Go Away and Come Back Exhibition

Go Away and Come Back: an exhibition of architecture, travel, research, experience is currently open upstairs at the Moores Building Contemporary Gallery on Henry Street in Fremantle.

The closing party is this coming Sunday 4-7pm. There will be snacks, drinks, and thought provoking, engaging works to interact with.

Sneak previews and more info: www.facebook.com/GoAwayandComeBack  

CALL OUT FOR PROPOSALS Go Away and Come Back: an exhibition of architecture, travel, research, experience.

 

Image: Detail Opportunistic,

2012. R. Creagh.

Go Away and Come Back:

an exhibition of architecture, travel, research, experience.

What does it mean to return home after focused travels? What meaningful contribution can be made when returning with understandings found elsewhere or between places? Go Away and Come Back: an exhibition of architecture, travel, research, experience spirals around these questions proposing an investigation through the work and travels of established and emerging architects.

Architectural pilgrimages, study trips and grand tours have a significant place in the historical understanding of architectural education. Now, the internet grants access to the other side of the world from a home interior. Is the value of study trips questioned by the proliferation of online architectural media? With the increasing convenience of travel has the status of the grand tour shifted within the education of architects? Has inexpensive digital photography diminished the way experiences are recorded? Given the change in global economics, and a shifting emphasis away from old colonial centres, is there still relevance to the overseas internship?

Go Away and Come Back is a proposed peer reviewed exhibition of research works. The visual enquiries  are invited that draw on exhibitors’ travel documentation and reflection to further understandings of the nexus of architecture, experience, research and travel. In a contemporary world of globalisation and mobility, submissions are invited that challenge assumptions about both travel experiences and architectural research through grounded enquiry and engaging mediums.

 Call for proposals now open.

A maximum single A4 page written expression of interest, including a brief biographic statement, should be received before Monday 24 June, 2013. An additional reference image may be included at the applicants’ discretion. Please email to Robyn Creagh r.creagh@curtin.edu.au or Shannon Lyons  s.lyons@curtin.edu.au

Successful applicants will be invited to attend a series of optional workshops in Perth. As part of the curatorial review and development of the research works, at key points in the lead up to exhibition an interdisciplinary selection of creative practitioners and scholars will provide mentoring and critique. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue of works and scholarly essays.

thinking about: film

"Even if they are not all good poems, you do realise how incredible the thirst is for poetry as a way of apprehending and thinking about life. It sort of deals with the same questions as philosophy does, but it builds up from the ground and from specific detail whereas philosophy comes down from above and abstract generalisation. It allows you to experience other people's thoughts in a way that other art forms just don't, and reading all these entries together you see that people are looking for a way of dealing with the other. I don't want to term it spiritual exactly, but certainly the numinous aspects of existence aren't dealt with much in our culture."

- poet, novelist and international litigator Nick Laird on poetry, in The Guardian, 4/1/2013

To me, the essence of that quote really applies to film, not poetry. To me there is no better medium than film to "experience other people's thoughts", and for dealing with "the other". It is more visceral, has more "specific detail", and is also a very familiar medium - easy to make now with cheap computing, easy on-line promotion and distribution, and widely understood within our TV and cinema centric culture. Poetry I think held this popular story telling role within our culture, but has it no longer (except, perhaps, combined with song lyrics - which are given greater power in music videos). 

Recently among the collective, there has been quite a bit of film discussion and making; most of which has not yet reached fruition. 

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Suburban Odyssey

Yesterday KvV and I visited the Shaun Tan exhibition, ‘Suburban Odyssey’ at the Fremantle Arts Centre (runs until July 15).  Having marveled at the illustrations of the picture books, ‘The Rabbits’ and ‘The Arrival’ in a coffee table sort of attention span, I really appreciated seeing the evolution of his works.  The major works are of suburban landscapes, from early pieces of realism and portraiture to suburbia as magic-realism and then the working sketches of his later work illustrations.

So our fascination with suburbia, have we seen it all before?  Not as Tan manages to capture suburbia.  I found this quote from a love-in, online review by The West Australian, "These are serious paintings of Australian suburbia, bringing to life that which is usually pictured as dull and monotonous.  Many Australian artists celebrate the boredom of the suburban landscape, but Tan is able to breathe magic into the streetscapes of Perth".

I would agree with the sentiment but I feel that the best descriptive word would be his ability to capture a ‘benign’ suburbia.  Is this suburbia in its best version? There are no seething, bleak undertones, think Tim Burton’s ‘Edward Scissor Hands’ or David Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet’, just a perspective that some of it’s implied rules are strange (homogeneity, 9-5, crows).  Whilst BENIGN doesn’t have the charisma of AMAZING, the intellect of DELIGHTFUL or the nous of CLEVER, it is used in its ability to convey a kind, generous, gentle disposition.  The magic realism of his stick figure series of paintings (definitely worth the short trip) promote the idea that alien landscapes (or objects & creatures as seen in his later works) can be both strange and benign, which is surely if you took this idea further a message of tolerance?  Maybe I have run away with that thought, but to see these layered paintings and different techniques; pencil, gauche, acrylics, pastels and layered cardboard, wood, cloth & plaster, was a nice interlude for a Thursday.  

Teaser pictures below.

exhibition intro

working perspective

layered painting

A little bit of advocacy:

A discussion on a Victoria Park local 'facebook blog' (i.e. a page which someone uses to follow local events, businesses, issues and trivia), copied from facebook.

I have not made the posts anonymous, as they have been made on a public page.

I Love Vic Park

2 hours ago

On the corner of Leonard street and Albany Highway, we like it!

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  10 people like this.
  

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U-Ram Choe: extraordinary, empty

U-Ram Choe, a Korean sculptor who focuses on kinetic works, has a solo exhibition in the John Curtin Gallery, as part of the Perth International Arts Festival.

Urbanus Female on show in the John Curtin Gallery
image: choe u ram website

The show seems, at first, enthralling. The rooms are dark, and sparsely populated with strange mechanical creatures: flowers, fish, 'Aliens' (a la Geiger), dragonflies. These robots move - some constantly, some intermittently, some in groups, pulsing in arrhythmic patterns. Beautifully mechanical, complex and dramatically lit in the dark chambered space, they are astonishing creations. 

There is also a theatrette, showing a making of video, and videos from the original (and more complete, it would seem) show in Tokyo.

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