allan's walk artist run space inc

Allans Walk Artist Run Space (AWARS) invites proposals by emerging and established artists and curators from Bendigo & beyond, producing innovative, challenging and critical contemporary art, including visual and audiovisual arts, new media, sound, design, craft, literature and live art. We invite applications for solo and group exhibitions, and curated projects.

Please download & read the revised Exhibition Proposal and Application Guidelines

http://www.allanswalk.com/wp-content/uploads/AWARSapplication2011jan-jun.pdf

Closing Date 30th July 2010 at 5pm.

Further information from info@allanswalk.com

Elka Kerkhofs, Robert Stephenson and Paul Fletcher

THE ANIMATED ARTEFACT EXCHANGE.

An exchange between animation art and visitors to Allans Walk Artist
Run Space . An exchange between animation artists; Elka Kerkhofs,
Robert Stephenson and Paul Fletcher with other special guests. The
exhibition will feature a new short work produced collaboratively and
premiering at the exhibition plus a collection of Artefacts such as
drawings,prints, sculpture and inventions, from and related to their
present, past and future animation productions.

The theme of “exchange” is recognised as a pertinent and popular
perennial theme dating back to the original history of the Beehive
Building in which Allan’s Walk is housed. The Animated Artefact
Exchange, alludes to the history of the Allans Walk building having
once been a site of exchange- the mining and stock exchange. This
exhibition is conceived as several layers of exchange- between pubic
and artwork, between the artists involved and between the different
artforms and disciplines involved .

An exhibition of a diverse responses to the artform of animation-
past ,present and future, presented in a manner that references and
forms a hybrid of penny arcades/museums/ and audio visual libraries.
This exhibition will contain a collection of sculptural and drawing
based artworks as well as hi-tech/low tech, electro/electronic/
mechanical devices for creating/displaying moving image with and
without sound.

The three main artists involved, Robert Elka and Paul, are often
geographically separated and have diverse interests and artistic
practices in which various applications of Animation as an artform
are a common ground. Elka ‘s work has intersected animation with
Theatre, Dance, Installation and Performance Art, Roberts’ work has
encompassed the range from commercial art to independent film and
comic art and Paul’s work has been around the meeting of experimental
film, gallery installation and animation. This exhibition will pool
these interests to present a compendium of animation related
artworks. As such the exhibition will question the role of the moving
image in the 21st century, particularly the relationship between
animation and fine art and between animation and other forms of
manufactured moving image.

Artists statements re : Why Animation ?

Elka:
I like to use the craft of animation to visualise metaphors, like
many branches stuck together become a tree or a totally new wooden
stick creature.

Everything starts from a desire, which generates an idea that we want
to explore further.

The key to birth the idea into a visual and audio experience is to
communicate and exchange variations on the original ideas and apply
existing skills or develop new skills through experimentation. This is
a space any animator loves to swim in!

Robert:
I like to make things. I am never exactly sure how these drawings,
animations, models, writing, characters, places will turn out but
their development is fed by observation, personal biases, trying
traditional and non-traditional methods, responding to urges, being
inspired by others, and often just playing around with whatever
materials are handy. I have often found myself caught in the middle or
falling through the trap door of,‘industry’ and ‘art’ not being able
to completely satisfy both camps by what I do or how I go about the
work, and so the regions of ‘industry’ and ‘art’ and whatever
determines those places don’t, during the intimacy of the making,
determine the end result.

Paul:
I am currently fascinated with the potential of the combination of
digital and traditionally crafted animation for creating engaging non-
sense, realistic impossible and improbable spaces, creatures and
movement.

More info at ;
http://www.digitalcompost.net/animated_artefactINPROGRESS.html

Leo Garrouste
An exhibition of definitive works
From the 23rd of March 2010
With the Exhibition Launch Party taking place on Saturday 27th of March from 3pm.

Art can show something impossible. This exhibition, which focuses mainly on china ink, stencils and comic illustrations, is a recent collection of works compiled by the artist during his numerous travels.
Leo aims to affect you, entertain you, to take you on a journey so to speak.
He presents the absurd and the surreal, a surrealism not restricted to the unconscious….but one which gives shape to hypothetical worlds; where animals, nature and tribal shapes together form part of an intricate architecture.

Whether one enjoys the humour in one of his surrealist comics or the beauty of tribal patterns woven into an Asian-styled stencil, Leo will strike his viewers with an original voice, technical proficiency and a dedication to the malleable dimensions of artistic production.

Open Studio! Throughout the month long exhibition, Leo will be showing his finished pieces and displaying his method of creation to the public in an interactive manner. He will be available for both comment and conversation.

A MURAL BY LEO GARROUSTE CAN ALSO BE VIEWED AT 80 MARONG RD.

Visit www.leogarrouste.com to see more of Leo’s works.

Image- “Prise de tete, ink on paper.”

Image – “Gulliver, ink on paper.”

.

Essay

On Liberty and Death – Brad Haylock

We meet the world not with disdain, but with indifference — and regrettably so, for disdain would at least harbour a kernel of possibility. The spectacular is no longer read as such; everything before us is apprehended as mere information, as ocular data. There is no longer any point in looking in, behind or through. In the absence of the possibility of difference, one must give oneself over, either to the seduction of differentiation or to indifference. It is the latter that prevails, and yet the distinction here is moot regardless, for the former invariably devolves into the latter. We are beyond critique because we are beyond hope. All that remains is an acerbic and ever more self-indulgent storytelling.

Comprising a body of new work in a variety of media, Liberty and Death is a rumination upon the structural homogeneity of otherwise divergent ideologies, and an expression of the circularity or impasse of politics that this is understood to engender. This body of work takes as its point of departure a flag, specifically the anarcho-capitalist flag. At first sight, this yellow and black flag represents the ultimate paradox; the conflation of ideas that it signifies strikes us as irreconcilably contradictory. Upon reflection, however, or upon a closer inspection, synergies reveal themselves. Between these habitually opposed bodies of thought, similarities abound. Both espouse freedoms of the individual. Both are evangelical in their method. Both are premised upon the possibility of utopia.

The homogeneity of these divergent canons exposes the problematic of any utopian ideal. The title of the show, however, suggests a means of resolving this paradox, a conclusion to this line of inquiry: here, death is proposed not as an alternative to freedom but as its necessary equivalent, as the definitive and singular solution to an otherwise unanswerable question. And the works here echo or advance this sentiment with respect to artistic practice — this is, in no small measure, a commentary upon the politics of political art.

If you’re not against us, you’re with us announces an essential quality of politics, namely the impossibility of apoliticism or, in other words, the complicity inherent in non-dissent. This observation, however, is non-partisan, indeed too universal to be helpful. It represents critique without end, ambiguous in respect of both object and subject. Too photogenic, too consumable, it anticipates (or perhaps revels in) the consummation of politics.

Black on black (from zero form to absolute commodity) is perversely aspirational, hyperbolic. This work proceeds from a recognition of the seductive aestheticism of Malevich’s reductivist formal language and of the historical contingency of a radicalism of form. An unlimited edition, infinitely and indeed readily reproducible, Black on black wants to be the ultimate fetish object of political art.

Daydreaming about Utopia, by contrast, is perverse in its nostalgia, but also transitional in this body of work — transitional because a self-effacing sense of humour, and therefore some semblance of meaning, can be located in its title. No such revelation is proffered, however, in the case of the untitled champagne bottle. The incomplete redaction of the bottle’s label is clearly deliberate, the resultant flag unambiguous, but the meaning, the politics, of this work is indistinct. Likewise as regards the ink and graphite works on paper. These repeat the title of the exhibition, but unnecessarily, and their titles add insult to this injury. They are derived from found images selected, admittedly, for no reason deeper than the coincidence of certain words. They are to be read as art — their hand-drawn character tells us this —and political references abound, but their meaning is slippery. The champagne bottle and these works on paper thus comprise political art only insofar as they simulate political art. These works are deliberately polysemic, expressly overdetermined. In this way, they are proposed as a critique of critique, a fatal strategy.

References

Adorno, Theodor W. (1997) Aesthetic Theory, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis

Baudrillard, Jean (1990) Fatal Strategies, Semiotext(e), New York

—— (1996) The System of Objects, Verso, London and New York

Drutt, Matthew (2003) Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism, Guggenheim Museum, New York

Essay

Illuminations (I left on a Wednesday after a Terrible Row) – Josey Kidd–Crowe

By Susan McMinn BVA Hon Visual Arts

Josey Kidd–Crowe’s exhibition, Illuminations (I left on a Wednesday after a Terrible Row) consists of three components where, painting, installation and video takes you through a fragmented journey of memory and thought. Occupying two gallery spaces, paintings are intimately shown in the small space, whilst an installation of both video and small objects and relics are exhibited within the larger space, located opposite. The positioning of the different components is just as important as each art work. The paintings intend to capture random images of present thought whilst the ephemera engage past memory. The video offers a means of escape from the possibility of painful collective memory.

At first it would appear that the work of Kidd-Crowe throws caution to the wind. His loosely rendered paintings are executed with similar rapidity in which ambiguous thought and imagery enters and leaves the mind. In his paintings, Kidd-Crowe merges reality with the imaginary. His paintings are created quickly to emphasise the intensity of an emotional experience.

There is certain abstraction and yet an alluring figurative element to his work. The paintings are not fussed over and yet they are considered. Kidd-Crowe comments, ‘Though they are confused’ they are ‘decidedly confused’. On the small hardwood surface a raw narrative of primal of human emotion is expressed within the painted image. For Kidd-Crowe the painting process becomes personal. As he paints, he leaves behind a portrayal of imagery illustrating a yearning to capture the unknown. A succession of marks plays out a loosely rendered surreal narrative that engages with both the figure and elements of abstraction. Within the expressive mark making, he passionately explores subconscious thought associated with feelings of love, hate, regret and disgust. This is evident in the central painting, Untitled #3, 2009, where red hued vortexes thought spew forth to the edges of the picture plane; eyes gaze back at the viewer. Palpable iconography particular to the female body explores sexuality. Kidd-Crowe unashamedly reveals those very thought processes that would otherwise be kept hidden.

Whilst his paintings convey a catharsis of emotion, Kidd-Crowes ephemeral installation suggests the source. Found and made personal objects collected over time, and relics particular to the past, form a narrative of ones personal history touching issues of memory and the self. These are juxtaposed with portrait drawings on National Geographic magazine paper and a video. The way in which these three elements are arranged places emphasis on past memory and our desire to escape to another world. For me, on the one hand, entering this room made me feel as though I had entered a cosmos of privacy. Not unlike entering into someone’s bedroom, I felt somewhat like an intruder. And yet once I was ‘in’ I felt compelled to look and engage with the relics as they tapped into my own memory.

The objects and relics in Illuminations convey their own ambiguous story and embody unseen past memories and experience. Inherent in these objects is the suggestion of a previous owner and the representation of a personal history contained within. For the artist, inclusion of the object alludes to the absence of the figure and something that cannot be grasped:

‘Maybe if the elusive truth these objects contain could be grasped, the vague yearning for the unknown could be satisfied…perhaps the paintings are an attempt to exorcise the objects meanings’.¹

Here, contained within these objects and relics is another life and a personal past history that may never be revealed. Moreover, not unlike his paintings, Kidd-Crowe arranges these objects selectively. A string of pearls could suggest gender as does a worn pair of men’s leather shoes. Burning candles are placed atop of each shoe, perhaps suggesting the loss of a former generation. Leaves protruding from a wooden object suggest nature whilst a skull adorned with pearls and green glass fuses human-animal relationship. A broken fence picket and a small family photograph depicting mother and child, the ideal of family and melancholy. Small, yet dim lights positioned throughout the installation illuminate that which is hidden in our collectables and memories.

The feeling of nostalgia experienced within the space was disrupted however, with portrait drawings on glossy magazine paper placed alongside the objects and relics. Kidd-Crow utilised the typically remote, yet beautiful landscapes particular to National Geographic, to appeal to his audience a means of escape to an ideal ‘otherworld’. According to Kidd-Crowe the drawings are symbolic of our yearning to connect with ‘nature’ and the natural world. The drawings are surreal portraits with psychological connotations. Extraordinary figures loom from sublime landscapes and beaches. The raw emotions of thought evoked within the portraits are expressed in the paintings.

Similar to the desire for escape, evoked by the placement of the portrait drawings on lush landscape backgrounds, a video installation titled ‘Climbing’, 2009, explores the unsatisfied desire for the sublime. Through nature and the natural world, the film begins with serene imagery that begins to snap and jump as the film journeys through a chaotic array of movement, transcending into still calm of blue sky and cloud. Watching ‘Climbing’, I was captivated by the appearance of the void created by the close filming of the tree branches and distant sky. This is enhanced by particular movement created during filming such as the transition of sudden jerky circular motion to tranquillity.

Kidd-Crowe acknowledges an influence from American painter Forrest Bess and Swiss installation artist Carol Bove. He is attracted to the obscurity conveyed within the work of Australian painter Ian Fairweather. In the same way Kidd-Crowe rapidly paints thought and imagery as they come to mind, Bess terms himself a visionary painter and ‘makes no conscious effort to paint’. He closes his eyes and paints colour line pattern and form, copying them as they come to mind ‘exactly without elaboration’.² For Kidd-Crowe, Carol Bove’s interest in the sense of history contained within an object is not unlike his own desire to imagine the collective personal history or memory hidden within his own installation of objects and relics.³

Illuminations is a collective reflection of thought and memory presented in figurative abstraction. Although the figure is not present within the installation, the remains of the figures memory embody the space. Kidd-Crowe challenges the viewer with self examination as his works conveys a catharsis of emotion, a narrative of a collective personal past, and a means of escape. This exhibition touches on human primal emotions through the exploration of that which most of us would secretly keep hidden.