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DEATH BE KIND
GET OAK FIRMNESS @ Hell Gallery & Ocular Lab
Sarah Goffman @ Ocular Lab Inc
ELASTIC An Archive Project @ Cross Art Projects Sydney
N ew York Calling - PS1 Australian Studio New York
Mondo Cane2 @ LeRoy Neiman Gallery, Columbia University New York
The Collector @ First Draft Gallery Sydney
DEATH BE KIND is a twelve month project by artists Claire Lambe and Elvis Richardson. Along with intern artist Dani Hakim videoographer Paul Rodgers, and still documentor Joseph Lambe.
DEATH BE KIND is a project designed to research and exhibit contemporary art and collections that engage with the subject of death. Exhibitions so far in our program have explored the aesthetics of horror, the afterlife, the memorial and the museum display of collections. Death is a certainty in all our lives; as soon as we are born we are capable of dying. DEATH BE KIND collects together ideas about memories and fears, acceptance and hope to explore the relationships between art and death.
Simon Schrueule, God is dead clever 2010 (Bela Lugosi's dead @ DEATH BE KIND)
GET OAK FIRMNESS @ Ocular Lab Inc & Hell GalleryGET OAK FIRMNESS April-May 2009. Claire Lambe, Renny Kodgers and the collaborative duo Nat Thomas and Concettina Inserra in GET OAK FIRMNESS a performance and exhibition program exploring the expectations, power functions and romantic notions of the penis will be staged over two of the most interesting artist run venues in Melbourne; Hell Gallery and Ocular Lab.
The Oak tree known for its long growing hard wood and majestic presence is a universal symbol of strength and endurance. In the swollen promises of email spam and miracle products, the power to erect larger dimensions of the penis is the embodiment of manhood in redevelopment. This is where the GET OAK FIRMNESS show begins.
Ultra Primo Claire Lambe bronze
Photo: Joseph Lambe
Sarah Goffman @ Ocular Lab Inc
Victoria!
Victoria!
A mixed media temporary installation and video
(Under the cloak of the flag)Saturday 7th and Sunday 8th of April 12-5pm (ONLY!!!!)
opening Sat 3pm
31 Pearson Street
Brunswick West
Sarah Goffman collects, collates, assembles and embellishes the materials of Art Provera; like cardboard, rubberbands, cut up images and text, found objects, aluminum foil, glass and inventive lighting. She creates idiosynchratic arrangements of her objects that add a certain beauty yet rawness to the archive of the sublime, while turning any passive assumptions of looking into spaces of doing and action.Come and see Victoria! Ruminations on the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and all things Victorian!
Sarah Goffman is a Sydney based artist whose installations and objects have most recently been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Artspace Sydney, Canberra Contemporary Artspace and Hazelhurst Regional Gallery. Sarah was the editor in 2006 with Elvis Richardson of Photofile #78 - "The Archive Issue" and is a founding member of Elastic Projects.
ELASTIC An Archive Project
Cross Art Projects 2005
Lisa Andrew, Hany Armanious, Stuart Bailey, Jay Balbi, Joanna Callaghan, Liz Day, Deej Fabyc, Ian Geraghty, Sarah Goffman, Kathryn Gray & Holly Williams, Ross Harley, Mark Hislop, Emily Hunt, Andrew Hurle, Melanie Khava, Claire Lambe, Sally Mannall, Elvis Richardson, Tobias Richardson, Raquel Ormella, Luke Parker, Elizabeth Pulie, Mary Teague, Regina Walter
Curated by Elvis Richardson, Sarah Goffman & Lisa AndrewVIEW exhibition WEBSITE
You are invited to the opening
BY SUSAN CHARLTON
CREATIVE PRODUCER STATE RECORDS NSW (STATE GOVERNMENT ARCHIVES)
SATURDAY 15 OCTOBER 4-–6PM
The Cross Art Projects
A space for independent art & curatorial studies
33 Roslyn Street Kings Cross Sydney 2011
T: (02) 93572058 | e: joholder@aic.net.au
w: crossart.com.au
Exhibition continues until 29 October 2005
Wed–Sat 11–6PM
The Cross Art Projects
33 Roslyn Street Kings Cross Sydney (opposite St Luke’s Hospital gates)
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CROSS CONVERSATION WITH THE ARTISTS: SATURDAY 22 OCTOBER, 4PM
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ELASTIC is a group of nine artists who create projects that invite other artists to participate with a view to expanding the scope and interpretation of a project. This democratising curatorial model allows unexpected outcomes.
The Elastic: Archive Project displays, in various forms, the collecting and classifying activities that engage these artists’ practices as both research and raw material. Classifying systems are fundamental not only to public and private collection activities but relate, in a gallery context, to the manufacture of authenticity within the art-culture system. This exhibition explores this operation by placing private studio process in the lived context of the gallery space.
The resulting archival categories range from fantastic or absolutely bloody useless catalogues of vernacular objects or adornments, to straight-faced empirical research into, for example, the reasons given by an arts council for rejecting a grant application or under-representation of women artists in contemporary criticism. The archive even has its own exhibition reviews.
Draw your own conclusions with regard to the authenticity of the artists’ interpretations of material and museum culture!
From a historical perspective the Elastic Archive Project harnesses conceptual and process art’s critical forces as well more recent methodological innovations using analytical techniques appropriated from interdisciplinary and institutional critique. Out of these parameters a new direction in contemporary art has emerged. The emphasis is on the formal experiments of individual artists. In this way and by these means, contemporary life and issues of the marginal or unfashionable can be given prominence.
The Archive Project is the latest Elastic ‘edition’. Artwork editions are available exclusively for the exhibition.
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ELASTIC
Elastic’s prior projects include running an eponymous shop-front gallery in Chippendale (for 6 months in 2000), Caravan a survey style show at Free Space (2002) and the publication of the celebrated Elastic: A Printed Project in 2004. Last year, Elastic moved off-shore to establish Elastic Artist Residence in Whitechapel, London, curated by Deej Fabyc as a gallery space for projects and durational performance.
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Supported by City of Sydney Council for Kings Cross Arts Festival 2005: www.kxarts.com
curated by Elvis Richardson and Sally-Ann Rowland
Derrick Adams, Kristopher Benedict, Tony Chirinos, Jon Conner, Anna Conway, Jacob Dyrenforth, Chitra Ganesh, Hilary Harnischfeger, Stephen Hilger, Mark Hislop, Jon Kessler, Andrew Kromelow, Ignosio Lang, Alexander Lee, Greg Martin, Lisi Raskin, Elvis Richardson, Halsey Rodman, Andrew Rogers, Sally-Ann Rowland, Marco Santos, Mika Tajima, Elif Uras, Shira Weinert
Mondo Cane II, curated by Elvis Richardson and Sally-Ann Rowland, was presented at the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies in New York, April 2002. The exhibition drew works from twenty-four artists together to provide a cacophony of information suggestive of the unmanageable size of the world and the failure inherent in the desire to capture.
The work was displayed in a concentrated area of the gallery: two corner walls and a low platform at the far end of the space. The majority of the space remained empty. The exhibition area was delineated by a heavy yellow paint that drew the works together and created a pictorial space amongst which viewers were invited to walk.
Mondo Cane II evolved in concept and execution from the exhibition Mondo Cane curated by Mark Hislop, at Herringbone Gallery, Sydney, Australia, in 1998.The titles reference the Italian director Gualtiero Jacopetti's 1962 documentary, Mondo Cane. This documentary is a collection of purportedly real footage of cultural practices around the world: the more shocking and unusual a scene the better. The film coined the term "shockumentary" and firmly situated the spectacle in the realm of bad behavior. Jacopetti's camera undermined documentary objectivity, producing a slippage between truth and exploitation as he rubbed subject matters against one another, creating a new benchmark of juxtaposition.
The Mondo Cane exhibitions used the believe-it-or-not museum aspect of the Mondo Cane documentary as a means of presenting art in an unconventional and engaging manner. The artworks in these exhibitions are not the jewels on velvet cushions of conventional gallery presentation. The works are too numerous, they encroach on each other's personal space and are presented anywhere above, below and to the side of "eye-level".
The deep yellow ground in Mondo Cane IIfurther dismantled the expectation of exhibition spaces as neutral white cubes. The color was chosen for its anticipated competition with the works' themselves and its association with heavily decorated ethnographic displays.The dominance created by the concentration of artworks and the yellow ground produced the unequal balance of activity and neglect, stage and audience, that operates in theatrical spaces. Mondo Cane II's feature walls and platform hold an excess of artwork, confronting the viewer with an overload of sensual information reminiscent of patchwork quilts and wall murals. This "democratizing" display levels identities, reputations and qualitative artwork judgments. Questions of taste take second fiddle to intent as a whole, loud works sit quietly among others, as do stars among the unknown. Employing the associative structure of the Mondo Cane documentary, each artwork is brought into relation with those beside it, previously discrete objects becoming units of unanticipated narratives.
The Mondo Cane documentary has faded into history. It was not insightful, much of the footage was staged and it suffered from the dull opposition of "primitive" and "civilized" that has plagued anthropological practices. It managed however, to produce a spate of sequels: Mondo Cane 2, Mondo New York, and Mondo Rio
By bringing structural elements of these films into a fine art context, the Mondo Cane exhibitions sought to use these films as a means to expose and transform conventional exhibition viewing. The display de-neutralizes the gallery space, bringing questions of consumer marketing, privileged histories and political agendas into the often casual experience of viewing an exhibition.
Part Proposition / Part Declaration
curated by Elvis Richardson & Sally Ann Rowland
For object-making and installation artists, the museum remains both the hand that feeds and the citadel to be stormed. (1)
New York Calling is an exhibition of works on paper by thirty Australian artists that will be held in the Australia Studio at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, in August 2003. This show will open by appointment from August 27th – 31st 2003 with a public reception from 2-6pm on August 31st.
NEW YORK CALLING is a response to the unfortunate absence of Australia in the 2003-04 International Studio Program at P.S.1. It is in a desire to counter the invisibility of Australian artists in the future PS1 program that we decided to host this exhibition. Sunday August 31st was chosen as the date for the reception as this is the day on which the current Australian residency at P.S.1 concludes.
This exhibition will present the work of Australian artists that were selected through a web of personal connections. This approach draws on previous projects we have organized or participated in including, Mondo Cane II, Mondo Love, Ladies Night and Elastic. These projects can be seen as instances where artist communities draw on friendships and the ever-expanding networks between artists as a basis for creating projects and opportunities.
This is an exhibition of works on paper. This choice has pragmatic as well as theoretical consequences. In this format, we, as two self-funded artist/curators, can mount an exhibition of artists scattered over the globe. Structuring the exhibition around works on paper also brings associations of the ephemeral and documentation to the fore. The artists in this show have all spent time in New York City. Some as previous P.S.1 artists, others on scholarships, residencies, exhibiting artists and short term visitors, collectively demonstrating the significant investment that Australian artists make in New York. The exhibition pulls these past and continuing experiences together. The medium of paper brings with it associations of impermanence yet also holds the capacity to give desire and memory a tangible document for the record. As beautifully suggested by Julie Ault in her history of alternate art in New York, these concerns are universal to artists wherever they may be. Histories of meaningful situations are established by the written word.(2)
New York calls – you bet it does – all artists want opportunities to show their work here. It was encouraging to note the overwhelming support we received from the artists we invited into this exhibition. Australian artists are concerned about the increasing isolation of Australia, only compounded by this questionable future of the our country's participation in the International Studio Program at P.S.1.
New York calls – Australia answers back.Elvis Richardson & Sally-Ann Rowland
(1)Lucy Lippard, “Biting the Hand: Artists and Museums since 1969”, in Alternative Art in New York 1965-1985, ed. Julie Ault, (Regents of the University of Minnesota, 2002), p. 79.
(2)It is thus critical to establish written histories of meaningful situations and processes that challenged the status quo of the art system – to conserve them, to move them from memory and inscribe them, to supply analyses of their economic and political contexts as well as strategies to be modified and improved upon.Julie Ault, “For the Record”, in Alternative Art in New York 1965-1985, ed. Julie Ault, (Regents of the University of Minnesota, 2002), p. 3