Re-imagining static Utopias : unraveling the bat/human problem

The making of the modern world has long been fuelled by utopian images that are blind to ecological reality. Botanical gardens are but one example – who typically portray themselves as miniature, isolated 'edens on earth'. Whilst respected, heritage-laden institutions such as the Royal Botanical Gardens in Sydney, Australia promote such an idealised image they are now self-evidently also the vital ‘lungs’ of a crowded city as well as a critical habitats for threatened biodiversity (in this case notably flying foxes). In 2010 the 'Remnant Emergency Artlab' set out to alleviate this utopian hangover through a creative provocation called the 'Botanical Gardens ‘X-Tension’ - an imagined city-wide, distributed, network of 'ecological gardens' - in order to ask, what now needs to be better understood, connected and therefore ultimately conserved?

Solo Show

Solo Show is a to-scale model Metro Arts’ gallery, in which it was exhibited. Set upon a timber frame, the model depicts a miniature ‘installation’ within the ‘space’: a foam block that obstructs one of the gallery’s walkways. Developed and produced for a group exhibition that explored the relationship between humour and art, this work explores and pokes fun at ideas of the institution, scale and the artist ego as well as communicating feelings of emergence, insecurity and hesitancy. The work was included in the group show 'Lean Towards Indifference!' at MetroArts, Brisbane, curated by art collective No Frills.

me as al, you as bobby, me as bobby, you as al

In ‘me as al, you as bobby, me as bobby, you as al’, appropriated footage is looped and supplemented with superimposed text, creating a scenario where Robert De Niro and Al Pacino endlessly stalk each other, with their readied-guns chased by hovering words. These titans of Hollywood screen acting represent opposing approaches to the construction of filmic identity, and as the text labels loosely adhere to one weapon and the next, the action on screen becomes an investigation of the subjective and objective potential within screen surrogate constructions of personalized identity. The work was included in the group show 'Vernacular Terrain' (curated by Lubi Thomas and Steven Danzig) for the Songzhuang Art Museum, Beijing.

Explosive Revelations

‘Explosive Revelations’ employs the device of the Hollywood-style explosion to expose the constructed and futile nature of the moving image. Pointless, impotent explosions bloom and fade, punctuating a non-existent narrative – they promise the spectacle of violence but destroy nothing and disappear without a trace. The video itself is sourced from a stock footage supplier that provides users with a selection of explosions that can be inserted into movies by masking out the background. However, the footage is not used as intended, leaving them instead as merely explosions erupting on top of a black background, fizzling out into non-existence. The work was included in the 2008 'Light in Winter' program at Federation Square, Melbourne, directed by Robyn Archer.

something 2.0

In ‘something 2.0’, a section of a Hollywood film is re-edited to include textual elements that appear as ‘Pinocchio-ish’ protrusions from the actors faces. As they sit in what appears to be an interview or therapy session, this re-editing and looping imposes a new fictionalized narrative upon the characters. The histrionic yet vague nature of the text, and its imperfect integration into the footage, can be read as both a comical imposition and a failed critical gesture, both speaking to the complications involved in the relationship of the artist and the fan as they engage with popular culture. Thw work was included in the group show 'Perfection' part of the Metro Arts Artistic Program 2008.

Top Ten Box Office Blockbusters of All Time

‘Top Ten Box Office Blockbusters in Dollars’, is an ongoing series of works that represent the production budgets and worldwide gross profits of the top ten grossing films of all time. By displaying this data on top of the full running time of each blockbuster, the viewer’s attention is drawn back and forth between the amassing dollar figures, and the original film’s highly polished presentation. In doing so, the work aims to provide a new opportunity to enjoy these immensely popular films with a new sense of value. The exhibition was selected for the Artistic Program at MetroArts, Brisbane in 2010

My mother is water, my father is wood

'my mother is water, my father is wood' was an installation comprised of two large cork discs mounted on the gallery floor and wall, overlaid with images of photographic and archival research evidence, and a turned wood sculptural object. It also included a short video work on a miniature screen embedded in the upright disc. The work explored the language of natural elements and the structure of genealogical research to discuss the Scandinavian history of Queensland and my own family. The work was selected by the directors of LEVEL ARI in Brisbane for inclusion in their 2011 exhibitions program.

Swimming but drowning

This single-channel digital video work documents a performative event, the disintegrative process as a drawing-object is progressively submerged within water. This work forms part of a series of video works examining ephemerality within art and the iconoclastic impulse. This is informed by Gustav Metzger’s conceptualisation of auto-destructive art (1959) as that which contains within itself an agent, which automatically leads to its destruction. Here, the ontological moment of the work corresponds to its demise, investigating a symbiotic relationship between creation and destruction. It addresses the phenomenology and epistemology of destruction in art when presented by the artist, as both a process and an ethical position. The work was included in the group show 'The Construct', curated by Kris Carlon for Artworkers' Residency and Exhibition Project 2006 at the State Library of Queensland.

Citizen Coombs Wins!

Citizen Coombs Wins! appears to be a standard arcade game placed within the gallery. Mortal Kombat is displayed on the screen inviting the viewer to press play. The ‘player’ selects their character and awaits the commencement of the game; at first move however, the player dies – sound and text informs them that ‘Citizen Coombs Wins!’. By altering the expected play of the game, this work exploring notions of play, control, the institution and expectation. This work seeks to invite, engage and repel the viewer in order to question, critique and play with the role of the artist and the viewer within the context of the institution. The work was included in the international group show 'Ceci n'est pas une Casino!', curated by Kevin Muhlen and Jo Kox for the Casino Luxembourg and later toured to Villa Merkel, Esslingen, Germany.

Athletes series

The researcher was invited to photograph athletes in the lead-up to the 2006 Commonwealth Games held in Melbourne. She photographed four indigenous athletes, to produce a series of four large-scale cotton rag prints, 1 meter x 1 meter, printed onto photorag paper from digital files. “My photographic practice can be described as both political and spiritual, in the sense that as an Aboriginal Indigenous artist I take stock of the rationalising effect of the technologies I use, and create work that evokes nature and spirit. My methods often involve re-photographing or digitally re-working landscape photographs and adding historical or cultural icons of significance. Working with Indigenous athletes has been an honour and a pleasure. I admire the athletes’ passion and dedication to their chosen sport, and above all their humility, which seems a trait somewhat in contrast to what it takes to attain the highest levels of achievement. Indigenous athletes are wonderful role models for all Australians, and in making creative work that places their luminary presence with the land, I am aligning sportspeople with a deep sense of nature and spirit.” – Leah King-Smith. These works were commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery for the exhibition FLASH: Australian Athletes in Focus. The exhibition was a significant element in Melbourne2006 Festival, the cultural festival of the Commonwealth Games. The exhibition was prominently reviewed in Portrait: Magazine of Australian and International Portraiture and was subsequently remounted at Old Parliament House, Canberra (15 July to 12 November, 2006). One image was used for the front cover of Art Monthly, (March 2006).

Dancelines series

Dancelines was a body of work commissioned by Bangarra Dance Company and The Arts Centre, Melbourne. The artist was invited to produce a body of work that responded to the dance company's production of 'Boomerang'. The result was a body of photographs that applied the artist's interest in layering as a photographic technique and her interest in indigenous subjectivity and sprituality. The works drew correspondences between Rheannan Port, the subject's, own biography and character and the artist's voluminous archive of iamges of the natural world. The result complemented and formalised the collaborative processes that the artist had previously only explored in the video medium. The work was shown at the George Adams Gallery of the Arts Centre as part of Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games Arts Festival. 'Rheannan Port, #1' was selected for the 2006 Archibald Photographic Portrait Prize, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The work was reviewed in The Age newspaper.

Everything

Everything (2008) is a looped 3 channel digital video (extracted from a 3D computer animation) that appropriates a range of media including photography, drawing, painting, and pre-shot video. The work departs from traditional time-based video which is generally based on a recording of an external event. Instead, “Everything” constructs an event and space more like a painting or drawing might. The works combines constructed events (including space, combinations of objects, and aesthetic relationship of forms) with pre-recorded video footage and pre-made paintings and drawings. The result is a montage of objects, images – both still and moving – and abstracted ‘painterly’ gestures. This technique creates a complex temporal displacement. 'Past' refers to pre-recorded media such as painting and photography, and 'future' refers to a possible virtual space not in the present, that these objects may occupy together. Through this simultaneity between the real and the virtual, the work comments on a disembodied sense of space and time, while also puncturing the virtual with a sense of materiality through the tactility of drawing and painting forms and processes. In so doing, te work challenges the perspectival Cartesian space synonymous with the virtual. In this work the disembodied wandering virtual eye is met with an uncanny combination of scenes, where scale and the relationships between objects are disrupted and changed. Everything is one of the first international examples of 3D animation technology being utilised in contemporary art. The work won the inaugural $75,000 Premier of Queensland National New Media Art Award and was subsequently acquired by the Queensland Art Gallery. The work has been exhibited and reviewed nationally and internationally.

The landing

'The Landing was an exhibition of paintings held at Gallery Barry Keldoulis in Sydney in 2008. The exhibition comprised 7 paintings and a 3-channel video work. The show built upon the artist's interest in drawing parallels between, while simultaneously disrupting the hermetic integrity of both the painted and virtual surface. In this exhibition this was drawn out by the intentionally scratchy and blanched qualities of the painted surface contrasted against the careful delineations and gradation of their subject matter which was drawn exclusively from virtual 3D animated spaces. Conversely, the video work collapsed a series of picture-perfect objects into a dense and incoherent whole. These tensions and slippages act as manifestations of the indeterminacies that frame our subjectivity more broadly - as artist or viewer. As Barry Keldoulis writes: 'Alwast’s practice engages the construction of ‘reality’ in both the digital and painterly worlds. His seamless stitching together of the various modes of virtual reality... is in this exhibition contrasted with his paintings, which show a fondness for what many now see as the quaint naivety of the medium, and the foibles of humanity the painted surface exudes when compared to the clinical exactitude of the virtual world.'(2008, http://www.gbk.com.au/artists/peter-alwast/the-landing) Works from 'The Landing' were included in the exhibition 'Temperature 2: New Queensland Art' (2009, curated by Frank McBride) at the Museum of Brisbane.

Revolutionary self portrait

'Revolutionary Self Portrait' (2009) is a sculptural self-portrait. The work comprises a bust engulfed in hair and a scalloped pedestal stand. Historically, divine energy has frequently been depicted using fluid forms - drapery, clouds and occasionally hair. These forms and associations act as a departure point for this sculpture in which the figure is depicted in a state of inundation by billowing tufts hair. The work was also inspired by the tendency of great 19th century utopian thinkers - for example Marx, Bakunin and Kropotkin - to wear large beards. Within both traditions, the language of heroic subjectivity is amplified by a sculptural extension of the body. In 'Revolutionary Self Portrait' however, this extension threatens to suffocate the subject - a gesture made all the more ironic due to the fact that the artist himself is incapable of growing a beard. The work was selected for the National Artists' Self Portrait Prize, University of Queensland Art Museum, 2009.

Visual acuity is not what it seems : on Ian Burn's 'Late' reflections

A whole tradition is said to be based on the hierarchical distinction between the perceptual and conceptual. In art, Niklas Luhmann argues, this schism is played out and repeated in conceptual art. This paper complicates this depiction by examining Ian Burn's last writings in which I argue the artist-writer reviews the challenge of minimal-conceptual art in terms of its perceptual pre-occupations. Burn revisits his own work and the legacy of minimal-conceptual by moving away from the kind of ideology critique he is best known for internationally in order to reassert the long overlooked visual-perceptual preoccupations of the conceptual in art.