handsome boy modelling school

last wednesday was a night full of arty type openings. i fully intended to pop into the RMIT architecture open studio, then head over to Pieces Of Eight in north fitzroy to check out the My Pet Rock show.
ambitious plan, to say the least. sorry to melanie and the gang for not making it - i'm sure it went off.

the open architecture studio, however, was amazing. blew my mind open, actually, because a whole bunch of stuff got me thinking. thinking about the hand/eye/brain aspect of model-making. thinking about design for the other 90%. thinking again about airports. thinking about what makes up a city. i have to post about all of them actually, but today maybe just a thing or two about modelling.

i always wanted to be a super model.

no, i jest, i'm talking about model making for design - architecture, interior design and landscape design. obviously it's about getting the form right. about transference from brain to hand to eye and back again. a pathway that only really works when you get out the balsa, or the veneer, or whatever you're using. and i think that pathway is matched only when one sketches. that physical manifestation of thinking. perhaps this is what they mean by craft.

there were so many amazing models in the place, it's kind of hard to know where to start, but one of the projects i was really interested in was one in which students made architectural designs using atypical modelling material: pencils, foil, plexiglass and ear buds [q-tips for you kids in NYC]. actually, the q-tip one got me thinking about the possibilities for taking architecture into areas/applications with no architectural design experience and being able pass on tools for 'shaping' easily (and with a little help from j&j).

they reminded me of the images of model-making with indigenous communities i saw at process a few months ago with martyn hook and peter.. peter, hmm, someone. anyway - they were using straws and blu-tak and cardboard to design appropriate housing for cape york and torres strait families.

anyway, it also reminded me that craft, model, make, design, develop, space and shape are all verbs, and that the process of making forms which reflect a space is equally as (if not more so, in some areas) important than the beautiful forms you see in other areas of the studio. don't get me wrong, some of the elaborate models were amazing, and i love a slick model, but this project in particular reiterated the joy and purpose, the process of creative discipline and spacial design.

figuratively speaking

how cool are these chairs?! i even think they're better than the esc key stools, which i think are pretty cool.

from nikkei pasokon interior series via swiss miss.

european architecture

how gorgeous is it! such a beautiful shape, so simply designed and, as my friend esther said, such nobility in that archway. found in a backyard, northern austria, west of vienna. in a small town with a couple of streets and a water pump. so cute.


if you're friends with me on facebook, or have checked out my flickr site, you may have seen this pic before. but for those who haven't, i just had to share it.

more bike-riding psychogeography stuff

ok, so this post is more like a sketch book of ideas about movement through the city via bicycle, but bear with me. i might eventually write something that's halfway interesting :) i posted about some more of this stuff here

my experience of my environment is so effected by the way i travel through it. if my bike got stolen, i would be devastated - not just from loss, but because i've developed a way of operating and a sense of freedom in my urban environment based on this mode of transport and its particular features.

i've been thinking about some of these features relating to cycling, geography (cyclo-geography?) and psychogeography.



memory
this morning, the sun was shining and i put ms lily allen on the tunes and i had a tonne of memories about london town come flooding back. suddenly, the streets of north carlton were the streets of north london, and carlton gardens was finsbury park (minus the obvious crack deals and the beautiful lake). and then i smelled someone cooking and the corner of exhibition and bourke street became my grandmother's kitchen for half a second. this is the bit that i find especially interesting about riding a bike as a form of humanist geography/psychogeography - architecture and urban planning become a collage of interior, exterior - other places and even other times.




senses
i ride to work every day, so i have plenty of time to think, listen, feel, smell, and almost taste on the way there and back. which is why i love it so much - all my senses get to experience the day in between work and home. those 10-15 minutes are like an active stasis - there's so much activity, but it's all completely outside of either my departure point or my destination. it's travel and space quite unlike any other - like a protected moment. and at that time, my body is exposed. there's something about presenting yourself to be so vulnerable (flashing lights and helmets aside) which generates this heightened state.



pain
the other aspect to bike riding as a means for urban spatial experience is pain. when one navigates through a city in a car, or bus, pain is not a standard factor (the crippling frustration of melbourne's public transport system aside, obviously). clearly walking for long distances or extended periods generates pain, but it's a slow process and almost supports my theory in relation to psychogeography. but when you cycle, even if you're cycling a short distance, you will more than likely experience physical pain at some point - burning quads as you grind up a hill, cold air in your lungs at 8am, sore calf muscles from not warming up, chaffing from bad lycra (if that's your get-up) or [worst-case scenario] hit by a bus and dislocated hip and fractured right hand. and aside from that extreme case, it's these regular, but low-level instances of pain that make the experience of cycling through a city particular. i also think that it is through this pain that the memory or psycho element to the geography comes into play - like shock therapy. or something not quite so brutal.

for example, it's 8am in melbourne, i'm hurtling down past the carlton gardens, in second gear (on my 3-gear bike), it's 7º outside and my lungs are fucking burning. but all i can notice about my environment is the beautiful old trees in the gardens, the curve of the exhibition buildings, the intense green of the grass and the detail on the gargoyles of the buildings opposite. these details are sharp as a tack. this may be because i'm a visual person and record my life in pictures. or because i'm currently obsessed with melbourne and am seeing postcard shots everywhere. but i don't notice that stuff when i'm in a car. or even walking. there are other factors for that (which i'll discuss later), but it feels like the pain in my chest as the ice-cold air hits my ex-smoker lungs has sharpened the focus on these moments.





scale
a really important factor in having the city and this place accessible to me is that, through being on my bike, i'm elevated to a scale between architectural and personal. it's like the height and span of buildings, roads, parks, freeways, universities and the city as a whole mass is chopped down to a manageable size because i'm on a bike. firstly, i'm closer in height to them and because of my level of mobility, distance is more manageable. it feels more on my 'level' and all of this increases my sense of inclusion and ownership with the place.




movement/chaos theory.
when a butterfly flaps its wings, it can alter the path of a tornado.
similarly traversing a city changes the pulse of the urban experience. the rhythm of the city, from both an experiential and a philosophical point of view, is affected by the rpm of riding around town. i think it would be awesome to plot the beat and biorhythms of cities somehow and compare them.


UPDATE: Apparently I should see Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky, which deals with the jarring change in a girl's experience of London when her bike gets nicked. What do you think?

everyone is shit, except you love. part 2

my dearest friend in the whole world is an environmentalist. her adorable partner is a racing car driver. somehow they share common ground when it comes to the ethical dealings of government and business regarding issues of environmental sustainability. here's an email he sent her that is not only relevant to our current climate, but so goddamn cute.

[originally posted on her blog, but i just had to reproduce it. they will both be mortified. sorry sar.]


"As I am always suggesting, this constant chasing of the perfect fix to saving the environment by changing the type or source of the fuel we use is simply marketing crap. V8 Supercars Australia are changing from 5% ethanol mixed fuel to an 85% ethanol based version for its Racing Green program to become more carbon-neutral.

The result of this change is that the cars will use 25-30% more fuel as ethanol burns much hotter and therefore more rapidly. Another problem is that although ethanol produces much less carbon dioxide ethanol blended fuels produce much more nitric oxide due to the higher burn temperature. Nitric Oxide is also harmful to the environment so is this all a matter of moving the problem from one source to another as I have indicated all along. As you know I am one for making change but only when there is real benefits from the change, not marketing cover ups.

The other problem is not the output from the engines but the sourcing of ethanol based fuels, how much goes into producing this stuff including the clearing of land for crops, the cultivation of crops, the water used to obtain the crops (reducing another of our precious resources), etc.

Anyway, I just thought I would get that one off my chest as too many companies (including V8 Supercars) are full of shit about making changes to protect the environment with programs such as ethanol and carbon offsets etc. If everyone planted a tree for all the carbon offsets we would not have any land left for houses, roads, crops, picnic grounds and footy ovals. I don't yet know the answer but I do know that everyone is crap (except for you)."

ok, last wordle

i know, it's getting ridiculous now. but i just had to put this one up. it's the latest essay i submitted for uni. tee hee.


ok, i'll stop now. no more wordle.

my cv as a wordle

ok, so none of you may have found my del.icio.us wordle very exciting, but you're gonna love this one, i just know it.

this is my CV as a wordle thingy. i call it a shoe, 'cos it kinda looks like a shoe. although technically it's probably a cloud. it's so much fun!!





and whoever said i wasn't management material...

names names names.

on the weekend, i found a whole bunch of pics from my trip to dubai. i uploaded 'em to flickr and in trying to add some names other than C[insert camera generated number], i realised that i wasn't able to note the names of the buildings, mostly 'cos i was zooming past at 80MPH in air conditioned comfort, which makes it hard to identify them. I tried to find them on the interweb, but given that dubai has so much new goddamn architecture going up, the usual keywords like "architecture, arch, new, dubai, marina", well, i end up with hundreds of thousands of sites. (in fact, if anyone can give me a clue on this one, dusit dubai? much appreciated)

i also found it fascinating that the naming of architecture is quite unlike naming art. sometimes it's the name of the function (like the consulate of monaco, or the beijing aquatic centre), then there are the proclaimed titles, usually residential towers- like eureka, rialto, etc. and of course named/branded buildings, like CH2, CCTV. then, you get down to people-residential size and it's essex rd house, cape shank house, all a bit ambiguous/anonymous. but the name of the designer starts to feature far more heavily there - paul morgan architects, andrew maynard architects, etc.

and then, of course, there are the nicknames: the birdsnest, the gherkin, the death star.

interestingly, with public art the names and 'clients' are far less weighted in the public mind (and lets face it, artists and commissioners alike aren't so great at promoting that either), but the nickname is still there - the vault, shit on sticks, the cheese stick/rib cage.

but on nicknames - maybe it's because i'm so oz that i don't mind a bit of a nickname, but i think that when something in the public realm gets a nickname, it's actually the sign of a powerful work - one that people have enough affection towards/animosity against to own it by renaming it. and they only rename it so they can know it. OK, so sometimes the nickname is media-created. But does everything that is created by the press stick? [only to the walls, she says]. I don't know - i've not created a work that has generated a nickname (probably 'cos the works i create don't stick around on the streets for long enough), but I'd like to think that if I did, I'd roll with it.

how long is a lifetime?

while skipping through some old links, i re-discovered the joy of olive riley's blog. she's the oldest blogger, so good that she
has a series of assistants who help her out. 107 and still blogging. that's pretty impressive.

http://www.allaboutolive.com.au/
http://worldsoldestblogger.blogspot.com/


and then my latest edition of parkett arrived in the mail, featuring louise bourgeois - 97 and still in the studio, continuing to make amazing works (new works focusing largely on the colour red. what a great idea), pushing the gender button, pushing emotional buttons, pushing herself when she could easily sit back, have a cup of tea, gloat and we'd all forgive her.

both of these got me thinking about longevity and depth. and persistence. as an artist, i persist. i continue to push myself, focus on what i do, strive for the little victories i aim for, aim to be better, more polished, clearer in what i'm communicating and more accomplished in how i say it. i know that i will never retire from this gig and people like louise, olive, rosalie and a bunch of other creative women which will keep me going through it.

unfortunately, this trajectory of mine isn't quite so obvious on paper. i was having a discussion about my career/life/work history with an older woman the other day and she brought up the fact that i'm 'all over the place' - melbourne, sydney, wollongong, melbourne; set design, freelance, full-time, pro-bono; comms, admin, project.

when she put it like that, i could see that perhaps i seem a bit erratic. and maybe i am. but what's not on paper is an artistic practice which underlines everything and which all of my paid/gainful employment supplements. i'm also of the generation that believes that a variety of skills and experiences are important [and transferrable]: well-rounded employment experience, as opposed to my stepfather's generation which had a job, or at least industry, for life. add to that the usual rhetoric about artists always having to have 'day' jobs to supplement the real work, and you have a very 'interesting' looking background.

i could get insecure about my unusual career moves and the variety of my experienc. but reading about the lives and careers of the ones that stick around - olive, louise - and others who i admire - tracey, rachael, marcel, joseph, ai wei - i'm reminded that being engaged, interested, open and focused-but-not-rigid, is the key to longevity and depth.

wordle gummage

everyone loves wordle. i love wordle. it's almost as good as tweet clouds, but you can customise. this is my del.icio.us wordle.

i think i like it 'cos it visualises what i say. it's information aesthetics about me, based on what i like. and of course infoaesthetics are the new art. well, apparently.

wish you were here

from the guardian art & architecture blog




Next on the agenda is Santiago Sierra's 4000 Black Posters: a blackout of all "available" advertising hoardings around Shoreditch and Brick Lane. The gallery remains tight-lipped about whether the sites have been negotiated for use, begging the question exactly what constitutes activism in the post-Banksy era. In this case though it doesn't really matter: Sierra's act of silencing quotidian information is designed to highlight the exploitative power of signage, revealing how little of the public realm is ours to use. The fact that the artist may have had to buy the right to freedom of expression merely makes the gesture more poignant.

Who can say what proportion of the public will become perplexed enough by such works to ask questions about the development of our civic spaces and our rights within them. But as reminders, however implicit, of what social protest has and continues to mean in London, they offer critically engaging perspectives from which to start.

Sierra is brilliant and I wish I could be there to see it. Especially 'cos loads of my ad peeps are in EC1. I'd love to see W&K London black out their windows in sympathy.. or hypocrisy... or something.

mark gowing: aussie poster boy

mark's image pinched from creative review

oil kills peace.



congrats to mark gowing for his gold medal in the poster prize at the 21st international poster biennale in warsaw. yay!

toilets: private spaces

following on from my private in public presentation/investigation, i thought i should let you in on my most recent obsession: toilets. more specifically public toilets.

actually, if i'm confessing, then i've been slightly taken by public loos for quite a while. i love comparing them, seeing the differences and the similarities between them, finding the gems, resigning myself to the awful ones, listening to the conversations, checking out the graffiti on the walls and noticing the cultural signifiers that invariably turn up in the most private of public spaces. and so it seems that public toilets have become the focus of my research.

if you're particularly astute, you'll have noticed the beginning of toilet-based links on my del.icio.us page, plus the previous wishlist of having a studio in a toilet. there are a few areas about public toilets that specifically interest me, which i'll probably keep coming back to over the next little while so be prepared. i'm hoping to avoid the obvious toilet humour, but being that i have such a tacky sense of humour it may be unavoidable. i'll do my best.


social history and theory focused on the toilet



i'm just starting to get into this right now and have discovered henri lefebvre's discussion on the everyday, his relation to the situationists/debord and his criticism of the bourgeouisie denial of the everyday and pushing it to the extreme of architectural space. plus the ol' bachelard's poetics of such a space: hardly a room, but four corners and how we relate to corners as our retreat, our back-up. our protection in times of vulnerability, but also our entrapment.
then of course there's the place of the public toilet in modern dynamics: the place of the public toilet in women's social freedom and the role of the beats in homosexual freedom and teenage rites of passage. (i promise i won't mention teenagers giving blowjobs in the school toilets. that might be pornographic)


archaeology/architecture/design of public toilet.



i'm sure there'll be more in lefebvre's urban criticism about the architectural role of the toilet in there too and i'm also interested in the architectural history of toilets: what they look like, the ones that have disappeared, closed off, enshrined and the weird/wonderful places that they exist.

and of course there's the straight-up design comparisons between them.*

role of the public toilet in the urban rhythm.


this spans across a couple of areas.
of course i'm interested in the way people engage with public toilets [for an hilarious post about this, especially with children, check out this on dooce. it's fantastic] - their idiosyncrasies, neuroses, things they take for granted and obvious cultural differences (like those ladies in london loos selling lollipops).
plus, i'm interested in the role of the toilet in the whole realm of architecture/urban planning - does a dysfunctional toilet signify a dysfunctional society? and how much is a city influenced by its toilets? if we focuses as much attention on designing our loos as we do our bedrooms, would we be happier?


as you can see, this is all a pile of unanswered, loosely sketched, incoherent crap (d'oh! pun!), but i'm kind of excited about answering some of these questions and starting to flesh out what it all means in terms of my work. i've already begun working on the toilet project [mark 1], a public-ish work which simultaneously reconfigures architecture through craft/fashion methodology and also starts to facilitate some interesting reactions, which will hopefully challenge a few of those idiosyncrasies i was talking about before. i'll be posting more here soon, so stay tuned.



*i've always secretly wanted to do a toilet guide to sydney or melbourne. the companion publication to the melbourne/sydney design guides? ha!

wanted: studio space

i've sort of kind of been looking for a studio space, but now it's getting serious. i'm really looking now. properly. and i'm going to need your help.

i need it to be:
either close to home or close to work (north carlton or the CBD),
cheap (i really can't afford more than $180pcm)
open 24-hours (i'm a night owl)
secure
with a bunch of people who are serious about their practice
light enough (i'm not strictly a painter, so it's not super-crucial)
not library-quiet: i may wanna use power tools every now and again. and a bit of music is nice (although i have headphones now).
with net access.
available now

and in an ideal world...

i want it to be:
free
huge
warm in winter/cool in summer
really light
in a beautiful building
or an old toilet/bathroom*


*i recently heard about jeremy pryles' studio space being an old bathroom and thought it was a super idea. plus it fits with my current project/upcoming posts.

no one belongs here more than you.

her book has been out for a while (i'm yet to get it. shameful.), but miranda july's site is still active with gems like this.



the girl is brilliant i tell you.

rise up, paste up

lovin' it.
from wooster ,i think.

bloglines fade away. or, i promise i love you.

i'm still in love with bloglines. it totally floats my boat and on many occasion is the cause of me having fuck all sleep. and although my blogroll there is public, i haven't figured out how to make it totally public or should i say 'broadcast' by linking to it here. apparently i haven't 'shared'. or something.

i thought about trying out the new bloglink business that blogger/google is currently plugging, but, like i said, i'm in love with bloglines, so i just updated my links instead. in fact, it was quite shameful how old my link love was getting, so apologies to dear friends whose blogs just got ignored for far too long.

which, is a roundabout way of saying:

check these out:

slinkachu's little people (a tiny street art project)
a456
sam ismail (an international smoothie),
blank is like blank
bldgblog
brand dna (stan! i'm sorry!)
crackunit
david byrne's journal (yes, that david byrne),
dylan martorell
do yeah (hot illustrator working with ben maxwell from bamakko - oh what a small, small world it is)
ellie from allan's walk
empty streets
fistfulayen
fox and pearl
handmadelife (hml)
life without buildings (lwb)
my noisy matchbox blog
super colossal
and
supertouch

phew!

landscape urbanism

last week i went to the first part of this month's architecture + philosophy series, featuring ashley schafer from praxis, talking about urban matters: moving beyond determinism vs indeterminism. i only have the concise dictionary of architectural theory, but she did mention landscape urbanism. her theory was that there now seemed to be a retreat from this kind of grand-plan, whole of landscape thinking into a more 'architectural' scale - a more specific way of shaping the city. she suggested that this was the role of the architect - to shape a city by building buildings. as opposed to the landscape architect and i'm guessing the more collaborative approach of landscape urbanism influencing the metropolis through concept, infrastructure and open space. of course she cited rem koolhaas as our main main from OMA as the main academic or critic discussing urbanism and the city and that he hasn't written jack about it since he got those big bites at the dubai cherry.

i found this kind of discussion quite amazing and am interested in how a change in city/urban/space-shaping trends are reflected in other areas, especially technology and the digital 'generation'. i'd be interested to see if a trend towards specificity and the personal (or perhaps niche) within architecture has a correllation with the way we engage with the digital architecture on a more personal (or perhaps niche) level as a rise in personalised, specific and engaged "domain". which is a symptom of which? are they even connected? does google earth/google maps give us a big enough picture so that we no longer need architecture to do that for us? is google responsible for the decline of landscape urbanism? (what an ace name for a talk - ha!).

i don't know, but as someone starting to do more and more working within architectural frameworks and concept, i'm into it.

then, on the flipside, i was catching up on my podcast subscription to the architects over the weekend and heard gretchen wilkins, also an american academic (from michigan), talking about the rise of landscape urbanism and how this was going to save cities like detroit, cleveland and others in the 'rust belt'. again, she cited rem koolhaas as leading the way in this discussion and that collaboration was important in re-tooling and re-identifying depopulated cities.

so, being well-confused about where the state of city/urban/planning/shaping/architecture is at, i was hoping to go to last night's tony fry presentation for architecture + philosophy, thinking that maybe he might touch on it as well and add some clarity. but i left my brain in 2007 and completely forgot.*

*i'm sure the architects were there though, so i'm hoping they'll cover it. heh.

however, don't be surprised if this topic crops up a bit in the next little while, especially in light of upcoming projects involving public/private space, sound, the city and psychogeography.

in the galleries

it's been aaaaages since i've been to an exhibition and had the presence of mind to think about it enough for a review post. to be honest, i've been too self-absorbed in my own practice. not something i'm necessarily proud of, but just a fact of the matter.

however, i'm hoping to rectify all this with a few posts about some of the shows i've seen lately.


the next wave festival: closer together (which i kept calling 'come together) has certainly provided me with the opportunity to check out some hot shows.

platform
cecilia's full-frontals have obviously the talk of the town (between her and the Henson fracas, holy shit!). but i actually was far more interested in her masks. they appeared like a conversation with the drawings/ceramics/glass works by Brendan Suppression (Huntley), which I kind of appreciated - both Cecilia and Brendan being Melbourne rock fiends.

the vitrine at platform, with the growing installation by was amazing. it was fantastic to see the artist* hiromi tango in the space, continuing to create works like some kind of silk worm or spider, and the aesthetic was suprisingly rad. i can get very tired, very quickly of bitsy, naive, cutesy, fluoro stuff (seeing it as a bit of a fad a the moment), but this seemed genuine and in context and considered and with some kind of depth or excitement. i liked it anyway.

*i'm sorry, i forgot to write down the artist's name. help?



the other interesting things on in the platform subway included mel upton and her beautiful trash pieces (as seen above, pinched from her beautiful website), plus the random guerilla intervention that students from the RMIT industrial design department were doing on the opening night with rose petals. apparently it wasn't part of the festival, but i may or may not have encouraged them to take advantage of festival time to do a whole bunch of guerilla works.

CCP projection window.
i always ride past the CCP projection window, just to check out what's on. i made a special effort this time though. mainly because i didn't have much time to see anything else, but also because i had seen the image of the girl pulling the red wool out of her mouth and i got all self-obsessed. i loved the idea, and i wished i'd had it - i'm currently knitting the wool that i took down from the Spinach residency and i kind of wished that i was making a movie of pulling it out of my mouth instead. the video is so beautiful and so simple.

[i think i'm going to upload the short vid i took of that red, thread process to flickr. then i might actually do something with it.]


2020? ash keating, et al (not et al from NZ, but et al as in the rest of the kids that did the 2020 thing)

Anyway, I managed to scurry down to the Meat Market on the last day of the festival and wow. Firstly, the place is amazing. not quite as cool as the london meat markets that look like these, but are still working slaughter galleries. Secondly, the installation is impressive. It's actually nice to see impressive artwork [in terms of scale] in australia at the moment 'cos i haven't seen any for a while. the work itself is also impressively beautiful - loads of colour and dramatic composition, opportunities to engage, or to just stand back and observe. the last work i had seen of keating's was the great stack of mXs at platform a few years ago (having missed out on the acca debacle. shame bout that) and from that, this is amazing. his comment on beauty and waste is interesting and relevant, if a little 'no shit sherlock', but still a message that needs to be repeated again and again. i find the argument about permission of waste the interesting bit (especially in light of said debacle) and the point at which waste is no longer owned, if ever.

there was a forum on when i went and unfortunately i couldn't hear a damn thing anyone was saying, which was annoying, as i would have liked to. a lot. so i scarpered off early.


this is now, sebastian moody
on my way out from the meat market, i popped in to see this work which used advertising/planning methodology to create an image to represent the values of current australian society. knowing a little about the whole ad/planning wank (see previous post), i was really interested in this work and wanted to find out more about the artist, what else he found, whether the research papers he tabled were legit, etc, etc. in fact, i wanted a whole bunch of my plannery types to check out the show, but hey, most of them are on the other side of the world (ahem). [age, stan, angela, angus. if you read this and need to remind some of your creatives about the difference between art and advertising, go see this show.]

Objects in Space
I have the awesome OIS catalogue. so there.




i'm tempted to leave my review at that. but i should just quickly point out some of the cool things i've seen as part of this project: renee ugazio's curtain piece at craft victoria: very xanadu, abba, 70s interior design. i thought i'd hate it. turns out i like it rather a lot;
the schlock horror install by yvette king on the stairs of bus: fake mice with flashing red eyes, b-grade screams and tacky mist. all brilliant and a perfect entrance to the fabulous, fabulous show by Kim Jaeger & Emelie Plunkett, Jordan Wood and Bonnie Lane;
oh, and the mel upton piece i mentioned earlier.




plus, over the last couple of days i've been able to check out the show at TCB featuring Alasdair McLuckie and Christina Hayes (that's her work above, that i pinched from the tcb site).
Alisdair's show seems like the love child between Jade Pegler and Dylan Martorell, two of my fave peeps, so i don't know if I was especially partial to his work. Not that it's bad, but I just know that style rather well and am surrounded by it at the moment, so a little over it. Christina's paintings are quite lovely. I only really truly liked two of them and for some reason, it was the two which had this really beautiful shadow colouring between the body and the tree they were in. it really grounded the figures and made them far more engaging. but overall a good show at tcb - they always do killer shows there.



and i also got to see great shows at west space, especially hockey plot - fantastic show in the main gallery. i especially liked the punk'd t-shirt exchange and the sharp wit of both rehgan de mather and simon perecich killed me. i laughed out loud. a lot. which can be quite embarrassing in an empty gallery. but hey. the image above is a dodgy shot from my photobooth of the catalogue, featuring rehgan's tee.


so, this weekend i'm also going to check out neon parc, kings[woo hoo! new website!] and hopefully both the damiano bertolli and louise weaver shows at the geelong regional gallery. well, that's the plan anyway.


oh, and i also went to the brilliant architecture + philosphy lecture at RMIT on friday night, featuring ashley schafer from praxis, but i'll post about that separately on monday, after i've seen part 2, with tony fry (everybody's in the house!).

advertising is like porn. Verses 1 - 8

I'm loving Blank is like Blank at the moment. Justin's "analogies to live by" are quietly amusing and wry as fuck. I'm totally loving the Advertising is like Porn series that's going on there at the moment...

• Advertising is like porn (1):
Only the people who create it are delusional enough to call it art.

• Advertising is like porn (2):
They both have weird self-congratulatory award shows.

• Advertising is like porn (3):
It’s hard to transition out of.

• Advertising is like porn (4):
The Internet took it to a whole new level.

• Advertising is like porn (5):
You fast-forward through the boring stuff.

• Advertising is like porn (6):
The same concepts are endlessly recycled.

• Advertising is like porn (7):
It creates careers for art-school dropouts.

• Advertising is like porn (8):
Working in the industry will affect your family life at some point.



I'm thinking of making an accompanying Art is like Porn series, a tribute to Mr Henson, of course.

"Twitter *IS* BTW"

best tweet ever. from tomer lichtash

"The most nonrelevant [sic] acronym in Twitter is BTW. Twitter *IS* BTW"

promises, promises

it's been aaaaages since i've done some reviews for shows. but i've got a few up my sleeve. next wave stuff was ace: ash keating (talk of the town), objects in space (closing party on wednesday night), the homage to shit on sticks by chalkhorse, platform, the schmigloo esky and the little jewellery pieces and prints at alphaville.

but nurse ratchet tells me it's presentation time at uni, so an extended remix of those reviews will have to wait until thursday. after i've been to the OIS closing party. and maybe even after i've been to the opening at counihan on thursday night.

and if you're in london on thursday night, go to elms lesters painting rooms. delta's got a show on. and he very nicely invited me, even after i bagged the crap out of the gallery this time last year. lovely boy isn't he?

ok, i'm out like the vapours (as aaaaaage always says).