Performance Anxiety

I have a work in a group show!

actingUP: Performance based and inspired art

The opening is on Thursday, July 15 (from 6 - 9pm) at At The Vanishing Point. The address is 565 King St, Newtown.

The show runs from 15 - 25 July, I’d love for you to come along and check it out.

“Growing out of the avant-garde and conceptual art of the 1960s, performance in visual art – performance art - now more-than-ever is being utilised by artists in communicating and developing their ideas across a number of mediums, platforms and places.

Performance based and inspired visual art stretches across the gamut of emotions, sensations and affect. From the intimate, to the gestural, the manic to the meditative, it can take place anywhere, anytime - lasting seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and sometimes even years.

From the artist as performer, to the audience as performer, performance based and performance inspired contemporary visual art often challenges audiences to think in new and unconventional ways about art, self, culture and the world around them.

actingUP offers a diverse smorgasbord of performance treats; from the live to the documentary, the abject to the interactive, the critical to the comedic. Featuring 15 local, interstate and international individual and collaborative artists, the performance based and inspired art of actingUP draws upon such disciplines as sound art, theatre, painting, drawing, video, documentary, photography, and, critical & conceptual discourses.”

My work In Exitu Israel de Aegypto was recently exhibited in Hidden: A Rookwood Sculpture Walk. It was accompanied by text and audio explaining the work.

“In exitu Israel de Aegypto is an acknowledgement of death and its spiritual significance for the dying and those they leave behind. The work consists of several tonnes of rock gathered in a large pile like a monument or grave marker. The title refers to the hymn sung by new arrivals at Purgatory in Dante’s Divine Comedy. The form of the work echoes the mountain island which penitents must climb. The hymn itself refers to Israel’s escape from Egypt which resulted in their time in the desert, another spiritual trial. Again, the form of the work resembles the physically bleak desert that the Israelites travelled through for forty years.

“The form of the work was partially inspired by the poetry of T. S. Eliot. The pile of rocks evokes the spiritual desert which Eliot portrayed in The Waste Land. Without spiritual water ours is a barren and hopeless existence. In his poems Eliot described death as a kingdom of dust and stone. This collection of stones catalogues the weight of death, a small part of the kingdom.

“Conversely the work hints at a theme of salvation. The title refers to Israel’s escape from slavery which eventually led to their inhabiting the promised land. The pile of rocks could be Mount Sinai where the Israelites received the law or it could be Mount Zion in the Promised Land. Even as the mountain Purgatory it offers the chance of redemption and paradise for those who reach the top.”

I have a work in a group show!

Hidden: A Rookwood Sculpture Walk

The show runs from the 18th March - 18th April at Rookwood Cemetery in Lidcombe. We’d love for you to come along and check it out.

Now in its second year, Hidden: A Rookwood Sculpture Walk unveils the work of 24 artists’ responses to the Rookwood site, one of the largest cemeteries in the southern hemisphere. Through assemblages and ephemeral, text and sound based installations, artists open up questions about death and grief and explore their own personal connection to the site.

I’m curating a group show for At The Vanishing Point under their Emerging Curators Mentorship Program:

Living Space

The show runs from 12 - 28 March at ATVP. The address is 565 King St, Newtown. We’d love for you to come along and check it out.

“Living Space explores the reciprocal relationship between the body and space, and the process through which one is defined in the defining of the other.

What the body is, what it can and cannot do, and the meaning or consequence of these potentials is a direct corollary of the space in which one exists and navigates amongst others.

Space, defined as place, is qualified and given meaning and measure by bodily experiences that inhabit and activate it, the stories they play out within the potentials it opens and the limits it sets, both physical and absolute or conventional and relative.

Through a range of strategies that play with, pervert or otherwise challenge what we assume we know Living Space brings together video, multimedia, digital media, installation and performance artworks that open up and divulge the interplay of the borders between body and space.”

My work Circumcision (2008) was recently exhibited in the show ReImag(in)ing SomaSex and I was prompted to reconsider some of the ideas that had been in my head when I originally performed the work. The exhibition was mainly focused on ideas of body, gender and sexuality, so I have focused on this aspect of my work:

We begin life in the womb in a state of complete fulfillment. Through birth we lose our unity with the mother and the instant gratification of that physical bond. This rupture is then echoed in the development of our ability to distinguish between the mother and ourselves. These separations gave birth to a lack from which sprang need and desire. Lacan’s ‘objet petit a’ is an artifact of these ruptures. Once the womb or the nipple may have fulfilled us, but its removal taught us to desire. The ‘objet petit a’ is no longer the object of our desire, but it is the cause of our position as desiring machines. The lack has developed beyond the point of fulfillment.

Melanie Klein’s ‘part objects’ are those parts which attract the privileged interest of the child: the breast; the penis; the mouth. These part objects are wrapped up in the infant’s desire for the parent, to be suckled by the mother, to have the father’s penis. This desire is overshadowed by the threat of punishment, girl’s have already been wounded by the removal of the penis and boy’s live under threat. Circumcision is a symbolic castration of the son, or a warning shot across the bow. In my performance Circumcision is a self-mutilation an anthropophagic act. Julia Heyward described her arm as if it were separate from her, a foreign body or part object. My arm is a privileged object, at once separate and yet horribly connected.

Need and desire are repeatedly expressed through sexuality. Desire is evoked or sustained by states of revelation and obfuscation. When what is revealed is hidden or removed from our reach the fear of loss heightens our desire. Lacan states that the parts which provoke arousal are the sites which suggest severances. Breasts are withheld from the mouth and faeces is ejected from the body. Eyelids, lips, labia and the slit at the tip of the glans all appear as though cut open. Mike Parr’s performance at the 1977 Paris Biennale involved the amputation of a fake arm attached to his real stump. Parr’s desire for a lost arm caused him to cut away at the negative space, my desire provokes a similar revelation.

I have a work in a group show!

ReImag(in)ing SomaSex

The show runs from 18 - 26 November (from 10am - 5pm) at Macquarie University Art Gallery. The address is Building E11A, Macquarie University. We’d love for you to come along and check it out.

“ReImag(in)ing SomaSex takes as its central concern the interplay between visuality and embodiment, and showcases works that ‘re-vision’ normative perceptions and image(ining)s of sexed bodies—works, that in provocative, affective, visceral and conceptual ways inaugurate the process of ‘seeing otherwise’ ”

I have a work in a group show!

Hello

The opening is on Saturday, September 26 (from 6 - 8pm) at ESP gallery. The address is 228 Illawarra Rd, Marrickville.

The show runs from 27 September - 11 October, we’d love for you to come along and check it out.

For the 2008 Undergraduate Degree Show at Sydney College of the Arts I presented three works under the collective heading, Collected (2008). These works were linked by themes of meditation and maturation, struggle and spiritual growth.

Quercus/Augustus is a meditation on the tree as a motif for ascension. This tree encompasses many ideas, like Beuys’ 7000 Oaks Project, the biblical tree of life and my own personal experience of trees as a place of refuge. The first part of the name, Quercus, is the Latin word for oak tree and the second part of the name, Augustus, means revered or exalted.

Untitled (Seed) uses the bed as a metaphor for the womb/grave, with the rock as a stand in for a person and for my mental state, both a grave stone and a seed. The metamorphic nature of the volcanic stone, basalt, is something longed for and another reference to Beuys. The rock is a marker for a missing tree, perhaps present but unseen. The basalt is a seed, a beginning and the name is a reference to Acconci’s Seedbed.

Axis Mundi is a diagram of the island purgatory with it’s levels of atonement. At the summit is the garden of Eden, innocence restored. The name of the work refers to the point of contact between the high and low realms.

As an honours student in the SPI studio at Sydney College of the Arts I was required to write a research paper to complement my artistic practice. The aim for this paper was to present the major themes of my work and to ground my practice in a larger conceptual framework. The main thrust of my paper was an exploration of catharsis in art.

The paper is split into three chapters: “Making art to experience catharsis”, “Making art to provide catharsis for others” and “Catharsis and transcendence”. In each chapter I address the work of two artists whose work can be interpreted in relation to the theme of catharsis before expounding some of my own work.

This paper was a wonderful opportunity to write about several influential artists whose work I greatly admire and to detail the influence they have played in my conceptual development. It has also been invaluable in helping me to appreciate the direction my own work is currently heading in.

As I mentioned recently, my appreciation for the written communication and elucidation of my conceptual concerns has greatly increased. As such, I present, for your pleasure and enlightenment, the full transcript of my research paper:

Performance Anxiety - the Art of Catharsis

At the opening night of the National Tertiary Art Prize I had an interesting conversation about the current popularity of video art. One theory is that the invention and dissemination of LCD televisions has returned video to the pictorial realm. Wall mounted flat screen video is the new painting; framed, contained.

One could argue that the LCD television and video projection cover much of the same ground. However, aside from issues of scale, I think that projection requires some specific environmental considerations which make it less accessible than wall mounted televisions.

At Sydney College of the Arts the sculpture studio is also known as the SPI studio. SPI stands for Sculpture, Performance and Installation. This year there will be over thirty televisions in the undergraduate degree show from the SPI studio alone. As far as I know the majority of these televisions are CRT not LCD.

Perhaps we are just working within our limits, hoping to upgrade to LCD when we make it big. The humble budget of the impoverished art student will not stretch to liquid crystal. Or is it possible that there is some aesthetic appeal to the old cathode ray tube?