Filed under: moveable
Inhabit recently posted this intro to the new Transbay Transit Terminal in San Francisco, currently under construction. Not only will it have wind turbines and geothermal heating and grey water recycling, it will have a “5.4 acre green roof that will act as a city park and will host variety of cultural activities.” Are you paying attention Sydney? Are we really still squabbling about metro, no light rail, no heavy rail, no… nothing?
Quit being crap Sydney transport.
Moss wall (1994)
Passage: from tunnels of light I turn into dark, swapping fractured fractals and the dry sniff of the arctic for a slumbering under-earth kiln…
I’m hoping to win a trip to Copenhagen with this description of my experience of Olafur Eliasson’s installations currently on at the MCA in Sydney. The competition asks you to devote just 25 words to one work, but how to choose? To me, this truly fantabulous exhibition is so much about the transition of encounter and experience, moving from one work to another. This section of the exhibition particularly, the rooms taking you from the overwhelmingly giant wall of reindeer moss and spiky steel bubble of a kaleidoscope, through a low dark tunnel lined with fired soil bricks smelling just slightly moist, hinting at the mistiness to come in the room beyond… ahhh, so satisfying a journey. I would guess that passageway, the installation ‘Soil quasi bricks,’ goes quite unnoticed for many, in comparison to the showstoppers on either side of it. But really, they’re all passageways, getting you to and from experiences of colour, light, reflection, refraction.
There’s so much more I could write. Go now, before it ends on the 11th of April.
Beauty (1993)
40 Yrs of Kaldor Public Art Projects @ the Art Gallery of NSW
War and Peace and Inbetween (2009) by Tatzu Nishi
photo by Carley Wright and Johan Palsson
Tatzu Nishi’s intent here is to reframe the familiar and thereby make it strange, but there is an unexpected and strange Ikea-ness to this installation – inside and out. Externally, a mess of utilitarian scaffolding is wrapped in tarpaulin, making twin big blue (Swedish blue) boxes either side of the Gallery’s entrance. Inside, fresh plasterboard, a lonely ceiling rose, and a sparse array of Harvey Norman-like furniture make decidedly domestic interiors.
In each cozy box, entered via a ramp from the Gallery’s front step, the enormous bronzes of horse and rider (English sculptor Gilbert Bayes’ 1923 The Offerings of Peace and The Offerings of War) burst out of a coffee table and tv cabinet (peace) and gallop across floral bedsheets (war). This should be surprising, even alarming. But strangely it isn’t. Their monumentality has been humorously domesticated to be sure. However, my eye is drawn to the cheap, faux-woodgrain vinyl flooring, the two Hemnes beds, the generic lifestyle photo in a frame on the chest of drawers which together conspire to make these spaces like Ikea showrooms – I mean the Hemnes is actually Ikea (should we be alarmed that I can Ikea-spot WITH product names?).
It is more the inescapable generic anonymity that struck me in this work, and made me contemplate the quality of dead spaces (dead versus live, filled with the detritus and evidence of real livingness). Like a hotel room, the spaces of War and Peace and Inbetween masquerade as real life… even with the intrusion of bloody big bronze statues.
Filed under: playable
I love miniatures. In school I would stay up into the wee hours working on 10×10cm paintings with my size 0 brush (the ‘eyelash’ brush). And I have had a soft spot for the micro-cosmos of terrariums since I used them in the set design for Babushka in 2004. The attention that the mini incites is one reason I like them, but they also do something that quite belies their smallness. That is, they make things eerily bigger – time slows down, moments of emotion resonate in increased intensity. Check out the way the dramatic is deployed in the artworks of Thomas Doyle…
Filed under: playable
Pressed into a shallow heated space between audience and front curtain, the five performers of This Kind of Ruckus stand poised, ready for action, red crepe pom-poms quivering just slightly. ‘It’s theatre,’ they seem to say, ‘It’s a show.’ But that’s a complicated idea in the world of Version 1.0’s politically charged, verbatim theatre. Even more than in previous shows (the wheat one, the boat one), the lines between real testimony and performance text, or performer and person are decidedly grey. The subject matter here – domestic violence, sexual violence, power and control – is strangely intimate, as rage often is. In two equal halves, the ensemble examines ‘consent [a]s a grey area.’ How do we get from here to there? What separates accident and intent? Who is culpable?
I look away for just a moment and a heavy, bouncing disco has become an uneven stumble-embrace as David catches/pulls Kym and they fall to the floor. A mediated rehearsal of how-are-you-I’m-ok becomes an exercise in misunderstanding. Overhead, slow motion replays dissect the moment of embrace, a tumble, the changing pallor of rage – in extreme detail, over and again. Smeared stage blood and eye-shadowed bruises turn a game of which 12 guys would you fuck into a sinister and grotesque play of aggression.
It’s just a show. But I leave unnerved.
Version 1.0’s This Kind of Ruckus
Performance Space, Bay 20, CarriageWorks
9 September 2009
P Space website
Version 1.0 website
I remember hearing about Cassandra Jones’ cheerleader wallpaper years ago, but this interview with the artist also takes a look at recent animations using found photos. Suns set, moons wax and wane, birds fly… like most animation, it appeals to my ocd nature, and like all photography, it deals with the de/re-construction of time and movement.
Filed under: wearable
Psychiatrist Dr Karen Norberg, of National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, spent a year knitting an anatomically correct replica of the human brain.
Full story in the Telegraph here.
Filed under: wearable
One-way stretch Italian wool fabric was bought close to a decade ago at Australian designer Sally Bluff’s bolt end sale – now it is slightly 1930s inspired top (bias-looking construction, but actually it is a bit of a cheat). Jim is Mr Henson due to muppety open selvedge seams at shoulders (I think of him often).
© JSP
Filed under: wearable
Teva Durham’s yoke vest – many people have blogged about Durham’s difficult sizing in general and this pattern in particular… I rewrote the pattern partly to compensate for my 180cm frame and partly because I used a different wool which made the gauge all off (3.5″ width to 10sts instead of 4″ with a US13 needle). So I added quite a bit into the yoke and hip to add length – I will post my resizing here soon. I also changed to a US11 needle for the collar – there is no way it could stand up knitted with the 13. Very fast and easy pattern however; it took a day and a half, with a bit more time in front of the tv to weave in the ends.
© JSP
