Archives for posts with tag: Mark Shorter

I See Queer People

Three Exhibitions

10-25 February 2017

All Welcome

queerfeb2017

Images (clockwise from top left): Kieran Butler, A self-portrait for you, for me, for yoooo, for M and A and Gee too. 2016, Digital image file. Courtesy of the artist. Danica Knezevic, Constant Reflections, 2013, single channel, HD video. Courtesy of the artist. Tim Hilton/Ladonna Rama. Courtesy of the artist. Phil Soliman, The Vast Interior (View from the cave of St Anthony the Great), digital photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

mardi-gras-festival-2017

AirSpace Projects
10 Junction Street, Marrickville
Just 6 minutes easy walk from Marrickville Station

Opening Event

Friday 10 February 6-8pm

Artist Talks

As part of the

Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival 2017

Saturday 25 February 3-5pm

Gallery One

Boys don’t cry

Kieran Butler

170105_kb_a-self-portrait-for-you-for-me-for-yoooo-for-m-and-a-and-gee-too-copy-2

Boys don’t cry is a tragic love story, a casual hook-up and an awkward first time. It’s all the feelings you couldn’t say, the coming out you never always wanted and a person you thought you could fall in love with.

Boys don’t cry is about the materialities of love and relationships, the 21st century’s constant stream of information, and the way their associated power relations aid the breakdown and construction of one’s own identity. This exhibition is one instance of how we might work through the endless experiences of being under construction, the questions we ask, the self-doubt we face, the love we feel and the places, real, imagined, semi-fictional or fluid it may take us to; online or offline.

For myself, as a gay man, this has been a long, enduring and seemingly lonely experience, a slow construction of my own identity full of self-doubt. I ask myself questions about masculinity, femininity, LGBTQI colloquial language and popular culture; things I don’t understand, things I want to reject/accept, things I’ve felt removed from yet so close to at the same time. In the digital age materiality points to a mess of diverse factors where materiality itself can be an effect of “an ongoing performance”.[1] In this work I am referring to my own ongoing unsuccessful and semi-fictional performances of love as a homosexual, the identity politics of my own socio-political context and how I navigate them.

I am not the first to say boys don’t cry and this exhibition is by no means definitive of LGBTQI experiences. It is merely one of the many stories that exist in spaces that are real and tangible, sometimes imagined, semi-fictional and fluid.

[1] Lange Berndt, P. Documents of Contemporary Art: Materiality, MIT Press, London, 2015, pg.12

Gallery Two and The Cranny

Disco Infirmo

Trevor Fry
Tina Havelock Stevens
Danica Knesevic
Renny Kodgers
Ladonnarama
Sean Lowry
Daniel Mudie Cunningham
Jane Polkinghorne
Ingrid Stiertzel

Curated by Jane Polkinghorne

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Disco conjures a nostalgically, shiny, glamorous past while simultaneously suggesting disco’s collapse into a sparkling hole of excess and ridicule.

Disco Infirmo uses disco in the Australian context as its starting point, remote from the high glamour of the disco era at its peak at Studio 54, New York Operating from Australian vernaculars of ‘secondhandism’, the artists incorporate and infect this imported form, corrupting, mutilating and lionising via Australian cultural anti-glamour.

The artists respond to the sensations that Disco Infirmo evokes – nostalgia, sparkles, nausea, dance fails, Blue Light Discos, ridiculous fashion, rhythmic music, those too old for the dance floor, the bad and almost good dancers, Aussie pub rock discos, and mum and dad dancing inappropriately. Out of time and out of place, and yet the disco continues to be a democratic field for creative expression.

Deep Space

Worse than Animals

Phil Soliman

still-from-worse-than-animals-hd-video-loop-with-sound-2016

In Worse than animals, Melbourne-based multidisciplinary artist Phil Soliman takes the worst insult he has ever endured and shapes it into a powerful symbol of identity. A gloriously psychedelic mashup of pop culture, internet ephemera, ancient Egyptian mythology and house music, this video installation challenges toxic homophobia and other types of othering with humour and insight.

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It was another great night at AirSpace Projects for the opening of Landscape Too.  And to echo ek.1’s video work ‘Make it real (one more time)’ storm clouds and lightening provided a dramatic backdrop but fortunately spared us from the deluge that struck parts of the south coast and tablelands.  In the manner of a gothic harbinger fruit bats streamed across the sky to seek refuge in the city, forewarning only those who are inclined to superstition.

storm LT

The work looks great, a mixture of traditional and new media responses to the enduring concern of landscape. In recent years, new questions have been raised in relation to landscape, framing it not as a shared or agreed upon reality but rather as a subjective experience where its representation reflects the attributes of the culture it emerges from.  Some of the questions have been addressed in the work and the accompanying booklet, encouraging viewers and readers to reflect upon their own experience of landscape and to consider how it is socially and culturally manipulated.

Viewing art on the internet doesn’t compare to viewing art in the flesh. Not only is there the variation of scale to consider, some of the works function as sounds and moving images while the more traditional media offer seductive surfaces not easily appreciated when mediated by the virtual world. Here are a few details of work to entice you over to Marrickville. And come enjoy the ambience of AirSpace Projects.

doggie photo
Ron McBurnie, Catherine Parker and Stephen Spurrier. Unraveling a Constellation (detail), 2014. Etching, screenprint and acrylic paint on paper, 20 x 20cm each.

 

ek.1photo
ek.1 (Katie Louise Williams and Emma Hicks). Make it real (one more time) (detail), 2014. Digital print on fabric banner, digital video looped on LCD screen on four panels. 69 x 240cm.

 

hayley
Hayley Megan French. Some Distance (detail), 2014. Acrylic on canvas, 120 x 160cm.

 

Mark Shorter
Mark Shorter, Two Sketches for Antipodysseus (detail), 2014. Two channel HD video installation, 9:34. Camera Jürgen Kerkovius.

 

Sally Clarke

Visual Artist

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AirSpace Projects 2014-2017

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