THIS WEEK IN ART - JULIA DEVILLE: ‘NIGHT’S PLUTONIAN SHORE’
Published: Broadsheet, July 28, 2010. 

Julia deVille’s elegiac taxidermy creatures and ornate jewellery pieces are a solemn remembrance of life. By Dan Rule. 

Julia deVille has been cast in something of an eerie light during her relatively brief but extremely active artistic career. Merging taxidermy and animal skeletal structures with classic gold- and silver-smithing techniques, her jewellery and her artwork seem ensconced in the spectre of death.

Chat with the New Zealand-born artist, however, and you’ll be left with a very different impression. “People seem to think my work is about death, but I think it’s more about life and about the celebration of life,” she says. “I like combining creatures with these materials that are seen as precious, because it poses a whole new set of questions about the value and preciousness of life. People don’t put value on a mouse, for example, but what happens if you put diamonds in the mouse’s eyes?”

Based around Edgar Allan Poe’s poem The Raven, Deville’s new exhibition Night’s Plutonian Shore – which opens this week at Sophie Gannon Gallery and also features a suite of collaborative works with jeweller William Griffiths and artist Aly Aitken – continues her fascination with Greek and Roman mythology and casts various creatures in the role of psychopomps, the animals that would guide spirits down the river Styx to Hades, the Greek god of the underworld.

The pieces include a diminutive tabby kitten, a stillborn fawn, a diamond-dusted piglet and golden gosling wearing a diamond and white-gold headpiece, which was a friend’s lifelong pet. “She’d raised it from a chick and it actually thought that she was its mother,” deVille says. “So it was all pretty emotional and there was this kind of overwhelming sense of importance to that piece.”

Indeed, for deVille, who has been fascinated with taxidermy since she was child and only works with animals that have died from natural causes, there is nothing more valuable than a life. “It comes back to that question of what’s really precious,” she says. “Like with a stillborn deer, there’s this creature that sort of lost out on having its life altogether – it didn’t even make it – and there’s a preciousness and value to working with a creature like that.”

Julia deVille’s Night’s Plutonian Shore is on show until August 21 at Sophie Gannon Gallery.

www.sophiegannongallery.com.au

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BEATS with Dan Rule
Published: Music Australia Guide #78, July 2010. 

The Roots
How I Got Over
****1/2 

The Roots are a rarity in the rap world: a live ensemble of limitless musical scope that is still very much part of East Coast hip hop’s lineage. Ninth studio record How I Got Over – led by drummer and musical director ?uestlove and MC Black Thought – is one of the Philly crew’s richest and most realised yet. Melting between swooning soul, symphonic atmosphere, arcane folk explorations (Right On even features Joanna Newsom) and raw, kick/snare signatures, the record traces Black Thought’s narrative of a man’s journey through solitude and estrangement, to eventually find glimmers of hope and promise. It’s a tragic, moving, thoroughly rewarding trip. 

DefJam/Universal 

Actress
Splazsh
**** 

Splazsh, the latest in a string of esoteric renderings from Darren Cunningham (aka Actress), proves an intriguing creature. Lurking amid stealthy, minimal techno introversions for much of this record – check the slow-burn luminosity of opener Hubble, Get Ohn and the mechanised stridence of Bubble Butts and Equations – the South London producer isn’t afraid to completely flip his script. Flashes of exuberance pulse from the darkness; sexed-up vocal chops shudder and stutter atop bouncing tech-funk drum lines; early ‘80s synth palettes phase, cut, scythe and refract. It’s immediately accessible and obscure, clear and opaque. Cunningham describes his own sound as “RnB contrete” for good reason. 

Honest Jon/Fuse 

Big Boi
Sir Lucious Left Foot…The Son of Chico Dusty
****1/2 

Sir Lucious Left Foot is hip hop dynamism personified. From the skewed Southern bounce of opener Daddy Fat Sax and uncanny pop hooks of Turns Me On, to the sticky, synthetic funk of Shutterbug and spiking horns and surging operatics of General Patton, OutKast co-pilot Big Boi’s hugely anticipated solo debut is as wildly divergent, magnetically playful and, quite frankly, brilliant as his finest work with Andre 3000. Big Boi is electric here, plying his dense, cheeky, web-like rhyme schemes over a wild assemblage beats and hooks. One of hip hop’s revolutionary protagonists has re-emerged in the most emphatic of fashions. 

DefJam/Universal 

Eloquor
Charge
***1/2 

Eloquor does a lot right on Charge, his second long-player in as many years. His ploy – an effective one – is to keep things simple. Across a suite of classic, rugged boom-bap, the no-frills Melbourne MC talks story and conjures time and place rather than preach trumped up ethics and philosophy. And it shows on tracks like the orchestral brood of MT MF, DJ Premier-like piano hook of Pressure’s On and the sombre study of parenting and youth, Hey Folks. Charge does run a little off the rails when things get too maximal. But for the most part, this sturdy, gritty record reveals a rapper who recognises the power of understatement.

Myspherical/Obese 

Oval
O
****

Markus Popp’s latest offering as Oval is very much a sum of its parts. Across two discs, almost two hours and a whopping 70 tracks, O explores the stunning, shimmering limits of Popp’s electronic interface. Unlike his acclaimed work of the mid ‘90s, this swathe of miniatures place elemental treated guitar and fragile percussion centre stage. The results are nothing beauteous. So minimal are Popp’s sketches – so stripped of anything but the essential melodic and structural components – that they assume an almost reverential posture. This is electronic music, deconstructed and purified. O is a treat for the senses.

Thrill Jockey/Fuse 

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M.I.A. - ‘MAYA’
Published: Music Australia Guide #78, July 2010.

M.I.A.
/\/\ /\ Y /\
****1/2
(XL/Remote Control)

The abrasive, low bit-rate squall of the opening few minutes of M.I.A.’s third record /\/\ /\ Y /\ obliterates any hunch that motherhood – not to mention the runaway crossover success of 2007 hit single Paper Planes – may have tempered Maya Arulpragasam’s penchant for brazen provocation. Exploding out of the political affronts of opening skit The Message (“Hand bone connects to the internet connected to the Google connected to the Government” recites an eerily monotone male voice), Steppin Up writhes amid a tempest of chainsaws, power drills and industrial metal guitars. It says a lot about /\/\ /\ Y /. Indeed, this is far from the sound of an artist cashing in on recent chart success. While there are countless hues of light and shade here – the auto-tuned pop of XXXO and the narcotic, fogged-out groove of Lovalot included – it’s uncompromising moments like the propulsive dubstep signatures, plunging frequencies and gun shot snares of Story to be Told and lo-fi noise attacks of lead single Born Free (which features a choice sample of ‘70s New York noise savants Suicide) that characterise this challenging, intensely energised oeuvre. That said, perhaps the most uplifting track here is of an entirely different ilk. Framed by synthetic reggae-pop hook, It Takes a Muscle is the closest M.I.A. has ever ventured toward the ballad. We may know Arulpragasam as the urban music agitator, the daughter of the Tamil militant separatist, but this proves a stunning moment of emotional vulnerability amongst the bluster.

DAN RULE 

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AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, July 24, 2010.

WHAT Bindi Cole: Sistagirls
WHERE Nellie Castan Gallery, Level 1, 12 River Street, South Yarra, 9804 7366, nelliecastangallery.com

Melbourne-based Wathaurung photo artist Bindi Cole has built a reputation on her performative, often highly personal traversals of identity. Set amid the remote Tiwi Islands, north of Darwin, new series Sistagirls proves one of her most visually lush and surprisingly sensitive bodies of work yet. The show captures members of Tiwi Islands transgender community – which apparently makes up around two per cent of the 2500 strong population – adorned in full, glamorous garb and lit-up with studio lighting against a seemingly dichotomous series of island backdrops. “Jemima” poses relaxedly, one hand on a hip, a parasol in the other, on the bank of spectacular waterhole; “Bimbo”, dressed in a loose white frock, reclines on the sand of a deserted beach, a pair of what appear to be Tokwampini bird sculptures beside her; bikini-clad “Frederina” poses suggestively beside an odd, toadstool-shaped fountain. What makes Cole’s photographs so effective is their eschewal of expectation. Her stunning subjects – “Buffy”, cheekily glancing over her shoulder as she wanders across the local footy ground or “Ajay”, gazing longingly from her veranda – ever so beautifully complicate their surroundings. The aesthetics of glamour, let alone transgender glamour, are not at all part of mainstream descriptions of Tiwi Islands life. This visually rich, unmistakably tender collection adds another layer. Tues to Sat noon–5pm, until July 31.

WHAT Greatest Hits: New Basic
WHERE The Narrows, Level 2, 141 Flinders Lane, city, 9654 1534, thenarrows.org

Melbourne art-dude trio Greatest Hits – Gavin Bell, Jarrah de Kuijer and Simon McGlinn – seem to have achieved a level of fandom so breathless it’s almost toxic. That said, they tend to deliver the goods, whatever those goods might be. This new exhibition at The Narrows follows countless recent shows around town and numerous choice moments, including their plastered door and cigarette-smoking rock at West Space, resin-entombed Hawaiian shirt at CCP and giant wax rainbow as part of the recent Next Wave Festival. Suffice to say, it’s filled with their usual scattering of confounding, nonetheless amusing objects and oddities. In what seems at least a material (and perhaps phonetic) continuation of the wax rainbow, a wax Rambo – a life-sized cast of Silvester Stallone’s head – sits proudly in the middle of the space. Elsewhere, a half-inflated globe filled with Listerine emits a minty-fresh aroma, while a computer screen plays a video of another computer screen playing different videos. There are some prints too; spray-painted postcards scanned and blown up to create lurid, fluorescent holiday images. It’s hard not to laugh, but in a good way. The waft of Listerine all about, New Basic is the result of three boys with an art education playing muck-about. The rest is up to you. Wed to Fri noon–6pm, Sat noon–5pm, until August 14.

WHAT Shannon Smiley: Ordinary World
WHERE Lindberg Galleries, Level 2, 289 Flinders Lane, city, 0403 066 775, lindbergcontemporary.com.au

There’s the suggestion of an almost menacing darkness, a kind of anxious unknowing, to the dense, wild undergrowth of Shannon Smiley’s Unknown World. The young Melbourne artist’s incredibly detailed, beautifully rendered large-scale canvases are without horizon. Knotted, entwined plant-life fills all but meagre glimpses of sky and space. But it’s these precises glimpses – of depth, of setting, of context – that afford Smiley’s paintings their significance. These untamed scenes are, in fact, of an urban ilk. We begin to notice the section of chain-link fence all but consumed in the twisting branches and foliage, the thin strip of asphalt inching into the foreground. Indeed, Smiley’s works capture not the unknown of the wilderness, but the corridors of knotted green that shadow Melbourne’s train lines, stations and forgotten spaces. It makes for an interesting about face. Where these works might cast the creeping vegetation in an ominous and threatening light, the sense that the undergrowth is in the process of reclamation gives them an entirely different psychological weight. Nature is not something to fear. It just is. Tues to Fri 11am–5pm, Sat noon–5pm, until July 31.

WHAT Kain Picken & Rob McKenzie: A History of Manners
WHERE Uplands Gallery, 247 High Street, Prahran, 9510 2374, uplandsgallery.com

It’s difficult to find an orientation amid this scattering of works by longtime collaborators Kain Picken and Rob McKenzie. Two hammocks, made by Colombian weavers, hang on adjoining walls, the phrase “A History of Manners” emblazoned horizontally on one work and repeated on the other. McKenzie’s trio of compact, abstract acrylic and pencil drawings seem to repeat a kind of loose, woven pattern. Like the hammocks, Picken’s lone painting – an oil-on-canvas recreation of a fabric swatch that he gave to another artist to complete – sees him remove himself from the process of production. It’s one motif from a body of work that for the most part seems little more than abstruse. Tues to Fri 11am–5pm, Sat noon–4pm, until August 7. 

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KELE OKEREKE - PUNCHING ABOVE HIS WIEGHT
Published: Music Australia Guide #78, July 2010.

With Bloc Party on indefinite hiatus, the debut solo record from frontman Kele Okereke reveals an artist in the throes of change. He tells MAG’s Dan Rule how The Boxer represented a chance to explore the world of electronica, and himself.

Talking with Kele Okereke is a little like walking on eggshells. One wrong move and the floor falls out from under you, awkward silence pervading. Tap into a vein of interest, however, and the 28-year-old will unload, streams of garrulous explanations, digressions and descriptors ricocheting every which way.

Luckily, today, there is far more of the latter. “I’ve always enjoyed dancing,” he states plainly, if not suddenly. “It’s something that I think is important, dancing, and that’s not necessarily dancing to house or techno or any of the more serious kinds of dance music,” he launches back in, talking at a million miles an hour.

“I just think going and dancing is something is something one should do as often as possible, because it’s something that’s good for you. It clears out the mind and it’s a good way to relax,” he pauses for a breath. “In this day and age it’s almost like a meditative exercise. I think it’s an important thing that people should do socially.”

In his own roundabout way, Okereke – who is chatting from New York, where he is doing press for his brand new solo record The Boxer – is justifying his renewed engagement with electronica, a quality strewn throughout The Boxer’s clutch of driving, dance-orientated rhythms and cut-and-paste aesthetics. Indeed, while Bloc Party’s thee records (breakout 2005 debut Silent Alarm, 2007’s A Weekend in the City and 2008’s more deconstructive Intimacy) have always kept electronics within earshot, Okereke’s solo venture embraces it with open arms.

“The appeal of electronic music to me is that idea that you can create anything and you’re only limited by the power of your imagination,” he urges. “It’s like there’s a million options out there.” 

Recorded in London with Glaswegian production prodigy Hudson Mohawke and in New York with Spank Rock affiliate XXXchange, The Boxer ripples with exploratory flare. Where opener Walk Tall detonates searing drones over gunshot kicks, cuts like On the Lam and Tenderoni has Okereke crooning over buried house and techno inflections, while Unholy Thoughts sees a wiry, vintage Bloc Party guitar line expand into a sea of opaque, synthetic atmospheres. It’s a trip to say the least. 

“There’s that idea that rock music has a certain authenticity in conveying emotion and that’s totally valid – the power of a great, visceral rock show is that it’s very immediate – but I think there are other things you can do and there are other ways you can convey ideas through music.” 

“I’ve never wanted my expression to be limited,” he continues. “It’s something I’ve learned not to be frightened of.” 

Okereke, however, sees the record as more of an artistic progression than a dramatic reinvention. “I feel that making Intimacy definitely paved that way for making The Boxer,” he says. “Half that record, we recorded in a really similar way, with just me and the producer editing the band’s takes together rather than us all being in a room and playing as a band.”

“So having attempted that with Intimacy, I kind of felt that with The Boxer the process was very similar. It was just me and a producer in a room, editing stuff together. So it didn’t feel that radically different.”

With Bloc Party on an indefinite break, it was more challenge of going it alone that buoyed Okereke. “Making this thing by myself was really quite rejuvenating and quite inspiring to me,” he offers.

“I didn’t know if it was going to be possible, you know. I’d never made a record by myself, I didn’t I was going to be able to do it. And there were times when it was difficult, of course, and I kept on going and I learned a lot about myself during the process.”

While many have suggested that the record’s title – and the fact that Okereke started training in kickboxing earlier in the year – was a response to an alleged racist assault by members of John Lydon’s (aka Johnny Rotten) entourage while backstage in Barcelona, Okereke refutes the suggestion, in a manner of speaking at least.

“I think the image of The Boxer has came from the idea that you have to keep going and no matter what life throws at you, you have to keep your head up high and you have to be strong,” he says.

“I think that a lot of our previous stuff as Bloc Party was more about regretting the past, where this record is about looking to the future,” he pauses. “It really feels like an optimistic record to me.”

The Boxer is out now via Wichita/Shock

Visit: iamkele.com

•

INTERVIEW - PVT
Excerpts Published: Music Australia Guide #78, July 2008.

For PVT drummer Laurence Pike, the band’s lithe, synth-scarred new record Church With No Magic represents a meeting of minds. 

Hey Laurence, I’m really enjoying the record. 

Oh great. 

The immediate shift, for me, was this greater sense of synthesis between the three of you guys. I don’t know if it was because the instrumentation was more abstracted from its source or if there was more of tonal continuity or something, but to me it seems kind of more conjoined. 

Yeah, well I think that was the underlying idea really. Well, that was the only idea we had when we started making it, to make something that was kind of the result of us being altogether. We’d been doing a lot of gigs and touring constantly and we kind of felt like the previous record was the start of something, rather than the realisation of something in some ways. So I think it was successful in that regard, you know. 

It’s interesting to me because there are perhaps more songlike structures and hooks and melodies on this record, but there’s that interesting interplay between that and perhaps these slightly more harsh sonic qualities. So there’s kind of an interesting back and forth on this record. 

Sure, I think we’ve always tried to make songs, whether they had lyrics or not. I wonder if this is going to strike people as a big leap, but for us it kind of felt very normal, because we’ve seen it unravel over a period of two or three years. We pretty much started working on this, months before the last record even came out. As soon as we delivered the last record to the label, we went straight back into the studio again. 

Working with just the three of you and signing to Warp and touring a lot more, do you feel as though you’re really understanding each other in much more intuitive way? Do you feel like you’ve got to a point where you feel like you can do whatever you want, to an extent? 

Yeah, I think so. There was an interesting point a while ago… I mean, musically our ambition has never been to do any one thing. We’ve never really put limitations on ourselves in terms of what we can do; I think our ambition has always been to do what we want.

We’ve never really felt like we’ve necessarily had to appease anyone and we’ve never been part of a scene directly, you know? We’ve always kind of done our own thing and that’s why we started the band in the first place, so we had a vehicle to take things to whatever limits we wanted, you know?

But I think we feel more like a band now. We did a photo shoot a few months back and I remember Richard was on the phone to me and he said ‘We look like a band now’ (laughs), and it was just weird, as if we didn’t look like a band before. But I kind of knew what he meant. I think he was acknowledging the fact that we feel a lot more like a band now. I think we just get each other a lot more.

Like I was saying before, when we went to record this album, we thought, ‘Let’s just go in and make whatever we’re going to make’, you know, and I think we just put trust in each other just let go and do it. That was our objective.

I always used to think of you as someone with his fingers in many pies – from Triosk to Savath & Savalas, to your project with Dave and working with Cornell – but you seem to be focussing purely on PVT at the moment. Is that a personal, creative shift for you or is it more a circumstantial one?
 

Yeah, over the last two or three years it’s just kind of become the main thing. Pretty much the only other thing I do is recording and touring with a singer called Jack Ladder. We’ve just started work on his new record and fortunately his cycle at the moment seems to be kind of out of sync with PVT, so I’ve got pretty much the next month off from commitments with PVT so we can make a record and that’s conveniently exactly when he wanted to make it.

But aside from that, I’ve kind of really pushed away from doing other things because there was a long period where I just wanted to anything and everything, more out of just curiosity than anything. But I think as you get older, you learn to say no to things a bit more and sharpen exactly how you want to spend you time and energy.

Dan Rule

Church With No Magic is out through Warp/Inertia 

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HAIR STYLISTICS - RUSTLING UP A RACKET AND A RHAPSODY
Published: The Age, EG, July 23, 2010. 

Sometime-novelist Masaya Nakahara is glad to be back doing what he does best - creating earth-shattering noise, writes Dan Rule.

Masaya Nakahara has a mean self-deprecating streak. He describes his noise-lashed live performances in terms of “self-destruction”; he labels his award winning writing “half-arsed”; he chuckles regularly and heartily at himself.

“I do exactly what anyone else could do onstage,” he offers, pauses, giggles. “It’s just about how shamelessly and unscrupulously I do it.”

The Tokyo noise musician, better known by his past and present stage monikers Violent Onsen Geisha and Hair Stylistics, is a rarity in the often dark, dour world of noise music.

In a two-decade creative career that has seen him share stages with Sonic Youth, Beck and John Spencer Blues Explosion, collaborate with Jim O’Rourke and win Japan’s prestigious Yukio Mishima Prize for his 2001 “anti-novel” Bouquets of Flowers Everywhere, the 39-year-old has built a reputation on merging tectonic swarms of volume and texture with an all but comedic palette of samples, sound bites and stage antics.

The artist, however, frames his output – which has included acclaimed 2004 album Custom Cock Confused Death and recent 12-month, 12-release recording project Monthly Hair Stylistics – in a somewhat more humble light.

“Loud noises are just fun,” offers Nakahara, speaking from Tokyo with the help of a translator on the eve of his debut Australian performance as Hair Stylistics at The Toff in Town on Sunday night. “I kind of just feel like I’m directing traffic in a way.”

“My equipment and devices make noise and I just direct it and try and mould it into something crazy and interesting.”

Using samplers, delays and various electronic bits and bobs, the joy of Nakahara’s approach is the ambiguous connection between gesture and sound.

“That’s one of the things I really love about noise and electronic music,” he says. “There can be all this crazy action but it might not actually be directly linked to the sound. The audience doesn’t even know what’s happening.”

“It’s kind of like when you strum a guitar and when you do a windmill – it’s the same sound, but a windmill is far more interesting to watch.”

The son of a Tokyo illustrator, Nakahara spent his childhood “making stuff”. “Because of my father’s job, there were always materials around,” he recalls. He latched onto the work of Jean Luc Godard as a teenager and soon began devouring film soundtracks and avant-garde music.

Nevertheless, Nakahara didn’t attempt to make music of his own until he stumbled across the chaotic beats and sample collages of late 1980s hip-hop crews like Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions. “When you think back to bands like Public Enemy, their music had the potential to encompass a lot of different things,” he says. “It was so open-ended and there really wasn’t a particular style as such, which was very attractive to me.”

He saved up to buy his own sampler and multi-track tape recorder in 1988, only to realise he needed more equipment to make hip-hop. “After buying those two things I realised that all I could make was noise,” he laughs.

His foray into literature is just as unlikely. Nakahara is completely untrained and while critics have anointed his collection of short stories Mari and Fifi’s Massacre Songbook (1998), aforementioned novel Bouquets of Flowers Everywhere and book of film criticism Masaya Nakahara: 2004–2007 Work Journal (2008) as signposts of Japanese literature’s avant-garde, he casts his writing as little more than frivolous.

“I don’t really like literature,” he says. “It really is just work for me, a way of making money. I don’t give it much thought.”

Indeed, Nakahara’s heart lies in his unhinged musical explorations. “I like it when the audience recognise those moments when I’m playing and I become confused and lose control of the sound,” he laughs.

“Please try and find those moments. Try and find the moments where I don’t know what is going on, because there will be a few of them.”

Masaya Nakahara, aka Hair Stylistics, plays The Toff in Town on Sunday, July 25 with Menstruation Sisters and Marco Fusinato. 

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THE SECRET LIFE OF THINGS - SUSTAINABILITY WITH A SMILE
Published: The Age, Melbourne Life, July 20, 2010.

A new animated film addresses issues of sustainability in design with humour in its heart, writes Dan Rule. 

“Eric Sun” is not a happy little mobile phone. In fact, he’s up to his aerial in the gloom of an existential crisis. After little more than 12 months, his owner has abandoned him for a sleek, sexy new model.

Perched uneasily on the edge of the couch in his psychologist’s office, he pauses, gathers his thoughts, bottom lip quivering. “I just feel really worthless,” he stutters eventually. “My career has only lasted for one year.

“I need a new life doc, a new direction! There has to be more to life than being stuck in a drawer?”

Eric Sun is the chief protagonist of Life Psycle-ology, a short animated film to be launched on Thursday as part of the State of Design Festival broaching issues surrounding eco-design and the lifecycle of consumer products. The difference being that the film, which is the first in the series The Secret Life of Things, does so with a smile. 

“Eco-design has a PR problem and it’s not being communicated very well,” says Leyla Acaroglu, who developed and directed the film through her eco-design consultancy Eco Innovators. “We’re trying to use humour to engage people on another level.”

“A lot of the information that is around on sustainability and environmental stuff can be quite depressing and can be quite disempowering,” continues the 27-year-old. “Explaining all the facts and presenting all the doom and gloom side of things, on the one hand, is important, because we all need to get to a point of understanding about the issues, but we also wanted to empower people about what they can do.”

Originally conceived as an educational resource for design students, the film traces Eric Sun’s emotional journey through past life regression therapy. He learns of his source materials: gold from South Africa, palladium from Brazil, platinum from Russian, Silver from Mexico and nickel from Australia. He recalls the joy of regular use and the dismay of failing memory and shortened battery life, only to learn of the possibilities of disassembly, resource recovery and reuse in other electronic products such as USB flash drives and digital cameras.

The mobile phone – something a poster child for the new generation of high-turnover, comparatively disposable consumer technology – seemed the perfect hook via which to launch the film series. Indeed, according to a recent global consumer survey by Finnish telecommunications Nokia, only 3 per cent of mobile users internationally recycle their mobile phones. Other studies have the figure even lower.

“The whole thing is based around the idea of product lifecycles and trying to come up with a clever way to sort of portray that,” says animator Nick Kallincos, who originally came up with the Eric Sun character. “The mobile phone just felt right.”

“This is a thing that we all use all the time and are largely unaware of all the materials and all the hidden things beneath it.”

Acaroglu agrees. “Here were all these quite complex issues, but when Nick came back with this idea of this sad little mobile phone going to his doctor’s office having this existentialist crisis and past life regression therapy, you just knew instantly that it was perfect,” she says. “It just explained everything.”

“We see Eric go through all these experiences and they’re all very cute and very funny, but if we had done it in any other way we wouldn’t have actually been able to demonstrate all of his lifecycle impacts in such a way.”

Acaroglu has become one of Australia’s most vocal eco-design advocates. She studied product design in Sydney before she became disillusioned with the field. “I felt like I was being taught to create crap for idiots,” she quips with wry laugh. She then moved to Melbourne gained a Bachelor Social Science (Environment) with Honors at RMIT, got a job at the university’s Centre for Design before going onto found Eco Innovators.

Suffice to say, her decision to launch the film series as part State of Design was no mistake. “It all comes back to that communication thing,” she says.

“The way it has been communicated, eco-design looks like a bunch of tree-hugging hippy crap to design students, who really just want to make cool stuff, but it doesn’t have to.”

“So for me it’s about trying to find a way to communicate the message.”  

The Secret Life of Things launches 6pm Thursday at the EPA Offices, Carlton. Places limited. Tel: 8669 2046.

Life Psychle-ology screens 2pm and 6:30pm daily at the Federation Square Big Screen until July 25.

thesecretlifeofthings.com  

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AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, July 17, 2010.  

WHAT Bushfire Australia
WHERE TarraWarra Museum of Art, 311 Healesville-Yarra Glen Road, Healesville, 5957 3100, twma.com.au 

Now in its final week at the stunning TarraWarra Museum of Art in the Yarra Valley, Bushfire Australia proves a poignant exploration of Australian art’s historical and contemporary negotiations of bushfire-related themes and imagery. The sheer scope of this exhibition is striking in itself. An extensive collection of historical works fills much of the main space. William Strutt’s famed 1864 work Black Thursday, February 6th 1851 sprawls across one wall, vast, dramatic and tempestuous, but ultimately overbearing. The softened hues and atmosphere of Arthur Boyd’s Burning Off (1958), J.W. Curtis’s Breaking camp, forest fire (1893) and the searing forest landscape of John Lonstaff’s Gippsland, Sunday night, February 20th, 1898 (1898) make for far more evocative examples. It’s a dynamic echoed in many of the contemporary works created in the wake of the Black Saturday fires, which only just fell short of the museum site. While the more violent imagery goes some way to capture the sheer power and brutality of the flames – the towering, billowing smoke of Petra Reece’s All consuming and relentless (the beast) is perhaps the finest example – it’s the quieter works that perhaps prove the most affecting. Camilla Tadich’s compact oils (pictured, cropped, above) are haunting and mute. They capture unusual perspectives of the devastating aftermath of the blazes that tore through her hometown of St Andrews and she fought from her door. Her car headlights shed light on the burnt out remnants of a house, car and water tank; daybreak reveals an ashen landscape, completely drained of movement, colour and life. Peter Wegner’s tiny, gestural bronze sculptures – which render victims embracing or alone, in shock in the wake of the fires – are the most unassuming but also the most heartrending of the collection. Art couldn’t possibly summon the fury and fear of the moment, but it can go some way to evoke and communicate the loss and grief and very human consequences. Tues to Sun 11am–5pm, until July 25. 

WHAT Saffron Newey: Serious Moonlight
WHERE MARS Gallery, 418 Bay Street, Port Melbourne, 9681 8245, marsgallery.com.au 

Theoretically, Saffron Newey’s darkened, meticulously detailed oils might fit the genre of the landscape painting, but the Melbourne artist’s work avoids a palpable sense of representation and place. Painting from her own night-time photography, these works posses an uncanny luminosity. Certain colours glow and shimmer while others are muted in the half-light. Shapes and shadows of the indefinite pervade. Newey’s curious vantages – low to the ground, from behind shrubs, foliage and bushes – only add to the arcane atmosphere. Shafts of moonlight splay onto an empty track; the tips of leaves gently radiate against the darkest of blues. We’re left with a clutch of starting points, with more questions than answers. From whose perspective are we surveying these scenes? Just where are we and why are we here? Newey feeds us mere hints and traces while we wander and wonder. Her paintings are evocative starting points to an undefined narrative. Tues to Sun 10am–5pm, until July 31.

WHAT Wayne Viney: Radiance
WHERE James Makin Gallery, 67 Cambridge Street, Collingwood, 9416 3966, jamesmakingallery.com 

Radiance seems the perfect title for Wayne Viney’s latest series of unique monotype prints. Known for his stunningly blurred, vaporous landscapes, the Melbourne artist and printmaker has abstracted all but a trace of the lay of the land in this series. Rather, he plies these works with simple horizontal phases of light – the ambience, perhaps, of the sun’s reflection and refraction from the earth – void of details and topographies. Viney’s reductive, nonetheless beautiful prints exude a timbre or resonance rather than a representation. Hue, tone and texture are of the essence. Tues to Fri 10am–5:30pm, Sat 11am–5pm, until July 24. 

WHAT John Spiteri: Aquaria Humanistica
WHERE Neon Parc, Level 1, 53 Bourke Street, city, 9663 0911, neonparc.com.au 

There’s an alluring duality to John Spiteri’s mixed-media paintings, prints and assemblages. Though somewhat elusive, even murky, in their orientation and detail, the works that comprise Aquaria Humanistica don’t merely present a multifaceted artistic outcome, but grant access to various cryptic stages and chapters in Spiteri’s process. Muted grey and brown oil and enamel is rubbed, sanded, cut and drawn upon; figures emerge out of muddy backdrops; repetitions percolate from one work to the next. In many ways, these works feel like archaeological relics from another dimension or era. They are the fragmented moments, figures and evidence – they allude to so much while explaining so very little. Wed to Sat noon–6pm, until July 31.

WHAT Benjamin Armstrong: Walking backwards to the place I come from
WHERE Tolarno Galleries, Level 4, 104 Exhibition Street, city, 9654 6000, tolarnogalleries.com

Despite their delicacy and lightness of touch, Benjamin Armstrong’s hand-blown glass sculptures invoke a kind of poetic sense of permanence; the irrevocable passing from one plane to the next. Taking the form of large, hollow glass orbs – or as he describes them, “corrupted hourglasses” – sitting one atop the other, they appear as if in the midst of funnelling matter from the top to the base chamber. Brown dust, a baguette, a golden fish and a human brain are towed and sucked toward the inescapable lower cylinder, like unwilling specimens. The stunning, large-scale Chinese ink and pigment drawings that accompany the sculptures, however, suggest a different set of possibilities. Using the erupting volcano as a central motif, these works seem to show the potential for regeneration and the cyclic. In Permian times a volcano spews forth towering clouds of smoke, though in Too little too much those same clouds spill sparkling rain to the earth. Tues to Fri 10am–5pm, Sat 1pm–5pm, until August 14.

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ANDREW MATTOCK - GIST OF A WINK WITH A SMILE
Published: The Age, Arts & Culture, July 12, 2010.

This work questions censorship - with a guilty giggle, writes Dan Rule.

DO YOU know what a plushie is?” asks Andrew Mattock, drawing a smirking halt to our conversation. No, unfortunately, I do not. An anticipatory pause, a broadening smile. ”A plushie is someone who dresses up in animal suits for sexual excitement!” he urges finally, cackles, sighs, cackles some more.

Aside from having a good old laugh, the 42-year-old artist is, in fact, in the midst of making a valid point. For Mattock, whose new collection of raw, mixed-media paintings shows alongside that of Cameron Lindsay as part of the Heavenly Bodiesexhibition at Green-Wood Gallery, pornography is in the eye of the beholder.

”If you take the dictionary definition of pornography, it’s something along the lines of ‘words and images to stimulate sexual excitement’,” he says. ”Some people find feet a turn-on, and then there’s the book by J. G. Ballard, Crash, where people find car crashes sexually stimulating.” Another laugh. ”The whole point of these artworks is about asking just how you define pornography.”

This is Mattock’s second series of paintings tackling historical and contemporary examples of the state censorship of sexually orientated material. Inspired by the pre-porn ”sleaze paperback” genre of the late 1950s and ’60s - many of which, including such salacious titles as Honolulu Snatch, The Lust Lobby and Sin Driver, compete for space in Mattock and wife Emma’s St Kilda apartment - the spray-paint and enamel works that compriseHeavenly Bodies make for a veritable orgy of bouncing bosoms and schoolyard innuendo.

A half-naked blonde gazes longingly over her shoulder, the words ”Up My Alley” emblazoned down the side of the painting. ”The affair had left a nasty taste in Samantha’s mouth” offers another work, in scrawled text. There’s the curvy negligee-clad seductress flaunting Hot Cargo; there’s Eaten Alive, Maid to Order and, of course, the splay-legged piece de resistance,Jungle Finger. It’s cheeky, crass and makes for a guilty giggle.

”I like the wry smile, you know,” offers Mattock, who hails from Melksham in rural England. ”I enjoy the reaction; I enjoy being cheeky. I guess I’m a product of my time in that sense. Before the zeitgeist of the ’60s, where everything seemed to change and so many censorship laws were repealed, in order to get around the laws all of this innuendo popped up.”

It is no mistake that the exhibition arrives amid controversy over the federal government’s proposed national internet filter and new regulations that grant customs officials the right to search incoming passengers’ luggage and electronic devices for undeclared pornographic material.

”To apply a filter, arbitrarily, across every strand of society and every strand of media just seems a ludicrous approach,” Mattock says. ”It seems like the shotgun and scatter-gun approach, like, ‘That’s wrong and we’ll censor you.’ These were issues dealt with in the ’60s and ’70s!

”You’ve got Australian Customs trying to make you declare pornography when you come into the country. It’s crazy - how can Customs define what’s pornography and what isn’t?” he says. ”I bet you can guarantee that everyone in the queue at immigration will find completely different things sexually stimulating.”

By mimicking the aesthetics and innuendo of an unliberated era, Mattock, who trained in ceramics before shifting to paint on his move to Australia in the mid-2000s, aims to warn of the potential reinstatement of drastic censorship. ”One of [American sexploitation director] Russ Meyer’s great quotes is, ‘Most censorship looks ludicrous when you look back upon it,’ and it does.”

But does this attitude ignore concerns about under-age access to adult material and the early sexualisation of children in the internet era? Mattock thinks not. ”People need to take responsibility and educate their kids,” he says. ” As a household, you can say, ‘I would like you to filter this [internet] content’, rather than having a secret government list of what you can see and what you can’t.”

Mattock, who works freelance in IT to pay the bills, says it’s the job of a modern democracy to regulate itself. ”Most people have an inbuilt ‘filter’,” he says. ”You can’t arbitrarily apply something to everyone in the country because of a few people who sit at the margins.”

That said, Mattock doesn’t see his paintings as the work of some kind of pro-porn crusader. ”At the end of the day, it’s all just fun and cheeky. There’s no point in doing it if you don’t have a smile on your face.”

 Heavenly Bodies is on display at Green-Wood Gallery until July 18. 

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