dan rule journalism various text

INTERPOL - ‘INTERPOL’Published: Music Australia...

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 00:30:00 -0400

INTERPOL - ‘INTERPOL’
Published: Music Australia Guide #80, September 2010.

Interpol
Interpol
****
(Co-Op/Shock)

Interpol’s self-titled fourth record is an elusive, accumulative beast. The final chapter in the dapper New Yorkers’ first decade – made all the more pointed by the fact that it will be the last album to feature cult bassist and keyboardist Carlos D., who quit the band at the close of the recording sessions – is a morass of reverb and harmonics, layered orchestration and driving rhythm. Indeed, Interpol doesn’t merely revisit the band’s earlier post-punk and proto-orchestral inquisitions, but meticulously re-imagines and re-integrates the various strands of their sound. The agile bass and drum lines of Summer Well could be straight from the Turn On the Bright Lights (2002) archive. But the devil is in the detail: the sophisticated implementation of keys, wraithlike vocal whispers and compositional nuances take it to entirely different plane. The guitar dialogue and driving rhythmic pulse of the brilliant Barricade, too, recalls Interpol’s early career gestures, only for vocalist Paul Banks to give one of the most heart-torn, vulnerable vocal performances of his career. Indeed, Banks – who has a tendency to sound disengaged – is a revelation on this record. Moments like the funereal, orchestrations of like Always Malaise and the tempestuous slow build of Lights have Banks singing for his life. It’s not always an easy listen, but it a complex and challenging statement of intent. Where Our Love to Admire (2007) witnessed a band struggling to find traction, Interpol seems a search for some sense of resolution. There are more questions than answers, but by its conclusion, Interpol leaves us begging to know just what the hell they’ll do next.

DAN RULE

SPREADING THEIR WINGSPublished: Broadsheet, Spring Edition,...

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0400

SPREADING THEIR WINGS
Published: Broadsheet, Spring Edition, 2010.

Jeremy Wortsman’s illustration agency, The Jacky Winter Group, and in-house gallery space, Lamington Drive, have defied their humble beginnings to become a hub for some of Australia’s finest creative talent. Now, with a clutch of likeminded businesses in tow, they’re converting their new Collingwood warehouse into one of Melbourne’s genuine creative epicentres. By Dan Rule.

Looking back on it, there was a distinctly aspirational bent to the placard that adorned the diminutive, turn-of-the-century Fitzroy building that, until recently, served as headquarters of The Jacky Winter Group illustration agency and its associated Lamington Drive gallery.

The Compound Interest: Centre for the Applied Arts – it was hard not to chuckle at the grandiosity of the title, especially in comparison to the rickety little space it heralded, jammed between the rear of a shop and a cramped, bluestone back lane on the corner of George and Gertrude Streets.

“It was really a bit of a joke back then,” smiles Jeremy Wortsman, the Melbourne-based New Yorker behind the project. “But now it’s kind of grown into something that’s a lot more real.”

He’s not kidding. Wandering about the vast Keele Street warehouse that now sports The Compound Interest insignia in the weeks before its September 2 launch, the raw multilevel building is a hive of creative spaces and activities.

The new Lamington Drive gallery – a wooden cube, which, like its predecessor, features corner-lit, cardboard-lined walls – and its adjoining, pegboard-walled retail space dominate the building’s eastern entrance, while a staircase at the rear of the warehouse leads to a bright, upstairs studio; a new home to award-winning graphic design company Chase & Galley (which Wortsman originally co-founded with Stuart Geddes) and web-design outfit The Golden Grouse.

“We’re really trying to cover as many aspects of applied art as possible,” explains Wortsman, leading the way to the western span of warehouse, where industrial designer Christian Condo’s Modern Motorcycle Company workshop and showroom adjoin The Jacky Winter Group offices, set in a wooden-walled pod, replete with batting range (“I like hitting things,” he laughs).

“I guess it’s really just an extension of what we were doing at George Street, but just with many more businesses.”

Indeed, The Compound Interest’s initial clutch of ventures is just the beginning. The coming months will see the staggered opening of countless other endeavours in the space, including architects Martyn Hook and Fleur Watson’s design and architecture-focussed Pin-Up Gallery, a full print and framing workshop including and a café with outdoor courtyard. The space will also see a couple of high-profile relocations, with Carolyn Fraser’s internationally renowned Idlewild Press relocating from the Nicholas Building and Ghita Loebenstein’s Speakeasy Cinema project shifting from 1000£ Bend.

It represents something of a first for Melbourne. While the Nicholas Building has long stood as the city’s premier example of a cross-pollinating creative space, the Keele Street warehouse brings with it a genuine curatorial focus. These aren’t just businesses working side-by-side, but businesses working together.

“When we were putting the whole idea together it was really important that all the businesses complimented each other,” says Wortsman, who, after moving to Melbourne in 2001, made a name as a co-founder of cult poster magazine Is Not along with Geddes and writers Penny Modra, Mel Campbell and Natasha Ludowyk.

“It’s the idea that someone might be coming in to meet John upstairs and see a print at Lamington Drive, or someone might be coming to a show at Lamington Drive and might see something else they like. It’s really about that cross-section and making sure we’re all doing really complimentary things.”

But there’s more to The Compound Interest than business opportunity.

“It’s kind just that thing of being able to hang out with your friends,” offers Wortsman. “We’re all likeminded people and we’re all doing stuff, you know. We all spend so much of our lives at work, so why not make work and pleasure the same thing.”

It’s the next phase in what has been a remarkable introduction for Wortsman’s agency. Since launching in October 2007 with an initial stable of 12 illustrators – which included the warped Australiana of Eamo, celebrated watercolour and collage of Kat Macleod, skewed comic humorist Oslo Davis, Dylan Martorell, Tin & Ed and Rik Lee – The Jacky Winter Group has risen to become one of the country’s premier illustration agencies.

In its first three years, the agency has grown to represent a roster of upwards of 40 artists (with the likes of Beci Orpin, Travis Price and Jeremy Dower joining the fray more recently), launched developmental incubator The Hatch, international booking agency Rock of Eye and storyboarding sub-agency The Bowery, taken on several staff, including general manager Matthew Shannon and agency and gallery manager Lara Murray, and procured commissions from a host of domestic and international clients of the ilk of The New York Times, Business Week, GQ, Playboy, Nike, Saatchi & Saatchi, Random House among countless others. Lamington Drive, meanwhile, has risen to become a staple on the Melbourne gallery circuit, hosting several sell-out exhibitions and occupying a gap in the market between fine and commercial art.

It’s a role that Wortsman hopes the gallery, which relaunches with a solo show from inaugural signing Eamo, can continue to develop in the new space. “The retail component is going to be really important because we’re going to be publishing a lot more of our own artist books, working with other independent publishers and stocking their kind of product,” he says. “It’s going to be more of a curated and self-published kind of thing.”

“Lamington Drive always existed to ask that question: what is commercial art? What is a fine art space? How can those two things co-exist? And we hope to keep asking that question.”

That’s not to suggest, however, that the move to the new Compound Interest site has been anything less than a monumental exercise. “Oh man,” he sighs. “We had these lofty ideas that we were going to take over this 10,000 square foot space and do it on the cheap, but you just can’t.”

“We’ve had to be frugal and we’ve had to do things in steps and we’ve had to call in favours.”

And they’re not done yet. “It’s important to tell people that we’re here and we’ve relocated, but that also, things are going to be constantly happening and changing in this space with things like the café and the cinema and other things,” urges Wortsman. “It’s going to be a really staggered thing.”

“I hope that when people come, they can see the potential and keep coming back to see it grow.”

The Compound Interest: Centre for the Applied Arts is located at 15–25 Keele Street, Collingwood.

www.jackywinter.com
www.lamingtondrive.com

BEATS with Dan RulePublished: Music Australia Guide #80,...

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 23:45:00 -0400

BEATS with Dan Rule
Published: Music Australia Guide #80, September 2010.

Jules Chaz
Toppings…
****

There’s a loose, unhinged quality to Toppings…, the debut disc from Canadian beat kid Jules Chaz. Stretching across 21 instrumental hip hop cuts – with the addition of a guest vocal slot from Vancouver rapper Ishkan – the record is a loose weave of unlikely stylistic bedfellows. Strutting, wonky hip hop grooves and spacious breaks underlay crackling, Sub-Continental loops and reggae flavours; shadowy atmospheres drift among Twin Peaks samples other creepy musical obscura. It’s like Madlib rubbing shoulders with early career Flying Lotus, Oh No sharing tapes with Nosaj Thing. The sprawling post-hip hop diaspora continues to spread.

Wagon Repair/Inertia

Koolism
The Umu
****

MC Hau and DJ Danialsan (aka Koolism) are the definition of Australian old-school. The Canberra duo have been kicking classic, first generation-styled hip hop jams for the best part of two decades. Kinetic fifth studio record The Umu suggests they’ve got plenty left in the tank. Hau is on fire here, dropping characteristically intricate, socially conscious rhyme schemes amid Danielsan’s upbeat funk and soul-flecked rhythms and 80s-styled breaks. Check the meticulous unpacking of Australian cultural attitudes on Can’t Stand It, lurking boom-bap of cop critique Hanz High and bass-lead funk hook of Cash Monet for proof. Koolism may be from way back when, but they’re still kicking it with best of them.

Invada/Inertia

Quantic Presenta: Flowering Inferno
Dog With a Rope
****

Worldly DJ/producer Will Holland (aka Quantic), has made a great leap forward on Dog With a Rope, his second release as Flowering Inferno. Fusing organic Latin and Caribbean flavours into a collision of buoyant rhythms, humid dynamics and flourishing melodies, Holland – who has called Colombia home since 2007 – doesn’t just pay homage but actively re-plots the boundaries between both musical idioms. It’s a fascinating trip. Perhaps most telling is Holland’s respect for his source material. While he’s willing to test stylistic delineations, he does so with a rare lightness of touch. The results are at once authentically traditional and outwardly innovatory.

Tru Thoughts/Fuse

A-Diction
Walkin’ Alone
***

Melbourne duo A-Diction do a lot right on debut longplayer Walkin’ Alone. Following an EP and a couple of mixtapes, there’s barely a weak track on this rock-solid record. MCs Boltz and Breach are both competent (if not, at times, a little rugged) on the mic, and importantly, they’ve managed to acquire the services of a host of impressive producers. Man of the moment M-Phazes, Mules and Jase all drop stinging joints – none more so than the tripping boom-bap of M-Phazes’s One Fact – giving the record a more complex flavour than it might have otherwise achieved. It won’t blow too many minds, but this workmanlike effort will garner plenty of respect.

AD/Obese

Roots Manuva meets Wrongtom
Duppy Writer
***1/2

Though a revitalizing listen, Duppy Writer isn’t quite a new album from UK hip hop’s longstanding monarch Roots Manuva. Essentially a re-edit record, the project sees dub visionary Wrongtom go to town on a clutch of vintage Roots material, recontextualising some of his masterful verses in a bubbling dub/reggae milieu. There are some fine moments, including a perfectly plodding version of 1999 classic Juggle Tings Proper. But while pure dub is a great setting for admiring Roots’ pure charisma and faultless flow, Duppy Writer lacks the genre-crossing dynamism that has left Roots Manuva’s studio so revered. It is a companion work rather than a statement.

Big Dada/Inertia

THE ICON - IAN DURYPublished: Music Australia Guide #80,...

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

THE ICON - IAN DURY
Published: Music Australia Guide #80, September 2010.

In The Icon we profile those who change music. This month, Dan Rule hails the unhinged charisma and inimitable creative vision of UK iconoclast and chief ‘Blockhead’ Ian Dury.

To speak of the late Ian Dury in musical terms alone would discount his far-reaching creative and personal legacy. One of the most genuinely eccentric musical outsiders of a generation, Dury cut an inimitable figure in a rock world so often characterised by derivatives.

A polio survivor, his lurching stage presence, insatiably dry wit and smoke-scarred, cockney parlance at the lead of Ian Dury & The Blockheads fashioned an entirely new archetype for the front man. He may have limped and stumbled, but his dynamic poetry and infectious personality made him one of the most unlikely stars of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Born in London’s northwest outskirts during the Second World War, Dury spent his early childhood in neutral Switzerland. But it was on his return to the UK in the late 1940s that his world was to change forever when he contracted polio during the epidemic of 1949. He spent a torturous six months in a full plaster cast before enrolling in the Chailey Craft School (for disabled children), a harsh, unloving environment that many have suggested gave the young Dury his characteristic drive and ambition.

Music came late to Dury, who was 28 and had already studied and taught fine art before he founded burly, 1950s influenced pub rock act Kiburn & the High Roads. But it was when Dury went out on his own at the end of the 1970s, signing to struggling indie label Stiff that things changed. With the release of debut record New Boots and Panties!! (1977) and early non-album singles Sex & Drugs & Rock ‘n’ Roll and Hit Me You’re your Rhythms Stick, he became an instant superstar at the ripe old age of 36.

At the height of their powers, Dury and his band were a force to be reckoned with. Their vibrant melange of disco funk, new wave and punk resonances made records like Do It Yourself (1979) and Laughter (1980) some of the most dynamic of their era, while Dury’s shrewd lyricism – part social commentary, part crazed humour, part cheeky, sexual provocation – and voracious presence made him an utterly magnetic performer.

But as he so often proved throughout his career, Dury was more than his music. As his star began to wane in the early and mid 80s – with comparatively lacklustre records like Lord Upminster (1981) and 4000 Weeks Holiday (1984) – he shifted his attention to craft of acting, his trademark determination and natural charm landing him various theatre, television and film roles.

Although there were more albums to come – Apples (1989) and The Busdriver’s Prayer… (1992) included – it wasn’t until 1998, in the midst of the battle with cancer that would eventually claim his life in 2000, that Dury reformed The Blockheads for one final tilt with charming record Mr. Love Pants. It served as a fitting farewell to a singular artist who could only be stopped by life’s inevitable end.

The Ian Dury biopic Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival and is slated for cinema released later this year.

Visit: sex-drugs-rock-roll-thefilm.com
Visit: iandury.co.uk

LIFE IN 32 BARS - CYPRESS HILLPublished: Music Australia Guide...

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

LIFE IN 32 BARS - CYPRESS HILL
Published: Music Australia Guide #80, September 2010.

Cypress Hill’s woozy, smoke-hazed sound and stoned charisma eschewed classic west coast hip hop to make them the first figureheads of Latino rap. Percussionist Eric Bobo tells Dan Rule new album Rise Up is a visceral new chapter.

Mid 1980s Cuban-born brothers Senen (aka Sen Dog) and Ulpiano Sergio Reyes (aka Mellow Man Ace) hook up with fellow South Gate, Los Angeles kids Louis Freese (aka B Real) and Lawrence Muggerud (aka Muggs) under the name DVX.

1988 Mellow Man Ace leaves the group to start a solo career and they rename themselves Cypress Hill, quickly garnering an underground reputation for their blend of Latino street slang and slow, undulating hip hop beats.

1991 Their following on the rise, thanks in part to B Real’s distinctive nasally delivery and the group’s predilection for marijuana, the trio sign a deal with Columbia Records offshoot Ruffhouse.

1992 Release their self-titled debut to massive underground acclaim with Muggs’ eerie, lurking beats and B Real and Sen Dog’s blasé street sketches offer a fresh perspective on Dr Dre’s rolling G Funk sound.

1993 Debuting at number one, second album Black Sunday takes the stoned Cypress sound worldwide and is proclaimed an instant hip hop classic. Iconic single Insane in the Membrane becomes an international smash.

1994 Percussionist Eric Bobo joins the group following a stint with Beastie Boys.

1995 Release sinister, gloom riddled third album III: Temples of Boom sending their sound back on a darker, more underground route.

1998 Cypress return with the decidedly lukewarm IV.

2000 Double-disc epic Skull & Bones sets the quartet back on course with the group adding a harder, rock-based sound to their repertoire.

2001 Release sixth album Stone Raiders.

2004–2009 After releasing the Caribbean-influenced Till Death Do Us Part, Cypress go on hiatus, with first Sen Dog and then B Real releasing solid solo records.

2010 Release pointedly political eighth record Rise Up, featuring collaborations with Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello.

On the state of hip hop: “I think a lot of the new hip hop today is really interchangeable. You don’t really know who’s who because the beats are kind of sounding the same, the flows are kind of sounding the same. But with us and other groups of the era who are coming back, it’s showing that, ‘Yo, this is where hip hop really is at. We’re still here.”

On Rise Up: “We’re known for having the darker, really gritty, kind of grimy beats and whatnot, but we really wanted to focus on making an aggressive record that could translate to the live environment. We really wanted to focus on the strengths of Cypress and I think that those main strengths are hip hop and rock.”

On politics: “With the state of the world at the moment, I think it’s really important that people like ourselves, who have the opportunity to express themselves in a public forum, actually do that. Cypress, aren’t really a political band, but if we feel that the government aren’t doing enough and state legislators aren’t doing enough, and the biggest voice we have is the music and the people, then we’ve just got to get it out there.”

On Tom Morello: “He produced the title track for the record and I think that really set the tone for Rise Up. We’ve been friends with Tom since the 90s, touring together with Rage and so on, but to actually have him producing not one but two slamming tracks on a Cypress Hill record was just great.”

Rise Up is available now via EMI.

Cypress Hill tour Australia from September 23 until October 1.

Visit: cypresshill.com

SAPNA CHANDU - A WINDOW TO ANOTHER WORLDPublished: The Age, Arts...

Wed, 29 Sep 2010 01:00:00 -0400

SAPNA CHANDU - A WINDOW TO ANOTHER WORLD
Published: The Age, Arts & Culture, September 29, 2010.

An audiovisual installation prompts us to re-evaluate representations of Australian identity, writes Dan Rule.

FROM our vantage, the trams and traffic and pedestrian flotsam and jetsam of Gertrude Street flash by as if on film. The late morning streetside is awash with commission flat corner kids, heavy-fringed fashion types, workers and wanderers; they shift in and out of frame.

Through headphones we listen to a soundscape of traffic and conversations and accents and languages; a din of intimate moments, giggles, debates, hollers and background noise.

Set inside the shopfront of Gertrude Street florist Mr Lincoln, artist and occasional practising dentist Sapna Chandu’s new audiovisual installation, Short Stories #1: Versions of Contemporary History, is a ”documentary in real time”.

With the front window of the retail space performing the function of a screen, the work merges the live streetscape with a detailed world of field recordings and multi-accented conversations about Australia. A screen mounted to the ceiling, meanwhile, provides a laconic dialogue of subtitles.

”It’s really about trying to highlight just how many different perspectives and different realities there are in contemporary Australia,” says Chandu of the show, which runs as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival.

”I’m interested in the various screens we view supposed reality through … and kind of challenging our projection of cultural identity through the media.”

As we watch people saunter by, Chandu’s soundscape - which consists of a handful of vignettes recorded on local and international travels - gives a distinct impression of eavesdropping. We hear Australian travellers arguing over the validity of their Lonely Planet against the backdrop of a Hindu prayer call and ensuing thunderstorm; we meet an Indian puppeteer recalling his time living on the Gold Coast, doing a mean impression of an archetypal ocker accent in the process; we stumble in on a loose conversation about Germaine Greer and John Howard’s contrasting public analysis of Steve Irwin’s legacy.

It’s a simple, but nonetheless eloquent, study of the vastly different cultural entity we, and others, understand Australia to be. ”Each of the pieces address different points of view, so often there is a lot of tension between them,” says the 34-year-old.

For Chandu, who exhibited as a photo-artist before moving into installation, working with sound provided the perfect medium for the project. ”I think we’re so over-stimulated visually these days that we forget to listen,” she says. ”Sound is just so immersive compared to a photograph. The experience becomes so fresh again; you can smell the atmosphere and the weight of the air.

”I was just travelling and recording and taking video, but when I got home and started compiling the material, I realised that the sound was just far more interesting and rich. It was able to capture such a different sense of perspective.”

In this sense, the work’s setting in culturally and socio-economically diverse Gertrude Street was no mistake. ”It’s a street that has such a deep history and has changed so much over time,” says Chandu. ”Even in its present context - with the housing commission towers and the arty, fashionable, more elitist stuff on the other side of the road - you just have a huge amount of very different people who move through the one area. There’s just such a huge disengagement from one side of the street to the other.”

She hopes that her work can at least offer a point of reconnection. ”Having the audience look back out onto the street is a way of trying to re-engage them with others,” she offers.

”It’s a way of trying to get people thinking about some of these different experiences and perspectives.”

Short Stories #1: Versions of Contemporary History runs at Mr Lincoln, 2/102 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, until October 9. Free. melbournefringe.com.au / sapnachandu.net

AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan RulePublished: The Age, A2, September...

Sat, 25 Sep 2010 01:00:00 -0400

AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, September 25, 2010.

WHAT Elvis Richardson & John Vella: Because I’m Lucky
WHERE Conical Inc., level 1, 3 Rochester Street, Fitzroy, 9415 6958, conical.org.au

This divergent new show at Conical functions as something of lateral engagement with notions of stigma. Drawing on the work of Tasmanian artist John Vella and Melbourne’s Elvis Richardson, Because I’m Lucky deals in the currency of assumption, expectation and ways of seeing. John Vella’s fascinating suite of photographic and video works is both outward and inward in its scope. His striking, louvre-like photographic installation wallflower (neighbourhood watch) offers glimpses and fragments of the surrounds of his suburban childhood home. Taken through windows and flyscreen doors, the photographs capture crops of adjoining properties, the street and various other sight lines and points of visual intersection. It is both a study of watching and being watched, of both an experienced and projected gaze. In the hilarious FIT (7_ _ _), meanwhile, Vella grooms he and his family in the popular shopping centre fashions of eight diverse suburbs, while his video work Status Free Vehicle charts an hour-long, “stigma free” drive in and around Hobart, the camera angled in such a direction that we witness only sky and the occasional fleeting glimpse of a branch or power line. Elvis Richardson’s two works shift the focus directly onto herself. Her wallpaper work redirects a gambling questionnaire to apply to she, who has chosen to be an artist. “Have you ever made art until your last dollar is gone?” it probes, “Have you ever felt that you would like to stop making art but found you were unable?” Though ripe for a laugh, the work appears to preface the stark dichotomy between the art world’s position within the privileged, middle class and the rather less glamorous socio-economic conditions under which most artists operate. Richardson’s Negative Space sculptures, meanwhile, reveal inverted cement mountains sunken into plinths. Again, they seem to invoke the great divide between aspirations and reality. Like stigmatise representations of gamblers, smokers and other “problem citizens”, Richardson goals as an artist dig her deeper into a hole. Wed to Sat noon–5pm, until October 2.

WHAT Seraphine Pick
WHERE Uplands Gallery, 247 High Street, Prahran, 9510 2374, uplandsgallery.com

New Zealand artist Seraphine Pick’s new show of oil-on-linen and gouache-on-paper works revels in a bizarre, colour-drenched, psychedelic haze. Colours bleed into one another; figuration melts into nebulousness. There are several highlights. In the show’s one untitled work, a naked woman (bar a pair of choice stilettos) writhes in ecstasy on the banks of a forest lake. In Bandit, another naked woman (this time, save a balaclava) reclines relaxedly against a tree trunk, presumably post-heist. It gets better. There’s the iconic, blurred figure of Patti Smith, hair draped over her face, sunk to her knees, guitar in hands; the bearded, longhaired man leading the ghostlike white horse and rider; the wraithlike figures gathered in the dark woods. A playful ode to 1970s acid trip aesthetics though it might be, this is convincing series from Pick. Where some of her earlier drawings and illustrations possessed something of a girlish flippancy, this body of work is grounded in its stunningly unfastened and gradual use of paint and full embrace of its totally-off-your-face vibe. It’s a trip worth taking. Tues to Fri 11am–5pm, Sat noon–4pm, until October 2.

WHAT Rosslynd Piggott: Measuring Night
WHERE Sutton Gallery, 254 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, 9416 0727, suttongallery.com.au

Though Rosslynd Piggott’s new collection of paintings and mirror works seem spare in their detail at first glance, spending time with Measuring Night reveals a stunning richness of texture and tonality and light. Both the large-scale, oil-on-linen Night series and the 10-component Cloud Window & Black Hole installation work via clear visual counterpoints. The former sees linear spectrums of hourly light counterpoise murky, nebulous darkness; the latter pierces the soft shapes and layers of 10 different types of clouds with a flat, circular, black void, as if a startling reminder of what lies beyond their gentle embrace. In the smaller space, a trio of molten mirror glass and oil and palladium leaf diptychs assumes a very different vantage to the fall of the light. Though we’re drawn to the works’ various surfaces, with proximity they shift and buckle. Indeed, as we move about the space, the works become fluid, flashing, blinding and refracting with every step. Beyond mere light and dark, Piggott’s works remind us of beautiful transience of luminosity. Tues to Sat 11am–5pm, until October 2.

WHAT Damiano Bertoli: Continuous Moment – Le Desir… 2010
WHERE Neon Parc, level 1, 53 Bourke Street, city, 9663 0911, neonparc.com.au

With Neon Parc painted entirely black, Damiano Bertoli continues his Continuous Moment series with this dark, dingy and playfully disorientating installation. Featuring looped video, found stills, an illusive “lottery wheel” and a giant, bitumen coated, robot-like figure with a reflective light bulb for a face, the show renders a kind of arcane nowhere place. Though difficult to find a footing among the pleasantly ghoulish rabble, there is certainly method to Bertoli’s apparent madness. His use of video and found imagery – fragmentary moments captured and bound to the endlessness of virtuality – says plenty about our current, distracted circumstance. Here, he has created a void outside the bounds of time. Images repeat and reflect; the present stretches and extends. Climbing the stairs at Neon Parc, we enter a creepy contemporary eternity. Wed to Sat noon–6pm, until October 9.

AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan RulePublished: The Age, A2, September...

Sat, 18 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, September 18, 2010.

WHAT Ponch Hawkes: more seeing is not understanding
WHERE Monash Galley of Art, 860 Ferntree Gully Road, Wheelers Hill, 8544 0500, mga.org.au

A couple dance to their portable stereo under flat, fluorescent, shopping centre lighting. It is night, the roller shutters halfway down, the scene all but uninhabited. The pair’s posture is perfect, eyes locked, feet in tandem; they have surely danced this step before. But that is not for us to know. Veteran Melbourne photographer Ponch Hawkes’ new body of work is a study of the fleeting glimpse, the incongruity of the moment. Spanning the Focus Gallery at MGA, more seeing is not understanding sees Hawkes hone on the indeterminate, nonetheless familiar moments of the urban night. The things that capture one’s eye when flying past in a cab; the odd, striking moments that are often just as promptly forgotten. Three teenage girls slouch in the glow of a brightly lit train platform shelter, one staring determinedly at her mobile phone. Two young men hold hands, silhouetted against the cityscape. The taller of the two wears an animal suit. It is a flash, a starting point, void of cues and back-story. The fact that Hawkes recreates such encounters from memory seems to attest to their resonance. Though some lose their impact in over-stylisation, these morsels of the unexplained visual data offer captivating threads. One of life’s great thrills is its muddle of ambiguity and unknowing, and it is precisely in that space, Hawkes seems well aware, that the wonder and reverie of imagination lies. Tues to Fri 10am–5pm, Sat to Sun noon–5pm, until October 24.

WHAT Emily Ferretti: Small Worlds
WHERE West Space, level 1, 15–19 Anthony Street, city, 9328 8712, westspace.org.au

Running alongside Sydney artist Emma Thomson’s suite of brilliant photographs capturing wannabe models carrying out their fantasies and the intriguing collaborative installation Morlocks, Mole People…, Emily Ferretti’s petite, delicately crafted oil, watercolour and pencil-on-paper works float quietly between worlds. Set against empty, white backdrops, she renders her humble organic and domestic treasures via a palette so incredibly light, soft and tonal, her subjects seem born of dreams. A coiled garden hose assumes the brown, textured scales of a snake, if only for a portion of its length; the rings of a tree-trunk mark its many years; a web-like net falls like a fragile patchwork. One of the joys of Ferretti’s Small Worlds – which follow her stunning Light Hold exhibition at Sophie Gannon Gallery in May – are their sheer economy. The young Melbourne artist omits as many details as she includes. In her beautiful painting of a pinecone, she renders only half the bract scales, the remainder subsumed in white space, as if half-formed in a dream. Indeed, it this blankness – this eschewal of context and setting – that affords these humble objects significance. In Ferretti’s world, there’s a life and a narrative to every object. Against the void of blank, white paper, her garden hoses, plants, baskets and ropes assume a kind of symbolic, trophy-like importance. Wed to Fri noon–6pm, Sat noon–5pm, until October 2.

WHAT Kirrily Hammond: Songs of Solitude
WHERE Gallerysmith, 170–174 Abbotsford Street, North Melbourne, 9329 1860, gallerysmith.com.au

The intimate scale of Kirrily Hammond’s beautiful oils belies their sprawling, almost cinematic atmosphere. Though only small, the 20 plus paintings that comprise Songs of Solitude capture the kind of vastness – of sky, of highway and of half light on the landscape – that many artists fail to describe. Light is crucial here. Hammond’s works drift in the flaring headlights, blurred street lamps and soft, tinted hues of Gippsland on dusk. But there is more to these works than the lay of the land. Like the transition from day to night, Songs of Solitude inhabits an ephemeral state. These paintings are neither here nor there, suspended between points on a map. Indeed, this rendering of twilight conjures a far more introspective reading than its vistas might initially suggest. Flanked by light and dark – hurtling through town after town – Hammond’s works are less about place than the liberty of finding oneself untethered. Runs alongside Andrew Seward’s peculiarly elegant graphite renderings of seaweed. Tues to Fri 11am–6pm, Sat 11am–5pm, until October 9.

WHAT Jeremy Kibel and Rhys Lee
WHERE Block Projects, 79 Stephenson Street, Richmond, 9429 0664, blockprojects.com

Opening Block Projects’ handsome new space in Richmond, this mildly though happily deranged collaboration from co-director Jeremy Kibel and long time cohort Rhys Lee makes for a tumultuous sea of stylistic signatures and vociferous lashings of paint. With each of the pair’s four oil and acrylic-on-linen works spanning a vast 1.8m x 4m, this is not a show for the faint-hearted. A particularly impressive work sees one of Kibel’s Picasso pastiches – emblazoned with iridescent blue and fire engine red – flanked by one of Lee’s signature ghouls and the sassy slither of a snake; another sees Snoopy smiling wonkily among a hoard of devilish faces. Elsewhere, there’s a plenty of unhinged symbolism and spooky signifiers: blood drips, black tears fall, a crucifix burns on a mountaintop. Making sense of it all, one feels, is hardly the point. This is the electric to and fro of a pair of unique creative minds. Amid their ghostly blobs, splashes of colour and sharp, graphic incursions, we witness their wonderful clash, clamour and coalescence. Wed to Fri 11am–6pm, Sat 11am–4pm, until September 30.

AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan RulePublished: The Age, A2, September...

Sat, 11 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, September 11, 2010.

WHAT Marco Fusinato: Noise & Capitalism
WHERE Anna Schwartz Gallery, 185 Flinders Lane, city, 9654 6131, annaschwartzgallery.com

Noise & Capitalism marks something of a continuation for Melbourne’s Marco Fusinato. Where the multi-disciplinary artist’s brilliant Double Infinitives, which showed at Anna Schwartz last year, saw him present massively up-scaled, newsprint photographs of activist riots, this new exhibition inverts the vantage. Gleaning their source material from underground, photocopied insurrectional pamphlets and zines, the five, large-scale works that comprise Noise & Capitalism go some way to offer a view from the inside of grassroots political actions. Presented in a uniform, window-like, quadripartite configuration, each work features the front cover, inside cover and various, in some instances, layered pages of images and text. While works lifted from shorter pamphlets like Why she doesn’t give a f—- about your insurrection are clearly readable, denser pamphlets such as Thesis on the Imaginary result in a squall of illegible, layered text, or as the artist might put it, “noise”. On the one level, what Fusinato seems to be getting at here is the nature of exchange; just how information shifts relative to the context of its presentation. What does it mean to stand in a commercial gallery with others and read The Capitalist System? What are the implications of turning Escapism has its price, the artist has his income into a huge, saleable art object, framed behind glass? That said, it is the crowded, layered works – which pile mountains of text atop heroic imagery of riots and actions – that pack an imposing graphic punch. They seem to espouse the great challenge of translating one’s message to the morass that is the mainstream. No matter its social and political merits or significance, among a snoozing populace, the message will seem little more than unruly noise. Tues to Fri noon–6pm, Sat 1pm–5pm, until October 2.

WHAT Kit Wise: Explosion
WHERE Sarah Scout, Level 1, 1A Crossley Street, city, 9654 4429, sarahscoutpresents.com

This stunning suite of video works and stills by Melbourne-based UK artist and academic Kit Wise offers a disturbingly beautiful meditation on man-made violence and its portrayal in popular culture. Utilising open-source footage and imagery of the infamous Nevada desert atomic test known as “Operation Cue” (1955) and later explosive tests of “Project Dugout” (1960), Wise accentuates the transformation of horrifying blasts into detached, purely aesthetic cultural moments. In the larger of the three video works, Explosion (Geranium), a layered time-lapse image of a geranium bursting to life echoes a spectacular bloom of detonated desert earth, while the smaller Explosion (Operation Cue, 1955) and Explosion (Project Dugout, 1960) works loop, manipulate and rewind brutal blast footage to forge a kind weightless visual poetry. The stills, meanwhile, offer a digitised filter to the events at hand. Indeed, with proximity the blast images reveal evidence their mediation, becoming blurred and abstracted amid a cloud of digital pixelation. It seems an allegory for our wider engagement with nature via pop-cultural representation. An excess of stylised, mediated imagery creates a spectacular, nonetheless hollow event of its own. It does little, however, to advance our understanding of its point of reference. Thurs to Fri 11am–6pm, Sat noon–5pm, until September 25.

WHAT Eamo Donnelly: Health Food of a Nation!
WHERE Lamington Drive, The Compound Interest Centre for the Applied Arts, 15–25 Keele Street, Collingwood, 8060 9745, lamingtondrive.com

Lamington Drive gallery relaunches in fittingly rambunctious style with cult illustrator Eamo Donelly’s lurid ode to Big M’s, bikini’d beach bums, milk bars and various other archetypes of 70s and 80s Australiana. Indeed, the defiantly titled Health Food of a Nation! is a guilt and irony-free celebration of the era that spawned Sir Les and Hoges (how fitting that the latter slipped the ATO’s travel ban the week of the show’s launch). Donnelly’s illustrations – pegged and pinned throughout that cardboard-walled gallery space – are maximal in the extreme. Garish fluorescents render gnarled, ciggie and beer-swilling characters; raw prawns intermingle with Mr Whippy’s and Gouldburn’s famed Big Merino. As wonderful as Donnelly’s work is the a scattering of his own collection of 80s Australiana, including posters, post cards, calendars and various milk bar and promotional paraphernalia. It’s a hoot. While Health Food may represent an Australia that many would rather forget, Donnelly’s rose-coloured recollection proves little less than irresistible. Wed to Fri 11am–6pm, Sat noon–5pm, until October 2.

WHAT Jo–Anne Duggan: Wondrous Possessions
WHERE Colour Factory Gallery, 409–429 Gore Street, Fitzroy, 9419 8756, colourfactory.com.au

This sumptuous collection of large-scale photographs from photo-media artist Jo-Anne Duggan injects a dose of everyday pragmatism into the realm of the extravagant historical monument. Each of her photographs of the interiors of historic palazzi built by the Gonzaga family in Mantua, Italy evidence not just the buildings’ elaborate architectural and artistic detailing, but elements of their practical modernisation. Duggan’s lens captures the power points, exit signs, wall heaters and non-descript office furniture amid the Renaissance murals and sculptures. She extends her gaze from a cropped mediation of the historic monument to include the realities and details of its preservation, administration and upkeep. Mon to Fri 10am–6pm, Sat 1pm–4pm, until October 1.

YAYOI KUSAMA - POLKA DOTS ETERNALPublished: Oyster #88,...

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 20:04:12 -0400

YAYOI KUSAMA - POLKA DOTS ETERNAL
Published: Oyster #88, August/September 2010.

Despite her lifelong battle with crippling mental illness, veteran Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama has forged a reputation as one of the avant-garde’s most formidable and, quite literally, dotty protagonists. With a new video work showing as part of the 17th Biennale of Sydney, the 81-year-old is still very much at the top of her game, writes Dan Rule.

For Yayoi Kusama, art is neither a choice nor an affectation. It is not something she does on an occasional whim; it is not a means of study or investigation. The 81-year-old’s practice is ingrained in the stuff of life itself.

“I have lived my life both in mind and body, incorporating all my hopes into art,” she says. “I have found in it my spiritual salvation.”

Kusama, who is speaking via a translator in the lead-up to her exhibition as part of the 17th Biennale of Sydney, is a singular, seemingly indelible figure in a contemporary art world so often characterised by fluidity and flux.

Across a career that has spanned more than half a century – including 15 years in New York between 1958 and 1973 working alongside Donald Judd, Joseph Cornell and Claes Oldenberg as one of pivotal figures in the avant-garde movement – Kusama’s paintings, sculptures, installations, text, performance and video works have become some of the contemporary art’s most recognisable (and more recently, valuable) works. Her famed motif of the polka dot has appeared in so many contexts and breached so many aesthetic and philosophical signatures – be it feminism, pop art, fashion, minimalism or abstract expressionism – its near impossible to trace.

But while her dotty premise may give her work a kind of playful buoyancy, it’s grounded in a much deeper engagement with notions of repetition, accrual and the infinite. Indeed, for the woman who famously once said “if it were not for art, I would have killed myself long ago” and has lived by choice in a Tokyo mental facility since the mid 70s, artistic practice is an entirely holistic pursuit.

“Art is about everything that exists in my mind and body,” she muses. Put simply, it is a means for extension and, ultimately, survival.

“Everyday my heart is filled with a wish to commit suicide. When I was in New York, I was hospitalised for some time after an attempted suicide.”

“What saved me,” she continues, “has been the encouragement I got from my pursuit of the truth in art.”

Kusama’s creative lineage runs deep. Born in 1929 and raised in the alpine town of Matsumoto in the Nagano Prefecture of central Honshu, she took to art at the earliest of ages. She was an insatiable drawer, often rendering scenes that would come to her in “hallucinations”.

“I have seen a number of hallucinations since childhood,” she says. “The drawings I made of them and the ideas they inspired have been the foundations of my artworks.”

It was far from a joyous time for the young Kusama. Her father, who she has often referred to as a “gentle” and “kind-hearted” man, was largely absent from the family home. Her mother, on the other hand, was a shrewd businesswoman and a controlling, often violent matriarch. Kusama’s obsessive behaviour and continuous doodling and painting angered her to no end.

“My mother hated to see me always engaged in painting pictures and harassed me by tearing up the things I had painted and throwing them away,” she says

By the time she was teenager, Kusama fled to Kyoto and enrolled in art school, where she studied Nihonga painting, a traditional Japanese form of watercolour. It was a period of great prolificacy for the artist, obsessively producing gouache, pastel and ink-on-paper works by the thousands before eventually leaving for New York to follow a “longing for art and the world of mystery” in late 1957.

It was definitive time for the Kusama. After acquainting Judd, Cornell and others through Georgia O’Keeffe, she quickly became one of the key figures of city’s artistic coterie. Influential works from her time in the US included 1965 installation Infinity Mirror Room (Phalli’s Field), which saw stuffed, polka dotted, phallic fabric shapes fill a 3.6 x 3.6 metre mirrored cube, and 1966’s Narcissus Garden, a field of large stainless steel balls that Kusama showed at the Venice Biennale without invitation the same year. Her series of performative, nudist Happenings in Central Park and by the Brooklyn Bridge during 1968 and her performance work Self-Obliteration by Dots (also in 1968) also garnered much notoriety.

But after a string of paranoid episodes, which culminated in a suicide attempt in the early 70s, Kusama travelled back to Japan and admitted herself to a Tokyo mental facility, where she continues to live and work today. Suffice to say, she considers her obsessive art practice her one true therapy.

“Art has been my guidepost throughout my life,” she offers simply. “Obsession gives me strength to fight my difficulties.”

Her video work for the 17th Biennale of Sydney, Song of a Manhattan Suicide Addict, is a remake of the original 1999 piece of the same name. Remade in collaboration with Biennale Artistic Director David Elliott, it sees the artist in garish get-up crooning a cheeky ode to life’s end.

“Tear down the gate of hallucinations,” she sings. “Amidst the agony of flowers, the present never ends”… “I become a stone.”

Kusama, as we might expect, is suitably excited with the work’s recasting. “It is the first time the piece has been shown in the present form,” she says. “I have heard that the work is causing a sensation, touching the hearts of many viewers.”

And it’s precisely this engagement with her audience that helps sustain the veteran artist’s incredibly prolific endeavours.

“Since I’ve got older, producing artworks has kept me fully occupied,” she says. “I have inspiration anytime – in the middle of the night, in the morning and in the afternoon – and anywhere, like in an airplane.”

“It is my earnest wish to create works that would live on even after I have died and contribute to the world culture,” she continues.

“I want viewers of my works to perceive in their own way my drive to create, my ideas and the originality of my art. My aim is to send a message of peace and love forever to as many people as possible.”

yayoi-kusama.jp

SOPHIE HUTCHINGS - BECALMEDPublished: The Big Issue #362,...

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0400

SOPHIE HUTCHINGS - BECALMED
Published: The Big Issue #362, August/September 2010.

Becalmed
Sophie Hutchings
****

The title of this thread of delicate piano compositions from Sydney’s Sophie Hutchings seems an underestimation of its powers. Though the eight beautifully spare sketches that comprise Becalmed have a fragility and lightness of touch, they possess a rare emotive candour and breadth.

Indeed, the real strength of Hutchings’ work is its lack of any definitive sense of resolution. Tracks like opening vignette ‘Seventeen’ build from a skeletal series of piano phrases to peak in flurry of shimmering melodics, before dissipating into hushed silence.

Plaintive moments of calm like ‘Sunlight Zone’ bookend more complex, evocative exchanges. The stunning underlay of field recordings and propulsive crescendo of ‘Portrait of Haller’ (featuring older brother and Bluebottle Kiss frontman Jamie Hutchings on percussion) leads into the glacial call-and-response cello and piano of ‘Following Sea’. The beauteous, fragile piano of ‘After Most’ spirals into an ominous squall of textures, guitars and cello drones.

Though sparse, elegant and elegiac, Becalmed – which was recorded in part with home recording guru Tony Dupe – echoes with a loose, almost improvisational sensibility that resists simple definitions or outcomes.

Like the stuff of life itself, this poignant record is one of lingering sentiments and loose ends.

Dan Rule

AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan RulePublished: The Age, A2, September...

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 23:12:00 -0400

AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, September 4, 2010.

WHAT Mari Funaki: Objects
WHERE The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Victoria, Federation Square, city, 8620 2222, ngv.vic.gov.au

Mari Funaki’s works are the unlikely sum of their parts. The late Japanese-Australian artist, who tragically lost her battle with breast cancer in May, possessed a rare ability to transpose even the most austere and angular of materials into highly gestural and organic forms. This collection of recent, sculptural Objects dates from the early 90s until the time of her passing, and charts the jeweller and metalsmith’s shift into the realms of fully-realised sculptural practice. The magic of the 20 small-scale and four large-scale heat-blackened mild steel works lies in their metamorphosis. Indeed, at first glance, the sculptures’ sharp, shard-like limbs and geometric forms assume an eerily mechanical, robotic and architectural guise. But with shifts in proximity and vantage, a very different set of qualities emerges. Tangles of abstract shards become assume figurative gestures; sharp, angled strands become the stoop of a human form. It makes for a striking dichotomy. Funaki’s Objects,in essence, defy their very materiality. They are harsh and softened, angular and ductile, industrial and organic. They are evocative, but ultimately, undefined. Tues to Sun 10am–5pm, until October 24.

WHAT Harriet Parsons: Homeland #1, Kristin McIver: Divine Intervention
WHERE Blindside, Level 7, Room 14, Nicholas Building, 37 Swanston Street, city, 9650 0093, blindside.org.au

Each of these fascinating shows at Blindside takes a very different approach to notions of place and landscape. In the front space, Harriet Parsons’ stunning Homeland #1 proposes place as an amalgam of personal and cultural memory. Across 12 works, or “maps”, Parsons uses a hybrid Polynesian/British mapping technique – practiced by Cook and others on the Endeavour following their voyage through the South Pacific – to plot her dreams in intricate arrangements of dried plant stalks, shells and string. But Parsons’ works transcend that of the personal document. Indeed, by plotting her own inner moments via a trans-cultural, pre-colonial mapping system, she bypasses colonialism’s broad white brush, instead casting the Australian landscape as a melange of innumerable individual identities and experiences. In this sense, Homeland #1 essentially attempts to eschew the belief systems informing the Western landscape tradition and its imposition of a European vision on Australia. In the back space, meanwhile, Kristin McIver’s striking installation Divine Intervention seems to place the natural environment at the behest of the bright lights of the consumerist cycle. A dense scattering of palms and other pot plants crowd the centre of the space, a steel frame rising abjectly from their midst. Mounted to the frame is a circular neon sign, the words “life unlimited” throwing a cold, white light throughout the room. The statement is cynical in its context. The materials and artificial light are an alien, somehow violent incursion into the surrounds of the plants. The offer of endless life is nothing more than a seductive marketing slogan in a consumerist world that so shamelessly pillages the natural world. Wed to Sat noon–6pm, until September 11.

WHAT Kate Rohde & Romance Was Born: Renaissance Dinosaur
WHERE Karen Woodbury Gallery, 4 Albert Street, Richmond, 9421 2500, kwgallery.com

There’s nothing too deep or philosophical about Renaissance Dinosaur the gleeful, garish new collaborative exhibition from Melbourne artist Kate Rohde and Sydney fashion duo Luke Sales and Anna Plunkett, known to most as Romance Was Born. But that’s its precise charm. The second chapter in a collaboration that began with the launch of Romance Was Born’s spring/summer range at Australian Fashion Week, the show comprises a series of Rohde’s fluorescent fake fur, paper mache and expanding foam dinosaurs, resin headpieces and breastplates and a collection of astonishing key garments (or “showpieces”) from the Renaissance Dinosaur collection. It’s stunning. Rohde’s adorable T rex and Triceratops are definite highlights, while Romance Was Born’s Kate Rohde tribute body suit and Renaissance garden wallpaper (available by the square metre) are spectacular examples of their incredibly ornate, psychedelic craft aesthetic. Indeed, Renaissance Dinosaur doesn’t offer some kind of conceptual revelation. Rather, it evidences the outlandishly playful, aesthetically thrilling results of an unlikely meeting of the minds. Wed to Sat 11am–5pm, until September 18.

WHAT Caroline Rothwell: Transmutationism
WHERE Tolarno Galleries, Level 4, 104 Exhibition Street, city, 9654 6000, tolarnogalleries.com

There is an elusiveness to Caroline Rothwell’s traversal of the interface between the industrialised and natural world. Her discomforting sculptures of humans, animals and plants are riddled with perceptive and material contradictions. Seemingly defined objects are loosened and untethered, like evolutionary phases gone wrong. The taught, shimmering, balloon-like skin of her Tygers series is in fact the painted outer layer of a solid bronze cast; mutant plant formations are rendered in a slick, oily blackness; glittering, nickel-plated human forms sport misshaped rabbits’ heads. It is here, in this unsightly nowhere place, that Transmutatonism appears to find its crux. Rothwell’s augmentations of humanity and mutations of nature are an allegory for our ultimately fraught attempts coexist. Tues to Fri 10am–5pm, Sat 1pm–5pm, until September 11.

KATE ROHDE & ROMANCE WAS BORN - PREHISTORY PARADES...

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 06:11:37 -0400

KATE ROHDE & ROMANCE WAS BORN - PREHISTORY PARADES PANACHE
Published: The Age, Arts & Culture, August 23, 2010.

Fake fur and dinosaurs make their presence felt in an unusual collaboration, writes Dan Rule.

To most minds, the cultural footing of the gallery and the fleeting experience of the catwalk couldn’t be further removed.

Chat with Anna Plunkett who, along with creative partner Luke Sales, is Sydney fashion house Romance Was Born, however, and you’ll be left with an entirely different impression.

”We have a few pieces in every collection that we call museum pieces,” says Plunkett, whose collaborative exhibition - with Sales and Melbourne artist Kate Rohde - Renaissance Dinosauropens at Karen Woodbury Gallery on Wednesday night.

”They’re there purely to help us tell a story or translate a mood.”

The duo, notorious for their daringly colourful, extravagantly detailed one-off creations - which have adorned the likes of Cyndi Lauper, Deborah Harry, MIA, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Cate Blanchett among a list of countless others - understand their work to transcend the seasonal whims of the fashion world.

”These pieces aren’t meant to be put into production and, you know, we certainly don’t expect someone to walk around town in them,” says Sales with a laugh.

”We already see them as, well, not necessarily in a gallery context, but definitely not as just hanging on a rack in a shop.”

The Renaissance Dinosaur exhibition features a series of Rohde’s lurid, synthetic fur and paper-mache dinosaurs, Baroque expanding foam cabinets and a swath of Plunkett and Sales’ vivid garments and prints.

It follows the unlikely trio’s collaboration on Romance Was Born’s latest range of the same name, launched as part of Australian Fashion Week in May, in which Rohde created bright dinosaur headpieces in response to the meticulously detailed, Renaissance and Jurassic-influenced garments.

According to Sales, who contacted Rohde on a whim after a trip to Florence, considered by many to be birthplace of the Renaissance, it was a creative match made in heaven. ”We were going to do a dinosaur range already, but then we went to Florence last summer and just loved it so much that we thought it would be cool to do a Renaissance collection too and kind of merge them together,” he explains. ”Kate’s really inspired by the really decorative nature of Renaissance and Baroque periods, so it just seemed like a really good fit.

”Plus, everything she uses is artificial - like fake hair and fake fur and glitter and diamantes - and I love all that, so it was great.”

Indeed, for Rohde - who has exhibited her synthetic taxidermy replicas, Baroque sculptures and odes to museum culture in various galleries in Australia, New Zealand and Britain - the link between the Jurassic and the Renaissance wasn’t nearly as far-fetched as it sounds.

”In a lot of respects it worked really well for me because my work tends to mash up historical art styles and natural history already,” she says.

”I’ve always been interested in the museum and that notion of the museum display being the perfect moment … but I’ve become less and less concerned with that realism and moved more into synthetic weirdness. Just this idea creating crazy patterns and decorations and these specimens that aren’t like a real thing; totally unnatural colours and forms and so on.”

Suffice to say, the process made for a fascinating parlay between art and fashion’s differing creative processes and modes of presentation.

”Luke and Anna would come down to Melbourne for these very sort of informal meetings and would just walk around my studio picking up things and putting them on their heads, putting them on their shoulders and come up with ways things could be worn,” says Rohde. ”Where I’m just always thinking, ‘How will it sit on a wall or in a gallery space?’ ”

Plunkett and Sales have already commissioned Rohde, who has completed residencies in Paris and Tokyo, to collaborate on their winter 2011 range. They echo her sentiments. ”I mean, the whole Renaissance Dinosaur thing was almost a joke at first,” says Sales.

”But when you bring someone else in to collaborate, they can make it real in a different way and you can all end up doing something that you might not have ever really thought about doing.

”Working with someone like Kate, who comes from a different creative world, you just don’t have any idea about what’s going to come out at the end,” he says.

”And I really like that.”

Renaissance Dinosaur opens on Wednesday and runs until September 18 at Karen Woodbury Gallery, 4 Albert Street, Richmond, 9421 2500.

AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan RulePublished: The Age, A2, August 21,...

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 05:59:00 -0400

AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, August 21, 2010.

WHAT Polly Borland: Smudge
WHERE Murray White Room, Sargood Lane (off Exhibition Street, between Flinders Street and Flinders Lane), city, 9663 3204, murraywhiteroom.com

There’s an alluring polarity to Polly Borland’s portraiture. One of only eight photographers to be invited to photograph the Queen on her Golden Jubilee, the celebrated Melbourne-raised, London-based photographer’s work oscillates between a direct, unabashed intimacy and an unhinged, mildly grotesque performative quality that seems to both defy and accentuate its evocation of subject. This beguiling new series of works seems to take its cues from notions of beauty and sexuality. Across 31 photographs and five tapestry recreations (crafted by prison inmates), Smudge blurs gender delineations as much as it complicates definitions of beauty. Pink protuberances jut from curtains of a glossy wig; stockings cover faces, make-up smeared on the outside. A common motif is that of the synthetic and augmented body. A man sports a flowing, rainbow-coloured wig, balloon-like fake breasts almost bursting through fabric of his top; another sports a skin-coloured muscle vest; golf balls fashion dramatic lumps under a full body stocking. It’s funny, playful and disturbing all at once, as if a reflection on the hilarious absurdity and the tragedy of our quest for beauty at all costs. But Borland’s work isn’t so cut and dry. Indeed, on another plane, Smudge reads like an insight into others’ fantasy selves. Borland’s subjects are malleable, undefined and only limited by imagination. Tues to Fri 11am–6pm, Sat noon–4pm, until September 11.

WHAT Robin Fox: Proof of Concept
WHERE Centre for Contemporary Photography, 404 George Street, Fitzroy, 9417 1549, ccp.org.au

Renowned sound and visual artist Robin Fox’s live Laser Show has become a visceral staple on the Melbourne experimental music circuit. Using digitally synthesised sound and an oscilloscope to power and manipulate a laser, his spectacular performances represent a genuine mergence of the sound and image. Proof of Concept is an apt title for this striking exhibition of still photographs of Fox’s laser in motion. Indeed, this suite of large-scale prints captures a level of complexity, detail and minutiae imperceptible during one of Fox’s break-neck live performances. While there’s certainly an almost scientific fascination to these works, what makes them so effective is their incredible, often beautiful graphic quality. These works bear silent witness to Fox’s thunderous synthesis of sound and vision. Wed to Fri 11am–6pm, Sat to Sun noon–5pm, until September 25.

WHAT Gestures & Procedures
WHERE Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 111 Sturt Street, Southbank, 9697 9999, accaonline.org.au

As its title alludes, Gestures & Procedures hones its focus on recurrent action and effect. Featuring over twenty artists, spanning decades and continents, this extensive show proves a homage to practice; the at times poetic, at times powerful outcomes artists can achieve via simple, sustained actions. There are some definite standouts. Veteran Australian artist Mike Parr’s early 70s endurance works Hold your breath for as long as possible and Hold your finger in a candle flame for as long as possible are gruelling, yet enthralling to witness, while Lucy Gunnings’ incredible 1993 work Climbing Around My Room – which sees the artist gradually scale the circumference of her four bedroom walls without ever touching the floor – becomes a thrilling study of physical and tactical capabilities. Other highlights include a work by Swiss artist Delpine Reist and young Australian artist Beth Arnold’s Discarded Object Poster Project. But perhaps most strangely captivating work is Belgian artist Francis Alys’s documentary Paradox of Praxis 1, in which he pushes a large block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it gradually melts away to a puddle on the footpath. It seems a stunningly poetic allegory for the futile realities of labour. As the film’s title articulates: “Sometimes making something leads to nothing.” Tues to Fri 10am–5pm, Sat to Sun 11am–6pm

WHAT Carla Cescon, Tony Garifalakis, Simon Scheuerle: Bela Lugosi’s Dead
WHERE Death Be Kind, Upstairs at The Alderman, 134 Lygon Street, Brunswick East, 0401 346 520, deathbekind.com

Claire Lambe and Elvis Richardson’s new Brunswick East gallery space Death Be Kind continues its ghoulish induction with this ode to the aesthetics of horror. A reference to the Hungarian actor famous for playing Count Dracula, Bela Lugosi’s Dead sees its three artists playfully tackle various horror archetypes. Tony Garifalakis’s pair of inverted crucifix wall drawings, made with stretched VHS tape of cassettes from The Exorcist series, are a fantastically creepy negotiation of the theme, while Simon Scheuerles little shop of horrors – which includes a life-sized, levitating, god-like figure, a diamante-encrusted ticking time bomb and a collection of severed human ears is a macabre joy. Fri 6pm–8pm, Sat to Sun 2pm–6pm, until August 29.

INTERVIEW - PHIFE DAWG, A TRIBE CALLED QUESTExcerpts Published:...

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 22:12:00 -0400

INTERVIEW - PHIFE DAWG, A TRIBE CALLED QUEST
Excerpts Published: Music Australia Guide #79, August 2010.

Fronting legendary New York crew A Tribe Called Quest alongside Q-Tip and DJ Ali Shaheed, diminutive rapper Phife Dawg (aka The Five Foot Assassin) is one of hip hop’s most influential figures. On the eve of Tribe’s inaugural Australian tour, he clues in MAG’s Dan Rule on overcoming personal struggles in his mission to immortalise rap’s golden era.

Hey, is that Phife?

“Who’s this?”

This is Dan Rule from Music Australia Guide in Melbourne. How you doing?

“I’m good. Hold on one second, hold on.”

Where are you living right now Phife?

“I’m living back and forth from Atlanta and the Bay Area, California. But right now, I’m in New York.”

Back home…

“Yeah, that’s right.”

It hasn’t really been widely publicised out here, but it seems like you’ve been through hell and back in the last few years, with the kidney transplant and going through dialysis and that whole process. I’d love you to take me through some of those last few years and what sort of brought you through.

“Man, basically my support system. I just took it one day at a time and I pretty much knew I was going to be back; I just had to be patient for once in my life and that’s the road I took, you know, and God and good at the end of the day.”

Sure. I mean, working and doing what you’re doing now, do you feel like you’re a very different man for having been through all that?

“Yeah, definitely. I’m much more humble. Well, I think I was always humble, but I’m much more humble and I learned how to be patient. I think that was my worst quality before the operation; I had no patience for anything. But nowadays I’m a lot more laid back and I kind of let things come to me instead of forcing the issue, you know.”

Talk me through Songs in the Key of Phife in that sense…

“I’m like three songs away from being done with the album. Like you said, it’s called Songs in the Key of Phife, Volume One: Cheryl’s Big Son, Elma’s Grandson. Originally it was just called Cheryl’s Big Son, but just last Wednesday evening I decided to name it Elma’s Grandson as well because that’s my grandmother and she passed away last Wednesday.”

I’m sorry about that man…

“Thankyou. The funeral’s tomorrow so I definitely had to include her because a lot of people have heroes, like Malcolm X – who’s one of my heroes as well – and Magic Johnson and different celebrities of that nature, but my grandmother is definitely one of my heroes bar none, you know what I mean? So I had to involve her one way or the other.”

“So like I said, I’m three songs away from being done and, you know, it’s a record for everybody man. There’s party records, there’s records where you get to evaluate your life and maybe what it should be, things of that nature. I’ve got the, I wouldn’t say ballad, but the little lovey-dove opening, you know, because I am a married man at the end of the day so I understand what it is to be loved and to love in general, you know. All them types of records are on there.”

“I’m definitely more mature than on the last solo album in 2000 or the last Tribe album in 1998, you know, so it’s definitely a grown man’s album, but I’m still definitely a kid at heart.”

I’ve heard you’ve got a whole different bunch of producers on there, even people like Madlib’s little brother Oh No?

“Yeah, I worked with Oh No, he did a track on the album; Ali Shaheed did a track on the album. I have a production company by the name of Riddim Kidz Incorporated and it consists of myself, DJ Rasta Root from out of Atlanta and my man Snack Box and he’s from out of San Jose, California, so Snack did about seven tracks, Rasta Root did about three and I did about two or three. Ill Mind did a track, Oh No did a track… I don’t want to forget anybody… Oh, a guy Bobby Ozuna, he did like two tracks as well.”

“So we had a bunch of fun making the album and in a few weeks we’ll be starting a compilation album because I have a host of artists that I need to put out there to the world.”

I’d heard that you’d been working on straight production for a while, but hadn’t been writing lyrics. What sparked you to begin writing again?

“Good question. Honestly, after taking ill and what have you, I really didn’t want to rhyme anymore. I was thinking about just producing and putting them out, and even after the transplantation took place, I was still in that mind frame where I didn’t want to rap anymore unless it was a Tribe album, you know, and I’ll just put out artists and produce. But then I took a trip to New York and got the bug, pretty much, you know what I mean? My man Khalil out here in New York, he’s our road manager and he’s got a company that is doing a compilation as well and he asked me to do a record for the compilation and I was just like ‘Aiight, play me some beats’ and he played me one beat and I was like ‘Yo, I like that one’. I wrote a verse or two for it and then pretty much just had the bug again.”

“The other person I have to credit to Michael Rapaport, because he kept telling me I needed to do another album as a soloist. He’s directing a documentary on A Tribe Called Quest and while he was filming that we would have different talks about it during breaks and whatever and I just began to think ‘Okay, I should have a little play around with it again’.”

“So it was a combination of going to New York, Michael Rapaport and one of my best friends from St Louis, Missouri telling me, basically, that I had to get back in tune with my music and things of that nature.”

I think one of the reasons people are so excited about seeing Tribe again is that there seems to have been a lull in terms of hip hop lyricism over the last decade. There’s a lot of exciting stuff happening in terms really interesting production crews – like what’s coming out LA at the moment with Flying Lotus, Ras G, Nosaj Thing and all those guys – but we sort of haven’t seen a kind of Native Tongues or Project Blowed or Anti-Pop Consortium rise up in what seems like a long time. Would you agree with that and, I guess, why?

“Honestly, the way I see it, life is a cycle and what comes around goes around. So I think what we represented in the late 80s and early 90s, it’ll come around again. I think you’ll see that kind of hip hop again where the vintage, so to speak, will reign supreme. And not even so much that it’s a competition or like we’re competing with the new school or anything like that, but I don’t think they understand the respect factor that’s supposed to be involved when you’re in this game. I think it’s a fly-by-night thing for them. This industry is so much of a ‘what have you done for me lately?’ type of industry that they overlook the longevity that one would want to have.”

“There’s no more groups like Earth, Wind and Fire, who came out with 200 albums, or The O’Jays or The Supremes or bands of that nature. And I’m not even talking about their brand of music, but their longevity in the game. And being that hip hop is the most fickle of all music – because you can be number one for two months then not heard from for the next 12 – so at the end of the day you have to at least honour your craft, do your best to put out good music and keep it coming. Unfortunately for us, we have to do so much, yet gain so little. It’s not like the NBA where they’re guaranteed their millions, you know. The fans are the reason we eat, so we have to be on top of our game.”

Sure…

“With these rap kids, it’s hit and miss, you know. It’s here on day, gone tomorrow. And they don’t seem to really care. It’s like ‘Lemme get this quick money and lemme just dash out’ and that’s not really helping the music.”

“It’s reminiscent of college basketball, college basketball being horrible because people want to go straight from high school to the league, although nowadays the rules state that you have to at least do a freshman year in college before you go to the league. But to me, that’s not only messing up the college game, it’s messing up the professional game as well because they’re really not learning how to play, you know what I mean? A lot of people will argue that that’s not true, because a lot of the greatest players in the game right now are Coby Bryant, who came straight from high school, Kevin Garnett came straight from high school, Tracey Mcgrady came straight from high school and the list goes on. But there are only two them walking around, not only with a lot of money, but championship rings.”

I’m following…

“I’m not saying that they don’t know how to play, it’s just the championships begin with the team’s front office and to me the front offices of these teams aren’t making wise decisions. They’re just going for the hype and running with it instead of just sitting there and really doing their homework.”

“Winning is a team effort! The front office has to think for the long haul. Everyone else is just thinking for the moment. This is the same thing with hip hop music, but with the artists. The labels really don’t even care anymore. You can look the label as the NBA front office and you can look at us as the players, and unfortunately in the rap business, the labels do not care anymore. They’re not looking for the next best thing; they’re looking for what they can pee back off of. ‘Oh, so and so went platinum with this style, you need to use that style because we’re trying to make this safe money’. They’re not trying to make good money, they’re trying to make safe money and a lot of it.”

Because they’re desperate…

“Exactly, and that’s what’s messing up the game.”

When you look back to the Golden Era, when you guys came up in New York, do you feel like the social and political contexts have changed shape so much now that the music will be forever different?

“I hope something will come up, but at the same time I kind of think it has passed because nobody want’s to do all of that thinking right now. Nobody wants to be told what to do or what should be done in their records or when they’re listening to music, you know. I think it’s better for hip hop to have balance and options. Okay, you have your select group of MCs who are strictly party, party, party, so when you go to the club you’re going to hear them and when you turn on the radio you’re only going to hear a certain calibre of rapper.”

“But back in the day, what was good about hip hop was… Let’s take the Juice Crew for example, one of the first of many crews, you had Kool G Rap who was like the criminal of the Juice Crew. He was NWA all by himself as far as we were concerned, you know what I’m saying, so he had his own way. Then you had Biz Markie who was like the funny guy of the crew, but he could rap his ass off. But you know, he was out to have a good time, so Biz Mark had his own thing. Then you had Masta Ace who was like the brainiac of the crew. Then you had Big Daddy Kane who was like the battle MC/ladies man. You could look at Big Daddy Kane and know that all the girls were sweating on him, boom-boom-boom-boom-boom, but you didn’t want to test him because you knew what he was capable of when it came to the battle rhyme, the metaphors and everything. So all you could do was respect him. Then Craig G, he was the freestyle fanatic and he would just battle you at the drop of a hat, wasn’t thinking about nothing, just spit off the top of the head, and that’s why he’s one of my favourite MCs because he didn’t need no pen and pad to get across what he needed to get across right then and there on the spur of the moment. That’s a great talent to have. Then Marley Marl, who’s one of the greatest producers of all time, as we know…”

“There’s no crews like that no more. Okay, Wu-Tang, yeah, but they’re also from the Golden Era, you know what I’m saying? There’s no more crews like that anymore. Nobody cares anymore, because as long as you’ve got one or two hits you’ll do alright, get nominated for a Grammy (laughs), you know?”

I’d love to ask what we can expect from the Tribe shows and whether you see what you’re doing at the moment as a sort of back-in-the-day reunion or something that has the potential to grow again. Do you think Tribe has unfinished creative business?

“I do, I do personally. I absolutely do. I don’t know whether it’s going to come to fruition though. That’s the only thing I can’t answer. As far as the show, I have not idea what to expect. But that’s kind of how we perform. We don’t really discuss it too much. We rehearse every once in a while. It’s like, two guys live in Jersey, one lives in Atlanta and I live in California most of the time now, so a lot of the time we don’t even discuss it. We just get onstage and handle our business. A lot of the time, that’s the best way for us. Once that music comes on it’s like 1998 all over again.”

Tribe’s relationship to jazz is one of the key things that we all talk about. This freedom of expression and fluidity that perhaps wasn’t there in a lot of hip hop. What do you think of as Tribe’s legacy in that sense?

“I’ve never really thought about it. That’s something that I want to supporters to define, at the end of the day. I don’t really sit there and think, ‘Well I hope the figure this out about us’ (laughs), ‘I hope our legacy is this or that’. I’m just happy to be wanted by the masses. I personally think that that’s nothing but a blessing because we haven’t done a studio album together since 1998, it’s now 2010, and they’re still wanting us to do shows, they’re still wanting us to do albums and that’s a blessing. I personally think that we need to absorb that and count our blessings every day and embark on that.”

“So we’ll see what happens.”

Visit: atribecalledquest.com

BEATS with Dan RulePublished: Music Australia Guide #79, August...

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 21:41:05 -0400

BEATS with Dan Rule
Published: Music Australia Guide #79, August 2010.

Baths
Cerulean
****1/2

Though clearly a record of the laptop era, there’s a rare, indelibly human quality to LA kid Will Wiesenfeld’s debut under the Baths moniker. Among Cerulean’s sea of instrumental nuances, shoe-gaze textures and atmospheres, wonky beats and rhythmic structures are some of the most pure, heartbreakingly beautiful melodies you’ll hear. Cuts like Maximalist and Animals see swirlings choir of diced vocal fragments shatter into a clouds of static; tracks like Hall and Plea make for swooning, angelic pop ballads of the highest order. This is an undisputedly postmodern work by kid who’s an old romantic at heart. In a word, stunning.

Anticon/Stomp

Jimmy Edgar
XXX
***1/2

Jimmy Edgar’s hometown is in his blood. The precocious young Detroiter makes music anchored to the pillars of first generation techno, pre-1985 hip hop and bombastic, sexed-up synth funk. That’s not to cast his second longplayer XXX, which follows electric 2006 debut Color Strip, as a purely retrospective affair. Indeed, Edgar’s slick, propulsive synthetics owe just as much to the agile beat structures of IDM and driving groove of contemporary club-based hip hop. It’s a kinetic, tantalising mix. The only issue here is with Edgar’s churlish, sexualised lyrics. Indeed, so obsessed is he with the ‘bedroom arts’ that it almost becomes a heavy-breathing distraction.

!K7/Inertia

Giggs
Let Em Ave It
**1/2

Hype can be a voracious beast, and UK hip hop’s latest rapper-du-jour Giggs is well and truly lodged between its jaws. Second solo record Let Em Ave It has been one of the most hotly anticipated joints to come out of the post-grime environment. Unfortunately, that doesn’t defuse its flaws. The main problem is Giggs’ much talked about delivery. While there’s a lot to like about the record’s narrative thread – an at times moving, council estate rags-to-riches tale – Giggs’ deep, husky drawl is void of personality and his lumbering rhyme-schemes tend to deflate even the more engaging of lyrical details. The UK’s answer to Fiddy Cent may well have arrived.

Remote Control/Inertia

Skryptcha
The Numbers
****

If there’s one thing that The Numbers says about its author, it’s that he is a student of the golden era. Part of an impressive new generation of Sydney MCs, Skryptcha has crafted an uncannily mature debut here. From the unassuming downbeat groove of Jase-produced opener Good Music, this is a record without bluster or hyperbole. Skryptcha lets his agile mic skills and ear for a hook do the talking. For a kid so young, his beat selection – the stabbing funk of M-Phazes and Domingo’s lush, soul-drenched orchestrations included – is impeccable. Forget short attention spans; Skryptcha is here for the long haul.

Obese

Autechre
Move of Ten
****

Less than six months after 10th longplayer Oversteps melted Autechre’s highly abrasive rhythmic clusters into a melange of dense atmosphere and arcane melodic gesture, the UK’s seminal pair of abstract electronic architects explode back onto the airwaves with a new full-length rippling with muscular beats and rhythmic details. Indeed, Move of Ten is about as beat-focused and even hip hop-like as Sean Booth and Rob Brown have been for some years. But the key to this record is balance. Where stuttering, angular rhythms threaten to dominate, the tonal and melodic qualities that marked Oversteps mould Move of Ten into a shape all of its own.

Warp/Inertia

AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan RulePublished: The Age, A2, August 28,...

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

AROUND THE GALLERIES Dan Rule
Published: The Age, A2, August 28, 2010.

WHAT Immanent Landscape
WHERE West Space, Level 1, 15–19 Anthony Street, city, 9328 8712, westspace.org.au

This stunning new show stretching across all three galleries at West Space, poses landscape not as something defined or immovable. Part of a two-year creative dialogue between a group of Australian and Japanese artists, Immanent Landscape frames place as at once fluid, porous and multidimensional. Nobuaki Onishi and Kiron Robinson, who share the front space, each seem to trawl the outer limits of the notion of place or the object. Robinson’s two, large-scale photographs exist on the peripheries, the points at which one place becomes another. The stronger of the pair sees three, rectangular metal frames foreground a setting of towering trees and mountains. Though their function is unclear, the frames seem relics; a sign of a failed or forgotten attempt to widen the frontier. Onishi’s resin casts, meanwhile, create intricate “doppelgangers” of everyday objects: a twig, a rusting, steel trestle, a light globe, a strip of barbed wire. So realistic is Onishi’s brushwork that we are left all but convinced, only for him to cut his rendering short. At the stem of the twig, or the lower legs of the trestle, the resin is left unpainted and transparent. The object phases from authentic to illusory. There are several other highlights. Hamish Carr (who is also showing at John Buckley Gallery this week) and Ai Sasaki’s wall pieces render landscape as the sum of its innumerable, tiny parts. In both works, an endless series of minute repetitions and gestures multiply to create an overall texture. In the rear gallery, Atsunobu Katagiri’s installation of ikebana, crafted via Australian plants, seems to offer a deft articulation of the show’s crux. By imbuing materials from the Australian landscape with Japanese cultural tradition, he shows the permeability of each. Wed to Fri noon–6pm, Sat noon–5pm, until September 4.

WHAT Tapeworm
WHERE Neon Parc, Level 1, 53 Bourke Street, city, 9663 0911, neonparc.com.au

There’s something playfully insidious about the works that inhabit Tapeworm, this new group show from Melbourne artist Rob McLeish, London’s Luke Rudolf and New York-based Brazilian artist Eli Sudbrack (aka assume vivid astro focus). Each of the three artists gnaws at the edges of their chosen form, genre or subject. Rudolf’s work is particularly engaging. His two paintings see thick, loose, seemingly abstract smears of oil plastered across geometric acrylic shards and flat, fluorescent backdrops. But not all is quite as it seems. The fact that Rudolf considers the works portraits offers an entirely different vantage. Vague figuration emerges; foundational shapes become heads and shoulders; free gestures become a mess of lurid facial features. McLeish’s installation of smeared, scrunched and otherwise defiled Julie Andrews posters, toilet plungers and a weapon-like, tar-covered bell clapper sculpture is melange of crazed humour and implied violence. Sudbrack’s series of blacked-out, manipulated and redrawn nudie posters and “assume vivid astro focus” anagrams, meanwhile, recast soft-porn archetypes to assume a half-hilarious, half-grotesque concoction of psychedelic aesthetics and cultural mutations. As with the rest of Tapeworm, Sudbrack’s works leech off resources, styles and references to created something toxically new. Wed to Sat noon–6pm, until September 4.

WHAT Lost in Painting
WHERE Dianne Tanzer Gallery, 108–110 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, 9416 3956, diannetanzergallery.net.au

There are several interesting negotiations of materials and form amongst this diverse compile of contemporary Australian painting, curated by Nellie Castan Gallery’s Olivia Poloni and Dianne Tanzer Gallery’s Gillian Brown. Amid solid works by Chris Bond, Craig Easton and Megan Walch, Giles Alexander’s paintings obscure and cloud their highly intricate oil-on-canvas details with swathes of opaque resin, while Louise Paramor’s fluid, abstract oil-on-glass paintings ripple with almost cellular textures and details. Kate Shaw’s arcane acrylic landscapes, meanwhile, continue her engagement with the lurid, polluted world. Perhaps the cheekiest take on “painting” here is by photographer Drew Pettifer, whose trio of photographic portrait feature naked young men “slimed” by paint. Tues to Fri 10am–5pm, Sat noon–5pm, until September 21.

WHAT Zofia Nowicka: Framing the spectacle
WHERE John Buckley Gallery, 1 Albert Street, Richmond, 9428 8554, johnbuckleygallery.com

Young Melbourne artist Zofia Nowicka’s large-scale, gloss-coated digital photographic prints effectively reverse the gaze. Shot at a recent Leonard Cohen concert, Framing the spectacle sees Nowickia turn her lens not on the stage, but on various subsections of the audience. Her view is both macro and micro, collective and intimately personal. In several of the works, we witness segments of the crowd as a whole, transfixed in a state of near-meditation. Others capture various individual reactions: a young woman joyously applauding, as if a child; an older woman, seemingly in deep reflection; a handsome busboy dashing by; the grainy shadow of Cohen himself, a mere member of the throng. Indeed, Cohen’s image seems to elucidate just what Nowicka is getting at here. No matter the reason for the gathering, the real spectacle is the experience of hundreds, if not thousands of people in the one place at the one time. Wed to Sat 11am–5pm, until September 11.

THIS WEEK IN ART - POLLY BORLAND: SMUDGEPublished: Broadsheet,...

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 22:59:07 -0400

THIS WEEK IN ART - POLLY BORLAND: SMUDGE
Published: Broadsheet, August 18, 2010.

Celebrated photographer Polly Borland’s new body of work at Murray White Room oscillates between intimacy and warped theatricality. By Dan Rule.

There’s an unyielding ambiguity to the beautifully economical series of photographs that comprise legendary Melbourne-raised photographer Polly Borland’s Smudge. Her purely performative, anonymous portraits seem in a rare state of flux; her subjects drift between genders, between public and private states, between fantasy and reality.

“It’s sort of about this idea of revealing and hiding at the same time,” says Borland, who was born in Melbourne in 1958 and left for UK in the mid 80s, where she has since been recognised as one of the international art world’s leading portrait photographers.

“The pictures are kind of childlike, but there’s something very sinister and seedy about them as well,” she continues. “There’s that real sexual tension in a lot of them that is very un-childlike.”

The faces of Smudge’s small clutch of subjects – the “teenage surfy boy” and the “weird, fucked-up rag doll” – are obscured from view via garish wigs, mutant hair growths, phallic protrusions and stretched stockings smeared with lipstick and blush. A “Denis the Menace type kid” wears a fake muscle-vest; a “clown-y but kind of voodoo-y” man sports a flowing, technicolour wig, giant fake breasts bursting from under his shirt.

“Someone came up to me at the start of the show and said ‘They’re very disturbing, but they’re actually very funny too’,” says Borland, who was one of only eight international photographers invited to photograph the Queen on her Golden Jubilee and whose folio includes portraits of old friend Nick Cave, Michael Hutchence, Cate Blanchett, Kylie Minogue, Gordon Brown, Silvio Berlusconi and Germaine Greer among countless others. “I think he really got it. There is this sense of humour as well as that strange sense of privacy.”

Indeed, by completely concealing her models’ identity via costume and directed performance – a first for Borland – she allows for a very different kind of inquisition. “It’s really about me messing with what’s in front of the camera,” she says. “Because of that anonymity, I’m able to just play and have the model completely give themselves over. It’s almost like I’m photographing people doing things that they would only ever do in private.”

Polly Borland’s Smudge runs until September 11 at Murray White Room.

www.murraywhiteroom.com
www.pollyborland.com

PVT - ‘CHURCH WITH NO MAGIC’Published: The Big Issue...

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 22:50:09 -0400

PVT - ‘CHURCH WITH NO MAGIC’
Published: The Big Issue #361, August 2010.

Church With No Magic
PVT
****

PVT are a band with an extraordinary sense of focus. The Sydney and Perth-raised trio’s career – which has survived numerous line-up shifts and a recent name change from Pivot, following a legal challenge from a US band of the same name – has been marked by the unswerving refinement and synthesis of ideas.

New album Church With No Magic is the realisation of a long line of gestures, interests, direction and experiments. It is the Pivot sound, only condensed, reduced and honed.

Indeed, where 2005 debut Make Me Love You partook in an agile expansion of postrock and jazz, and 2008 follow-up O Soundtrack My Heart stripped their aesthetic down to a kind of a punchy, loose take on electronica and krautrock, Church With No Magic rids whole chunks of the PVT sound; namely guitars. It’s an exhilarating, electrifying shift.

Buzzing swarms of synths and arcing, reverb-laced vocals (courtesy of Richard Pike) dominate; tracks are economised to key tonal and melodic elements and layers. Laurence Pike’s hammering drums ring out like gunshots; Dave Miller’s electronic negotiations fracture and reconstruct melodies and rhythmic structures at whim.

The loss of PVT’s vowels has come with the cutting of dead wood.

Dan Rule

FABLE OF THE LABEL - XL RECORDINGSPublished: Music Australia...

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 22:40:27 -0400

FABLE OF THE LABEL - XL RECORDINGS
Published: Music Australia Guide #79, August 2010.

Fable of the Label profiles iconic labels past and present. This month, XL Recordings’ Richard Russell tells MAG about unwavering self-belief. By Dan Rule.

There’s always been a fluid, transient sensibility to XL Recordings. “I don’t think about music in terms of underground or mainstream or genre or anything, and I never have done,” says label founder and acclaimed producer Richard Russell.

Joining the dots amid the independent London label’s divergent catalogue offers few clues at first. The Prodigy and Basement Jaxx precede The White Stripes, Badly Drawn Boy, Peaches, M.I.A. and Dizzee Rascal; Gil Scott-Heron, Thom Yorke and Radiohead share space with chart-topping soul popstress Adele, Ratatatat and Vampire Weekend; stylistic threads and lineages veer off at right angles.

According to Russell, there’s rhyme and reason to the apparent melange. “All I think about the individual,” he says. “Success comes in all different forms and I’ve never wanted to be confined to these notions of success being about critical praise or success being about selling all these records. It doesn’t matter. Success is achieving whatever it is you set out to do, and if you work with diverse people, they’ve got diverse aims.”

It’s an idea that can be traced throughout XL’s history. Rising out of the late 80s rave and acid house scene, the label opened its doors in 1989 with Russell and co-founders Nick Halkes – with whom Russell shared UK chart success as DJ duo Kicks Like a Mule – and Tim Palmer steering the imprint through groundbreaking European techno such as T99 and hardcore rave and drum’n’bass like SL2, Jonny L, plus early releases from label mainstays The Prodigy.

But with Halkes and Palmer parting with XL in the mid-90s, Russell broadened his horizons. “A lot of those early XL releases were really just about 12” single,” he says. “They weren’t about an album or about a career or about a tour.”

“But having said that, the best of those records were the ones that Liam (Howlett, of The Prodigy) made, because he was interested in turning it into something more than that and taking it somewhere else. We spread his wings musically and pushed beyond that electronic scene and that’s what I tried to do with XL.”

“The basic premise was to make it a really, really great platform for people to do exciting things.”

It’s difficult, even for Russell, to pinpoint XL’s signpost releases. While each of the early Prodigy releases chalk votes, he also sees The White Stripes’ self-titled debut, Dizzee Rascal’s Boy in Da Corner, Thom Yorke’s Eraser Head and Radiohead’s In Rainbows – which XL famously authorised to be released online for free ahead of the record’s physical release date – as clear standouts.

M.I.A.’s singular 2005 debut Arular, however, holds something of a special place in XL’s catalogue. “She was someone who really turned up at XL and was like ‘I’ve got something that I want to do’ and I believed her,” he says.

“Someone like Maya can do anything she wants to do. It’s a certain type of personality that can do that and doesn’t really care about what we are told we should be doing.”

And when it comes down to it, that’s where XL finds its grounding. “ “It’s sort of about fantasy, in a way,” he says. “It’s about not listening to others and just following your dreams.”

“The label, where it is now, was a fantasy for me; going into the studio to make a record with Gil Scott-Heron was a fantasy,” he pauses. “Having dreams is the most important thing in any creative pursuit.”

Visit: xlrecordings.com