of the remaining carpet from this six bedroom house could not be accommodated in this group exhibition, and was therefore rolled up and left leaning against the entrance wall.In this instance of House/Home (image on right) the carpet pieces were displayed room by room for inspection. Situated behind glass in a purpose built display window of the Mark Foys building; once a department store and now a District Criminal Court House the history of the building itself suggests a colonization of government bodies, onto a failing free market. Creating a direct relationship between prison and the courts and jobs for homeless young people.
Again one structure has imposed itself on another, and the carpet simultaneously displays and exposes the public tax dollar, quantified via the quality and longevity of the carpet as being equal to the publics empathy for the character of the homeless youth and their plight.
House 100 square meters of 'Trophy' grey carpet removed from a youth refuge, dimensions variable 1996
Elvis is represented by Hugo Michell in Adelaide
