Friday, July 28, 2006

melted glass



I went to my studio the other day - which is really an expensive storage shed until I build some internal walls and get the electricity on - and discovered a dead car out the front. There was another one up the end of the street. Two burnt out cars in my small, quiet, isolated on the edge of town opposite the river very lonely at night street where sits my lonely studio. Mr T went back later and removed the one unburnt wheel. Having just that morning had our perennial groundhog day conversation about the exponentially expanding amount of stuff and the strangly shrinking quantity of storage space in our house, I'm still wondering what can be the use of a single wheel from a vehicle that does not remotely resemble any of the five T already owns? (He's now fallen in love with a white thing in Adelaide with a red leather interior and lots of shiny chrome)

Cool melted glass though...

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

dead white genius

I hate the genius tag that gets attached to old dead artists like Picasso, but I do heartily recommend the exhibition of his and Dora Maar's work that's on at the NGV at the moment. Fantastic documentation by Maar of the painting of Guernica and great colour pencil drawings. I love colouring.

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

pants



Last year I was lucky to get to use the Prototype room at the High Court of Australia to show some of my work. The Prototype room was literally built as a prototype to test out some of the materials and design ideas that were being used in the construction of the court building. These days it's an almost forgotten area off to one side of the court that's a bit run down but popular with the occasional bunch of skateboarders.

This got me thinking about inventions - good ones - crap ones - flops - disappointments and great ideas that never quite made it. So I made a series of works inspired by real and made-up inventions called the Amazing museum of spectacular innovations and admirable attempts. The paper permanent press trousers above are my favourites, specially because I have a nice pair of brown 70s ones I modelled these on and also because permanent press trousers were actually invented by an Australian.

Thursday, July 13, 2006

weekend in melbourne


Getting to Melbourne late Saturday afternoon somewhat reduces the art viewing opportunities, but I did get to look in the window at Gertrude St on Sunday and saw some great graffiti round that part of town. The highlight of the trip was definitely Hiraki Sawa's video work at the NGV International. Anyone in Melbourne before December should definitely get to see this. Since my last post was a whinge about all things I don't like about video, this one is about what I do like.

Sawa's work was quiet, strange and compelling. All his work uses his own apartment as an environment to create these surreal vignettes and 'events'. One piece follows the shadows of camels and the occasional elephant across the domestic surfaces, mesmerising as they continuously travel across the interior landscape. There are lovely moments where a group of camels circle around a light fitting or climb along the edge of the stairs. In another work miniature aeroplanes use the bed, table and kitchen bench as landing strips, as the video progresses, the hallway becomes a very busy flight path with many planes crossing as they enter and exit through several doorways. What I particularly liked about this work was it appeared simple, yet seemless. The sound tracks were beautifully integrated and you could enter at any time and didn't need to see the entire work to get something out of it. That said, I think I spent about forty minutes in that one section of the gallery and thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm glad I saw the Picasso exhibition first, because after viewing those videos I didn't want to look at anything else - I just wanted to take the memory away with me without jamming anything else in on top.