2009 BECAUSE I AM DIFFERENT | HOUSED & PURCHASING POWER | REALITY CHECK | LAST MAN CLUB | DRIVING AROUND | TOMORROW | YESTERDAY | 2008 TELEVISUALS SALUTE ELVIS | BASTARD LOVE CHILD | NOW 7 YEARS LATER | IMPOSSIBILITY OF LOSING IN THE MIND OF SOMEONE WINNING |
BECAUSE I AM DIFFERENT
Hugo Michell Gallery, Adelaide, 27 June – 26 July 2010
Untitled plaster wax wick 20x6x4 cm each 2010
Untitled plaster wax wick 20x6x4 cm each 2010
Because I am Different soot on paper 76x54 cm 2010Because I Am Different makes a statement and stakes a claim to the trophy which is the material subject of the show and an enduring symbol of success. This assertion also poses an excuse that perhaps the rules of the competition don't apply to me. Because I am lucky .... Because I am special .... Because I am different. These statements are created by masking areas of paper and exposing the paper to the soot from a candle, and like a photogram, what has been screened from the soot reveals itself when unveiled.
Continuing my investigations into found trophies which I have previously melted and re-silvered in "The impossibility of losing in the mind of someone winning". For this exhibition the trophies have been pulled apart and reassembled as columns with a base at the either end allowing them to stand reversible. These pillars are then moulded and cast in plaster, bronze and as wax candles. Irregularly duplicated in these materials the trophy becomes blank, stripped of its original patina and reflectiveness the sculptures become silhouettes, black holes, non reflective profiles commemorative of monuments and grave stones which are the enduring symbols of a successful life lived.
In the center of the gallery stands two trophy pillars balancing a candle burning at both ends. A simple material experiment, the candle seems to magically see saw because each descending end of the candle sheds melted wax it lightens and rises up counteracted by the weight of the opposite end and on and on it goes. To "burn the candle at both ends" characterizes a life lived on the brink, to the full, perhaps a life of dedication and ambition but this also reminds us of the price often paid for burning twice as brightly; it extinguishes itself in half the time when you live fast and die young. The swinging candle also appears mysterious and wonderful and rocks between both interpretations - as both mystical, blessed and enchanting to dogged, persistent and fiercely brief. The opposites embodied in this show are evident as black and white, the heavy darkness of bronze and the light whiteness of plaster, the material presence of sculpture and the ethereal temporariness of a candle, burnt then recorded in soot, the everlasting and the fleeting, and ultimately life and death.
HOUSED & PURCHASING POWER
VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Univeristy of Melbourne October - November 2009
Part of Melbourne International Arts Festival
Purchasing Power numbers 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 500 screen prints on paper 760x460mm Ed. 10
2009 VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne. Part of Melbourne International Arts Festival (click here to see details)
This exhibition is part of an ongoing commitment by the Margaret Lawrence Gallery to showcase new works by established Melbourne based practitioners, providing an opportunity for contemporary artists to create a new body of work on a large scale specifically designed for the gallery space. The project supports artists working with site-specific concerns to pursue developmental research into contemporary modes of practice within a variety of media from sculpture, installation and spatial practice to photography, video, painting and drawing. The exhibition for 2009 will feature two discrete solo projects by Susan Jacobs and Elvis Richardson.
Elvis Richardson’s work examines personal and domestic spaces for traces and signs of previous inhabitants. This new project uses domestic commercially manufactured carpet retrieved from public housing properties at times of physical, social and governmental change. The carpet, retrived and displayed whole in the gallery setting, becomes a physical document displaying the indentations, stains, and wear of its narrative and forensic qualities. Accompanied by her photographs of car interiors these works seek to emphasise the anxiety around public and private spaces and home ownership in Australia today.
Housed carpet retrieved from a 2 bedroom unit located in South Eastern Melbourne and owned by the Department of Housing. And Purchasing Power numbers 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 500 screen prints on paper 760x460mm Ed. 10
2009 Lighting by John Comeadow VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne. Part of Melbourne International Arts Festival Photo: Kay Abade
HOUSED: For this work I acquired a carpet as it was being removed from a two bedroom unit owned by department of housing property and located in the south eastern suburbs of Melbourne. The carpet was placed in the gallery space in the orientation and layout of the original dwelling. The materiality of the carpet becomes evidence of occupation via its stains, indentations and patterns of wear. When we imagine a dwelling it is common to draw a floor plan of the space, this work is a 1:1 scale of such a drawing.In collaboration with lighting designer John Comeadow the gallery lights were utilized to illuminate and cast the shadows of windows onto the carpeted space located like an island in the theatrically blackened gallery space. The viewer enters the space via a domestic doorway inserted in the gallery wall and is greeted by a hallway of carpet leading into the dwelling itself. I was hoping to create an experience of inspection where judgements about the carpet itself, where it comes from and what it is doing in a gallery could take place.
Paired with the carpet I printed a series of screen prints based on the colours and general design of the currency in the board game Monopoly. I printed them to a scale in relationship with the carpet and placed them along one side of the carpet similar to how players often line their money up tucked under the Monopoly board itself. My redesign of the currency includes direct references to historical and current values about home/land ownership in Australia. The Australian Dream we are told is to own our own homes, but this is an unattainable ideal for many Australians, and besides it is a narrow and self serving dream that has created a society with an ever widening economic divide. But in the end who does this situation serve?
Purchasing Power is an act of printing my own currency that asks the kind of questions I want considered around public and private housing, home/land ownership in Australia, such as how private profits become public losses, the never ending obsession with growth growth growth, the impact of the ill designed growth of sprawling underserviced suburbs filled with large oversized houses, a situation that will only increase the use of cars and pollution etc, all in a paradigm that is geared only toward home ownership at any cost, environmental, socially and financial. The screen print was my obvious choice of process for the work as it references political posters and turned the original line drawings into multiples that become a stack of currency; art currency invested with another value system - the art market. Each note is signed and editioned and states it can be traded for its current market value.
Over all the works intention was to place one value system over another and how they operate in opposite yet mutually symbiotic ways - housing, art, public funding and private profit.
Housed carpet retrieved from a 2 bedroom unit located in South Eastern Melbourne and owned by the Department of Housing. And Purchasing Power numbers 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 500 screen prints on paper 760x460mm Ed. 10
2009 Lighting by John Comeadow VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne. Part of Melbourne International Arts Festival Photo: Kay Abade
Housed carpet retrieved from a 2 bedroom unit located in South Eastern Melbourne and owned by the Department of Housing. And Purchasing Power numbers 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 500 screen prints on paper 760x460mm Ed. 10
2009 Lighting by John Comeadow VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne. Part of Melbourne International Arts Festival Photo: Kay Abade
REALITY CHECK
curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham
Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, Sydney October 2009
Sylvania Waters / Elvis Rants Away - billboard
Photo: Silversalt
Sylvania Waters / Elvis Rants Away - billboard
Photo: Silversalt
The Age TV Guide Tuesday August 4 2009 - billboard.
Photo: Silversalt
The Telegraph TV Guide Tuesday August 4 1992 - billboard.
Photo: Silversalt
ELVIS RICHARDSON @ HUGO MICHELLI
DRIVING AROUND
Illume Projections After Dark Campeltown Arts Center, Sydney August - September 2009Elvis Richardson : DRIVING AROUND
DRIVING AROUND is a compilation of videos downloaded from youtube where a camera is placed on the dashboard of a car and then driven around a wide variety of locations from Soweto in South Africa to Auckland New Zealand then El Centro California and Naimy Niger. I came across the videos being an avid youtuber myself and found them fascinating and quirky on a number of levels. Experiencing the world we live in through the windscreen of a car is like watching a TV screen. Forever moving through a landscape it is often how we know the places we live in, how we recognize and identify them. Roads are public spaces this view through the windscreen reinforces the idea of the car as a camera the enclosed bubble in which we often experience our surroundings.When searching and downloading videos from YouTube and other online sites I discovered there were no videos of "Driving Around Campbelltown" so I recorded some footage and have uploaded it to my YouTube site - thereby inserting Campbelltown into this online archive experience of place.
Driving Around (Campbeltown) installed as a projection onto Campbelltown Arts Center duration 1 hour no sound, video still 2009
Photo: Ian Hobbs
Driving Around Baltimore installed as a projection onto Campbelltown Arts Center duration 1 hour no sound, video still 2009
Photo: Ian Hobbs
Driving Around India installed as a projection onto Campbelltown Arts Center duration 1 hour no sound, video still 2009
Photo: Ian Hobbs
Driving Around Laos installed as a projection onto Campbelltown Arts Center duration 1 hour no sound, video still 2009
Photo: Ian Hobbs
DRIVING AROUND Auckland New Zealand and El Centro California DVD PAL 4:3 7 mins [view work on YouTube]
My most recent YouTube video series are sandwhiched layered compilations like a double exposure of people driving around in thier cars with a video camera on the dash board. I search YouTube for almost any location in the world "driving around ......" and there should be something to choose from. Not only do I find it fascinating to discover a million different landscapes that become homogenized by the architecture of roadways and viewed through the moving mointor of the car windscreen. Of interest to me is in experimenting with combinations of locations, Auckland and El Centro, Naimy Nigeria and New York City and on it goes.
The sound tracks provides a voyeuristic character to the work and create an atmosphere in which to picture the unkown car interior and its inhabitants at the time of recording. Sounds such as the radio, conversations, as well as narrated tours. The sound begins to describe the drivers motivation in making and uploading the video to YouTube while the visual reinforces the car as a camera the enclosed bubble in which we often experience our surroundings.
LAST MAN CLUB First Draft 1996-97
I.C.A.N Ocular Lab at I.C.A.N The Gift
June 2009
LAST MAN CLUB First Draft 1996-97 black and white photograph and bottle of Chival Regal 2009
[l-r] Jacqueline Millner, Gianni Wise, Sarah Goffman, Elvis Richardson, Philipa Veitch
LAST MAN CLUB is a group portrait of the directors of First Draft Gallery, Sydney in 1996-97 one of the oldest artist run galleries in Australia. I was one of those directors along with Jacqueline Millner, Gianni Wise, Sarah Goffman, Philipa Veitch and Alex Gawronski. Both Anne Fraser and Caitlin Newtown-Broad were also directors for a breif period.
In an episode of the Simpons Grandpa Simpson is one of two surviving members of the Hellfish Club formed during 'the war' with a booty of stolen paintings for the surviving member, the episode dives into secrecy and consipiracy between members as well as war crimes. The Hellfish Club is based on a popular war time activity where soldiers would form groups called Last Man Clubs where the last member alive would claim a prize. Also known as tontine, The Last Man Club is an organisation based on exclusivity and longevity and for Grandpa Simpson the prize is art perhaps also for this group of First Draft Directors.
Having a more than passing interest in customs surrounding death, the idea of a Last Man Club really appealed to me and I wondered how it would traslate to the art world to question how ideas of war, strategy, exclusivity and longevity might operate.
TOMORROW
GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS Carlton Hotel curated by Nat Thomas and Lyndal Walker
October 2008
TOMORROW DVD PAL 4:3 3 mins 2008 [view work on YouTube]TOMORROW is a video work compiled from videos downloaded from YouTube of young girls singing the song 'Tomorrow" from the broadway musical Annie, about an orphan girl who wins a christmas holiday away from the orphanage with Daddy Warbucks a wealthy merchant who is looking to adopt. Abandoned, alone and longing for parents or someone to save her Annie's hopes and fears are expressed in the musicals most identifiable song "tomorrow" a song reminisent of a relentless positivity.
Made initially for an exhibition curated by Nat Thomas and Lyndal Walker at the Carlton Hotel in Melbourne the was a round up of Australian women artists. Afeminist statement by its very existance. I made the work to comment on the fact that feminism although having acheived so much still has a long way to go, particuarly in the male dominated artworld. These young girls mostly alone in their bedrooms croon and belt out "Tomorrow, tomorrow, I'll love ya, tomorrow, you're only a day away..." directly to the camera, a rehearsal an auditiion, ready to perform.
The other dominant element of the YouTube series of works is the nature of these videos existance in the world. While YouTube may be identified with this type of content singular person situated in domestic interiors talking directly to the camera/computer and imagined viewer once the video has been uploaded. I can see my returned gaze reflected in the expectations behind thier eyes, knowing that someone will be watching.
In the case of the TOMORROW videos whose subjects are young around 10-12 year old girls I imagine they were not making and uploading these videos themselves. As computer savvy as young kids these days may be I had to assume, the majority of them anyway, would have been recorded and uploaded by thier parents therefore revealing another layer of aspiration and approval.
Coming soon Child Prodigies, subscribe to my YouTube channel to receive regular updates.
YESTERDAY DVD PAL 4:3 3 mins 2008 [view work on YouTube]After making the Tomorrow video i then started searching on You Tube for people singing Yesterday by the Beatles and found the majority of the singers were men again alone in thier rooms the work becomes a portrait and enters a gendered dialogue with TOMORROW.
TELEVISUALS SALUTE ELVIS
Utopian Slumps Melbourne 2008 Solo show
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 2009
I walk the Line curated by Christine Morrow
TELEVISUALS : SALUTE ELVIS DVD 6mins 2008, BASTARD LOVE CHILD tower of used home recorded vhs cassettes 2008The Televisuals Salute Elvis water colour pencil drawings apply the hand drawn to the machine produced aesthetic of test patterns designed to convey the authority of technological data, while they were also personalized and identified with each network television station. The TV test pattern is an obsolete devise once used to calibrate colours and reception between monitors and were often used to announce an unintentional or programmed break in network television broadcast. The hard edged abstraction of the test patterns uses a specific and limited range of colours and lines in a variety of ways to test the visual perfection of a projection or monitor.
Each drawing and animation segment contains an anagram of the word ‘televisuals’. Televisuals is found to have the broad definition of ‘being suitable for televsion’, which leaves the field wide open for a medium used to great effect by governments to direct marketers. The eleven rearranged self referential letters of ‘televisuals’ ask cryptic questions and make statements. But to whom? They also operate as episodes or chapter headings suggestive of generic sub-plots.
TELEVISUALS : LEAVE US LIST 12 coloured pencil drawings each 42cm x 30cm 2008
BASTARD LOVE CHILD
Bastard Love Child was exhibited in Tomorrow Again curated by Scott Donovan Artspace, Sydney 2006
Utopian Slumps 2008
When showing Televisuals at Utopian Slumps I included the sculpture Bastard Love Child a three-meter high stack of VHS cassettes twisted from floor to ceiling like a DNA helix first exhibited in 2006.Collecting the VHS tapes for Bastard Love Child I was thinking about individual identities becoming collective through televisual memories. Like many of the items I collect the VHS cassette has arrived at its own death dictated by technology, mass production and consumerism. By making it a collectors item and putting it to symbolic and artistic use I hope to comment on its own demise as connected to evolution itself with the structural reference to DNA.
The twisting structure affords the viewer to circumnavigate its form to read the poem of associations and historical documents on each individual spine where the content is recorded. In future exhibitions of Bastard Love Child I would like to create additional stacks and other structures that allow the viewer to construct forms or view content. I also wish to incorporate the solicitation of the cassettes from the public as part of the piece.
BASTARD LOVE CHILD tower of used home recorded vhs cassettes 2008, TELEVISUALS : SALUTE ELVIS 12 coloured pencil drawings each 42cm x 30cm 2008
NOW 7 Years Later
Freemantle Arts Center
Fertile Soil: 50 Years of the City of Fremantle Art Collection
NOW7 YEARS LATER
11 October – 23 November 2008
Now 7 Years later digital video 10.00 minutes 2008
The enduring personal horror of the 9/11 terrorist attacks is the subject of a new work created for the exhibition Fertile Soil: 50 years of the City of Fremantle Art Collection
Melbourne-based artist Elvis Richardson’s new work, NOW7 YEARS LATER,comprising two videos and one sculptural installation, has been made in response to Christine Gosfield’s 9/11…..defining home, which is part of Fertile Soil Gosfield expressed her horror and personal bewilderment at 9/11 when in the days immediately after the terrorist attacks she made the work by photographing 360 Fremantle people.
Inspired by Michael Apted’s Seven Up series, Richardson has tracked down many of those people, including ex-WA Premier Dr Carmen Lawrence, to talk and reflect on 9/11, seven years later. Richardson herself was in New York when the attacks took place. Her direct experience of 9/11 lay in contrast to those she interviewed, who watched the events unfold on television. “I was struck by how people’s collective emotions were mediated by technology,” Richardson says. “By speaking to people who watched 9/11 from afar with distance and objectiveness, it made me rethink my own memory of the events.”
Similar to Gosfield, Richardson has created NOW7 YEARS LATER in order to seek out questions, rather than find answers. 9/11…..defining home and NOW7 YEARS LATER will be viewed in parallel as part of Fertile Soil. Richardson’s work is part of Fremantle Arts Centre’s commitment to commissioning new Australian work. Jim Cathcart, Director of Fremantle Arts Centre says, “Fremantle Arts Centre is dedicated to supporting cutting-edge contemporary works and we are pleased to have Elvis onboard as part of this momentous exhibition.”
The End digital video 8.00 minutes soundtrack: Frédéric Chopin, Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 35 (“Funeral March”) played by various performers [source: YouTube] 2008
[view work on YouTube]
Recover plywood table legs trophy bases pin striped woolen suit fabric 240x90x80cm 2008 [prototype in studio]
The impossibility of losing in the mind of someone winning
Ian Potter Museum
Basil Sellers Art Prize
2008
Field + Impossiblity of losing in the mind of someone winning polystyrene, cold covered plastic figurines from found trophies, metal stand, house paint 2m x 2m x 2m+ wood and glass cabinet, found and burnt silver trophies re-silver plated 170 x 95 x 95cm
2008Review in Trouble Magazine by Marijke Davey & Art Monthly by Chirstopher Heathcote
Elvis Richardson: Scaling second hand mountains
an excert by Dr. Daniel Mudie Cunningham in Eyeline #68Elvis Richardson collects the totems of disused triumph. Trawling through junkshops for abandoned sports trophies, Richardson poetically questions how the meanings of objects invested with victory are altered when severed from their original source. Left to collect dust on history’s scrap heap these trophies are bittersweet reminders that we spend much of our lives aspiring for success, muscling out competition where necessary, and rationalising setbacks to our lifelong trajectory of accomplishment. However long our lives might be, they are marked by a finish-line of death, beyond which the collected markers of our successes can and often do go astray. Richardson is a collector who rescues objects from the temporary death of the second-hand marketplace by indexing the amplified grandeur of these personalised moments and the shared cultural and social memories underscoring them.
Mount Everest is inverted in Richardson’s Field (2008) revealing it to be flat on the bottom: sliced clean off the earth and flipped upside down to hover in weightless suspension like a lost meteoroid. This flat surface is used as a ‘level playing field’ for Richardson’s cornucopia of found sporting trophies. The hierarchies prescribing the importance of some objects over others in the realm of museum vitrine display – as evident in Richardson’s The impossibility of winning in the mind of someone losing (2007) – is dismantled for the communal camaraderie of team spirit. The line-up of winners assembled for Field gleam with mute pride, shared success – they have scaled the mountain, played the field, revelled in their shared victories.
As much as she reclaims these trophies from the inertia of being unwanted, Richardson shows how identity is never really ‘levelled out’ entirely, no matter what the ideologies of team spirit or sportsmanship dictate. Because it is in triumph where a player is singled out for reward, in defeat where she or he feels the sting of shame or imagined ridicule. Unlike the anonymous mass of players comprising a sports team, indeed, like those frozen for eternity atop the bottom of Everest in Field, players rise to the top (as much as they can sink to the bottom). Whatever the case may be, they are named and identified – detached from the faceless team, however momentarily. The tensions animating the precarious tightrope between being identified or faceless, extraordinary or ordinary, a winner or loser, are evoked in Richardson’s video Credits (2008). Referencing a film’s scrolling credits that rarely command attention (a cue to leave the cinema or to stop and eject the DVD), Richardson’s Credits depicts the engraved name plaques on forgotten op-shop trophies as a literal honour roll or roll call. Eerily, the engraved plaques call to mind bronze grave markers, which resonate with the imperatives of death attached to relics of the past or disused items collected from the trash. The names scroll on an endless loop, attributing credit to those who triumphed for their team. But anonymity prevails because reading a name and their conquest tells you nothing much about the person, once at the top of their field. These works, which comprise Richardson’s installation for the inaugural Basil Sellers Art Prize 2008, are a conceptual hagiography for the faceless heroes whose triumphs are a legacy now lost.
Dr Daniel Mudie Cunningham
Curator / Exhibition Coordinator Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts CentreCunningham is author of ‘eBay & the Traveling Museum: Elvis Richardson’s Slide Show Land’ in K. Hillis, M. Petit and N. Epley (eds), Everyday eBay: culture, collecting, and desire. Routledge, New York & London, 2006.Cunningham has included Elvis Richardson in the following curated exhibitions: Reality Check (Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, forthcoming 2009), Clip Art (Firstdraft Gallery 2007) Shelf Life (MOP 2006), First Degree (Chrissie Cotter Gallery 2005).
Credits
DVD PAL 16:9
15 mins looped
2008
Impossiblity of losing in the mind of someone winning
wood and glass cabinet, found and burnt silver trophies re-silver plated 170 x 95 x 95cm
2008
Elvis is represented by Hugo Michell in Adelaide
