Suspension points

This exhibition catalogue documents a collaborative art exhibition produced by QUT and Fordham University art students at the Ildiko Gallery in New York, December 6, 2014 to January 25, 2015. The exhibition theme related to the vagaries of communication over long distances, and the kind of creative works that could be generated via a range of media including email, Skype, message in a bottle, and Twitter.

Light-n:doubt

Light-n:doubt is an exhibition exploring the changing landscape between light and sculpture at 65 Hindley Street, Adelaide in 2003. The exhibition references research through the notion of 'otherness'. This show of work foregrounds the play between the materiality and idea of the object and what it 'speaks', the symbolic resonance of the object within space, and the role of the viewer in constructing language through form. Light-n:doubt at 64 Hindley Street, Adelaide. 20th-28th November, 2003. 11am-7pm.

Art museums and the global tourist: Experience centres in experience-scapes

In the experience economy, the role of art museums has evolved so as to cater to global cultural tourists. These institutions were traditionally dedicated to didactic functions, and served cognoscenti with elite cultural tastes that were aligned with the avant-garde’s autonomous stance towards mass culture. In a post-avant-garde era however museums have focused on appealing to a broad clientele that often has little or no knowledge of historical or contemporary art. Many of these tourists want art to provide entertaining and novel experiences, rather than receiving pedagogical ‘training’. In response, art museums are turning into ‘experience venues’ and are being informed by ideas associated with new museology, as well as business approaches like Customer Experience Management. This has led to the provision of populist entertainment modes, such as blockbuster exhibitions, participatory art events, jazz nights, and wine tasting, and reveals that such museums recognize that today’s cultural tourist is part of an increasingly diverse and populous demographic, which shares many languages and value systems. As art museums have shifted attention to global tourists, they have come to play a greater role in gentrification projects and cultural precincts. The art museum now seems ideally suited to tourist-centric environments that offer a variety of immersive sensory experiences and combine museums (often designed by star-architects), international hotels, restaurants, high-end shopping zones, and other leisure forums. These include sites such as Port Maravilha urban waterfront development in Rio de Janiero, the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, and the Chateau La Coste winery and hotel complex in Provence. It can be argued that in a global experience economy, art museums have become experience centres in experience-scapes. This paper will examine the nature of the tourist experience in relation to the new art museum, and the latter’s increasingly important role in attracting tourists to urban and regional cultural precincts.

Crystal palaces: Copyright law and public architecture

This paper investigates copyright law and public architecture in the context of cultural institutions of Australia. Part 1 examines the case of the Sydney Opera House to illustrate the past position of architects in respect of copyright law. It goes onto consider the framework laid down by the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000 (Cth) to resolve copyright disputes over moral rights and architecture. Part 2 considers the argument over the proposed renovations to the National Gallery of Australia between Dr Brian Kennedy and the original architect Colin Madigan. Part 3 finally deals with the allegations that Ashton Raggatt McDougall, the architects of the National Museum of Australia, plagiarised the designs of Daniel Libeskind for the Jewish Berlin Museum.

The garden of Australian dreams: The moral rights of landscape architects

This article considers the moral rights controversy over plans to redesign the landscape architecture of the National Museum of Australia. This dispute raises issues about the nature and scope of moral rights; the professional standing of landscape architects; and the culture wars taking place in Australia. Part 1 considers the introduction of the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000 (Cth), with its special regime for architecture and public sculpture. It focuses upon a number of controversies which have arisen in respect of copyright law and architecture - involving the National Gallery of Australia, the National Museum of Australia, the Pig ’n Whistle pub, the South Bank redevelopment, and the new Parliament House. Part 2 examines the dispute over the Garden of Australian Dreams. The controversy is a striking one - as the Australian Government sought to subvert the spirit of its own legislation, the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000 (Cth). Part 3 engages in a comparative study of how copyright law and architecture are dealt with in other jurisdictions. In particular, it considers the dual operation of the Architectural Works Copyright Act 1990 (US) and the Visual Artists Rights Act 1990 (US) and a number of controversies in the United States - over the Tilted Arc sculpture, a Los Angeles tower block that appeared in the film Batman Forever, a community garden mural, a sculpture park, and the Freedom Tower.

Konstrukcija mnimosti : K poètike "Voskovoj persony" Ju. Tynjanova

The subject of this work is the poetics of «The Wax Effigy», a short novel or novella by Jurii Tynianov, Russian writer, literary critic, historian of literature and prominent literary theoretician. The plot structure of the novel is based upon a real event, the creation by Bartolomeo Carlo Rastrelli in 1725 of a wax sculpture of the first Russian emperor, Peter the Great. «Construction of the Sham» consists of three chapters, an introduction and a conclusion. Due to the fact that Tynianov was at the same time a prose writer and theoretician of literature it seemed important to consider the reception of his prose and his works on literary theory in relationship to each other. The introduction is devoted to this task. The first chapter is about the history of the creation of the novel and its reception. Tynianov stopped writing one short story in order to write the novel; these two works have some common traits. It seems almost obvious that his work on the first text was a real step toward the creation of the second. In the first story there is an opposition of dead/alive which is semantic prefiguring of a central motif in «The Wax Effigy». An analysis of the reception of the novel demonstrated that almost every critic writing about the novel has described it as nonsense. Critics considered Tynianov's work in terms of «devices» and «content» and could not understand how devices are related to the content of the novel: the novel was thought as a signifier without any signified. Implicitly, critics thought the signified of the novel as a traditional one of the historical novel, as the historiosophical «idea», embodied in the system of literary devices. In this case literature becomes something instrumental, a kind of expression of extraliterary content. In contradistinction to that Tynianov considered literary semantics as an effect of the literary structure. From his point of view the literary sense is immanent to the process of signification accomplished inside the literary text. The second chapter is devoted to a rhetorical analysis of the opposition dead/alive. Tynianov systematically compares both terms of the opposition. As a result of this strategy the wax effigy of the dead emperor becomes «as if» alive and the world of living people «as if» dead. The qualifier «as if» refers to the fact that Tynianov creates an ambiguous semantic system. This rhetoric is related to European Romanticism and his «fantastic literature» (Merimé, Hoffmann, Maupassant etc.). But Tynianov demonstrates a linguistic origin of the strange fantoms created by romantics; he demystifies these idols by parodying the fantastic literature, that is, showing «how it was done». At the same time, the opposition mentioned above refers to his idea of «incongruity» which plays a prominent role in Tynianov s theory but has never been conceptualised. The incongruity is a inner collision of the literary text; from Tynianov's point of view the meaning of the work of literature is always a dynamic collision of semantically heterogeneous elements struggling with each other. In «The Wax Effigy» Tynianov creates a metalevel of the work demonstrating the process of creation of the literary sense. The third chapter is a reconstruction of Tynianov's conception of the historical prose, specifically of the mechanisms by which historical facts are transformed into literary events. Tynianov thought that the task of the historical novelist is to depict his hero as an actor, to demonstrate that as a wearer of many masks he is a creator of appearances, ambiguities. Here, in the «figure of fiction» (Andrei Belyi), the very idea of the historical prose and rhetoric employed in «The Wax Effigy», history and literature meet each other. In his last theoretical work, «On parody» Tynianov writes about the so-called sham structure of parody. In his opinion every parody is a text about other texts and «serious» work which could be read at the same time as a text about «reality». This twofold structure of parody is that of «The Wax Effigy»: that text speaks about ambiguities of the history and about ambiguities of the literary sense, about social reality of the past and - about the working of the literature itself. «The Wax Effigy» is written as a autoreflective text, as an experiment in literary semantics, as a system of literary ambiguities - of hero, rhetoric and the text itself. The meaning of the novel is created not by the embodiment extraliterary idea, but by the process of signification accomplished inside the work of literature. In this sense Tynianov's novel is parody, a break with the tradition of the historical novel preceding «The Wax Effigy».

Velum

Velum continues material experimentation with edible materials as explored within Formations: New Practices in Australian Architecture 2012. 1 The work employs the central theme of veiling as a ‘second skin’, an intermediary agent simultaneously engaging with Heideggerian themes of ‘nearness and revealing’ (1927, 1954). This second skin creates a liminality distorting everyday objects of popular culture and technological consumption. In doing so, the work puts forth multiple considerations, the figurative play upon consumption itself; the role of the strange and obscure to affect a deepening awareness of our accelerated consumption and experience; and more tangentially, questions surrounding imminent scenarios of hybridity between body and technology. Velum represents a recent focus of the authors’ creative practice, ‘Making Strange’ (Strange Making) published and presented elsewhere. Making Strange explores the sublime process, fundamental to both the final design outcome and the designing experience. The sublime process is seen as a leading, a physiological overpowering of self to a state of intense self-presence, often leading to self-transcendence or state of otherness. As such, the work engages with the body and materials, experimentally and in a trans-disciplinary manner to inform new material practice.

Closed Systems

Closed Systems was an exhibition of sculptural works held at MetroArts, Brisbane in the group exhibition 'Platform 2012' curated by Jan Manton. My contribution to the group show was a series of 13 bronze sculptures, produced using a lost-wax casting process. Each form was derived from a sapling that had been manipulated so that branches and roots were interconnected. The resulting 'looped' forms evoked notions on narcissism, self-absorption and introversion. The works were subsequently exhibited at the National Arts School in Sydney as part of the Kodak Minolta Art Prize (2013).

Identification and host-plant associations of Australian Sericothripinae (Thysanoptera, Thripidae)

The Sericothripinae is a largely tropical group of about 140 species that are often strikingly bicoloured and have complex surface sculpture, but for which the biology is poorly known. Although 15 genera have been described in this subfamily, only three of these are currently recognised, with five new generic synonymies indicated here. In Australia, Sericothrips Haliday is introduced, with one European species deployed as a weed biological control agent. Hydatothrips Karny comprises 43 species worldwide, with six species found in Australia, of which two are shared with Southeast Asia, and four are associated with the native vine genus, Parsonsia. Neohydatothrips John comprises 96 species worldwide, with nine species in Australia, of which one is shared with Southeast Asia and two are presumably introduced from the Americas. Illustrated keys are provided to the three genera and 16 species from Australia, including six new species [Hydatothrips aliceae; H. bhattii; H. williamsi; Neohydatothrips barrowi, N. bellissi, N. katherinae]. One new specific synonym is recognised [Hydatothrips haschemi Girault (= H. palawanensis Kudo)], also four new generic synonyms [Neohydatothrips John (= Faureana Bhatti; Onihothrips Bhatti; Sariathrips Bhatti; Papiliothrips Bhatti); Sericothrips Haliday (= Sussericothrips Han)].

Albert Einstein Commemorative Medal

Obverse: A likeness of Einstein according to the sculpture seen in the entrance to the Mathematics Institute of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Reverse: A mathematical formula in Einstein's handwriting.

Means are the Ends: The Command Issue

Means are the Ends: The Command Issue (2014) was an exhibition of sculptural works exhibited at LEVEL Artist-Run Initiative, Brisbane. The exhibition playfully critiqued the portrayal of women’s desire in cultural production and symbolic discourse through a focus on fetish sensibilities. Developed during a summer residency, the artworks looked to the rituals, materials and iconographies associated with certain divergent subcultures. Employing strategies of sculptural intervention and appropriation, the exhibition consisted of found objects, which had been deconstructed, altered and intervened; a dildo became a faux drawing machine, a butt-plug a makeshift horn. Reconstructing these visual codes through the formal and theoretical language of contemporary sculptural practice, Means are the Ends: The Command Issue spoke to the problematic, humorous and often paradoxical relationship between depictions of the feminine and women’s desire and agency.

Stand and Deliver

'Stand and Deliver' is an installation integrating three elements; a large-scale fabric work, a series of pencil and ink drawings on watercolour paper, and a lecture performance recorded as a digital video. 'Stand and Deliver' offers a feminist perspective on the archival impulse and utilizes the strategy of Revision to open up new critical directions for feminism’s own histories and archives. It is part of a broader practice strategy to re-perform a subjective feminist archive. 'Stand and Deliver' was developed and presented as a solo exhibition for First Draft Gallery, Sydney in 2014. 'Stand and Deliver II' was revised for the exhibition 'Quaternary', curated by Courtney Pedersen, held at the QUT Art Museum, Brisbane in 2015. 'Quaternary' was included as part of the 'Women of the World' (WOW) Festival, Brisbane 2015, at QUT Gardens Point Precinct.

Towards (dis)Satisfaction

Hosted at Blindside Artist-Run Initiative (Melbourne) the exhibition Towards (dis)Satisfaction (2015) was a re-staging of earlier sculptural works from the exhibitions Means are the Ends: The Command Issue and Crude Tools (2014), Feeble Actions (2013). The forms humorously interrogated representations of gender and sexuality via strategies of sculptural intervention. A stripper’s pole oozes grease from its stainless surface, fluted with holes. A dildo vibrates on a glass tabletop; propped up by simulated testicles, the intensity of the dildo’s vibrations makes the form spin. With its continual circling, the phallus drags Vaseline over the table, performing a drawing and redrawing of a smeared circle. In Towards (dis)Satisfaction fetish is used as an instrumental strategy, employed as a mode to work across different theoretical and material discourses. In the works the play between explicit and implicit depiction creates an ambiguity that has suggestive potency, where fragmentation and dysfunction initiate diverse readings. These material dialogues make apparent the anxiety and desire inherent in the viewer and question how the visual conventions of erotica and art history are mutually informative.

Sepulchre

The work in Sepulchre (2015) came from my research into female ritual practices and my fascination with specific mythological and historical narratives. These themes were explored during a month-long Summer Residency at Boxcopy Contemporary Artspace. Of particular note were the chronicles and rituals from the terrain around the Adriatic Sea, including Greece and Italy. During the residency, I kept referring to specific mythological texts, which had women as the main protagonists. I kept returning to female characters whose representation was framed by aspects of their sexuality. When looking at these women together, they seemed to sit within a greater narrative archetype, a communal dialogue of shared characteristics, repetitious narrative components and mutual landscapes. Sepulchre became my attempt to develop a conversation between these women by drawing from their commonality, and reimagining these collective elements into sculptural objects and moving images. The video explores an apotropaic gesture, a Baubo-style ‘flashing’. A glass star chart rests on white cliffs, speaking to the narrative of Andromeda and her position as both a celestial and terrene landscape. Another object, a wall mounted copper light burst, pays homage to the framing device used by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. By reconciling these dialogues, I was interested in exploring expanded portrayals of female sexuality and depictions of subversive and authorial femininity, developed through connotations with mysticism, ritual practice and women’s knowledge.

Fungus-feeding Thysanoptera: Phlaeothripinae of the Idiothrips genus-group in Australia, with nine new species

In a group of fungus-feeding Phlaeothripinae characterized by complex body sculpture, identification keys are provided to three genera and 15 species from Australia, including nine new species. In the genus Azaleothrips one new species is described, and one Asian species is newly recorded from Australia. The genus Stictothrips is recorded from Australia for the first time, with two new species. Within the genus Strepterothrips considerable structural diversity is recorded including three new species in which antennal segment III is greatly reduced and bears no sense cones. Some species in this genus exhibit the unusual condition of having several setae on the pelta, the first abdominal tergite. Problems in the production of generic diagnoses within the Phlaeothripinae are discussed.