STUDIONONSTOP

Grasping the Thistle

essay

published
Zones of Contact: 2006 Biennale of Sydney
A Critical Reader
edited by Natasha Bullock and Reuben Keehan
Artspace
Sydney, 2006

[download pdf [84kb] or read full text below]

In the time allocated for questions at the close of a session titled ‘Art, Autonomy and Hospitality: Networks, Transmission and Locality’ in the June Zones of Contact: 2006 Biennale of Sydney symposium ‘Biennales, Cosmopolitanism and Locality’ at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, I had a question to ask. In the course of the session the tilt towards curatorial rather than artistic practice had become pretty clear, with far-flung interpretations by panellists to the plainly over-packed topic. My question outlined that I’d been attracted to this session by it’s hum of particular buzzwords – ‘hospitality’, ‘networks’, ‘transmission’ and ‘locality’ – and that I’d likewise heard the word ‘inclusive’ in the air a lot over the last few days of Zones of Contact openings and events. I was interested to hear thoughts, particularly from the Sydney-based panellists, as to how these principles might actually be put into practice in light of the insignificant inclusion of Sydney artists in this Biennale of Sydney? After a pause the session moderator turned to the panel and asked, ‘Right, who’d like to grasp that thistle?’ Continue Reading »

images from top.

5. ‘Ashtray – – Planter’ 2008
detail

thumbnails – ‘The Lively Plane’ peopled and planting.

1. The Lively Plane
Dennis Tan & Lisa Kelly

I C A N
15 february – march 2 2008
Sydney

room diagram [28kb] & list of works [24kb]

In 2007 Lisa Kelly undertook an Asialink residency in Singapore and met artist Dennis Tan ~ founder and housekeeper of the independent artist space The Other House in Little India. There they grew the makings of a cooperative dialogue grounded in a mutuality of interests and attitude around practice, hosting, talking, walking and urban observation.

The joint project ‘1.The Lively Plane’ at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Newtown saw a city swap and cultivation of this dialogue via Tan’s one month visit to Sydney. The exhibition roamed around the artists’ material thinking on the constructed environment, relations, building, propping, sculpture, drawing, streetscape and locality.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

‘Inside a small room with white walls and polished timber floors, a plane tree sprouts snug and unassuming from one corner of a raised wooden platform, its top leaves flattened awkwardly against an indifferent ceiling. Also on the platform is a woven mat, a ‘domestic space differentiated from the wilderness’ (1), placed neatly under the shade one imagines might be cast if this tableau were not in fact indoors. The titles of these works (for they are, as it turns out, discrete works by two separate artists), No Street Tree and Working title: Private space on constructed space on Institutional space, suggest two things that lie at the heart of the objects and actions unfolding from this exhibition: the multi-layered and contingent nature of urban space, and the artistic processes used in interrogating and intervening in that space…’

~ read Working Title: Conversations on a Lively Doorstep by Tessa Rapaport at Makeshift Journal

Tentcraft
Lisa Kelly & Alex Gawronski

SOUTH
30 march – 10 april 1999
Sydney

1. Life Security 1999 (with Alex Gawronski)
found chairs, nylon rope, dyna-hooks, hardware
2. Ljus Och Viss Varme 1999
twig, camping lantern, citronella candle, hardware
3. Cobweb 1999
projector, spider, glass slide, plastic, dowel, acrylic, cork, adhesive mesh
4. Burning Desire 1999
cyalume light sticks, dowel, blutack, hardware

[all photos: Christopher Snee]

catalogue text
Alex Gawronski & Lisa Kelly (italics)

A working motivation unravelled from the container of a word.
t e n t c r a f t
faded advice soon re-developed amid Parramatta Rd.

Thinking of movement, a conflict of mobility and stasis,
and the parallel world of stuff that crafts a migration elsewhere.

Camping is a word embroidered with numerous associations. It is inscribed with various international codes that nevertheless belie a desire for universalism. It is colour coded, bound up yet it suggests escape and freedom, freedom from life. When we take off we hope equally to get lost, without necessarily abandoning the familiar texture of our lives back home. Indeed it is familiar difficulties of the emotional, financial and social kind that we seek to replace with the difficulties of a sort we can readily overcome. These are primarily practical difficulties. What they represent is an A-Z guide on how to: stay dry, stay warm, keep cool, avoid bites, avoid falls, maintain orientation, remain mindful of the environment and of our co-travellers and of ourselves. At the same time we seek to erase temporarily our local presence and to become (if only partially) wild. The camper seeks a reunification with those things that he or she takes for granted, those things technology keeps us safe from whilst seeking to maintain our complicity with our natural selves.

Continue Reading »