What: ‘IT IS TOGETHER’ Solo Show.
Where: BLACK & BLUE GALLERY, Cleveland St, Surry Hills, Sydney
When: 23 JULY 2009, 6pm – 10pm
Rationale: Taking cues from 1960’s action painting and the infamous 1960’s Merry Prankster Acid Tests and Love Inns, which combined multi-media sensations, designed to maximise the effects of LSD on the participants’ minds, this new work is designed to harness the artists’ interaction and interpretation of their own ideas and craftwork.
This work including a hand crafted coffin, a triangular platonic percussion set, and several other smaller conundrums is aimed at “waking the dead” so to speak. In other terms appropriating activities and ideas from by gone eras’ that still have potency today.
If paintings conclusion was that it only served as a bourgeoisie past time and interest, a decoration for furniture showrooms, then the magician has had to somehow reclaim the mystery behind the craft. Like there was the ‘death of hippie’ so to was there the death of painting or vice verse. Like the idea of hippie had to transcend itself so to did painting, suffering a psychological death more positively. Like dying, psychoanalysis aims to awaken un-consciousness or at the least to know the sub-conscious workings of self, like wise visual stimulus had long served the purpose of awakening such concepts. Painting also had to reaffirm its self-reflexivity.
What: 3 × 2D – Hogan, Klerks & Briggs July 2010
&Weird Heavy Publication Issue 00 Launch
Where: No Vacancy Gallery, QV Melbourne Vic.
When: 22nd July – 3rd August 2010
“We have struggled to find our own method of creating a space rather than relying on our own self.”
-Jiro Yoshihara, The Gutai Manifesto (1956)
3 × 2D brings together the practices of 3 artists whose work shifts between manifesting idea structures (thinking) and investigating optical perception (seeing). Taking on an experiential beat into ‘The Adventures of the Aesthetic’ 3 × 2D is in part, an anachronistic survey of art theory and aesthetics. Focusing on the latter half of the 20th century, particularly the 60’s this show seeks to flatten and dissolve distinctions between modern and post-modern, concept and object, video and sculpture and ultimately define the alchemical truth-value in nature & future.
The three artists presented in this exhibition, whilst having due regard for historical discourse are nevertheless inclined to go their own way. Much of what is important and informative in the exhibition stems from the artists’ very personal attitudes and beliefs. Presenting works in video, neon, silicon, collage and various constructions the artists play with references to a variety of modernisms, yet subvert its purity with baroque interpretations of the mundane and a sharp political subtext.
‘Modern technology (in peace and war) defoliates and lays waste to the natural world—-this exhibition shows you how to fight back with a resilient, vital garden “Concept’ of your own.’
Hogan, Klerks & Briggs . 2010
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