Work Wanted: Keith Wong
An artist advertising art in the yellow pages as an artwork turns out not to be a light matter.
More from this Issue
Unknown Worker in Art: Alan Lukey
A retrospective survey of the work of Alan Lukey who died in 2003 aged 51 organised by fellow artist John Foubister with the help of Jill Lukey was shown at New Land Gallery in Port Adelaide, 21 April to 10 June 2007. Lukey was a South Australian artist who painted abstract and meditative works and lived on the Fleurieu Peninsula between 1977 and 2003. He also made public art works often in the shape of waves.
A Relationship can't be Outsourced: Tracey Clement
The idea of slow art takes on a gripping intensity in Tracey Clements textile works which use ideas of duration and repetition to refer to womens traditional work and skills - a huge ball of wool, a giant button-covered blanket, full-size bodies made from thread and most recently a miniature city of salt and wire. The excessive though delicate relationship between the artist and the work becomes evident in the resulting artefacts. She admits to watching very bad DVDs while on the job.
Reskin: Intensive Collaboration
A fascinating participant report on an exciting collaborative project of great vision and experimentation. Reskin 2007 was developed by the Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT), the Australian National University School of Art, the Centre for New Media Arts (CNMA) and Craft Australia. It brought twenty international and national artists, designers and technologists together under the guidance of seven professional wearable technology specialists at the forefront of their respective fields. The idea of Reskin, co-ordinated by Alexander Gillespie was to design wearable technologies for the body using the latest materials and methods.
We Can Work it Out: New Style Residencies in Asia
Since the early nineties Asialink has helped to plunge 450 Australian artists into the proverbial deep end of arts practice, the overseas residency. Out of their comfort zones, far from friends and familiar comforts, the artists test their artwork and themselves in new cultural contexts. The recent experiences of Megan Keating in Taiwan, Danius Kesminas in Indonesia, Alwin Reamillo in the Philippines and Ben Morieson in Japan are described in all their variety and embrace of an increasingly Asia-literate world.
Territorial
Territorial Canberra Contemporary Art Centre June 2007 24 hr Art, Darwin September October 2007 ACT Artists: Silvia Vélez, Bernie Slater, Raquel Ormella NT artists: Franck Gohier, Catriona Stanton, Gary Lee
Everybody's Working for the Weekend
This article was written by a mysterious Australian creative labour collective possibly based in Western Australia. It humorously analyses the special characteristics of creative work as against the goals of capitalism while simultaneously possessing an intense work ethic through looking at recent artworks by Matthew Hunt, Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont, Rodney Glick and Lynnette Voevodin, and pvi collective. It concludes that the creative task of showing how the nature of work is historically and geographically located is vital.
Busy Work: Dreaming Time
Justine Khamara uses a scalpel to cut out tens of thousands of images from magazines. She then joins the often identical images to make very large assemblages. The artist sees the obsessive busywork that she does with her hands as providing her with space to dream and do the real work of sifting through the stuff in her head.
Labour of Love: Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro
The latest work by Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, artists who have been fruitfully collaborating for over seven years was shown at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2007. Called The Paper Trail it explores Paul Virilios ideas about dromology (the science and logic of speed especially in relation to war) through thinking about the Mongolian Empire. A fantastic Mongolian Ger (a nomadic structure ordered on the internet), government archives, Johnson Solids and the Trailer of Death are some of the features of the installation which suggests complex and recurring layers to all globalisation.
Topsy
Topsy Eleanor Avery, Ray Cook, Kim Demuth, Alice Lang, David Spooner, Grubbanax Swinnasen. Curator Chris Comer Metro Arts Galleries, Brisbane 5 - 22 September 2007