October 9, 2017
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IN TRANSLATION Curated by Louise Lassen Iversen

This past week we have hosted Danish curator Louise Lassen Iversen. Louise’s project ‘In Translation’ is a group show by Danish artists including Suada Demirovic, Miriam Haile, Annarosa Kroyer Holm and the collective Hvid[me] Archive. The works in the show represent each artists interpretation of cultural differences, where the act of translation becomes a cultural meeting ground. Louise has brought to us, an array of video works and an interactive growing archive (where RAYGUN community are invited to contribute), as a way to reveal concepts of decoloniality associated with the Danish history/culture. This ‘active’ exhibition enables Louise to connect perceptions of colonisation with the  Australian audience in order to give space to individual reflections within a global domain.

As Louise states:

IN TRANSLATION is an exhibition that uses the act of translation as a cultural meeting ground. Because a translation is a movement from one linguistic, cultural and historical context to another and because every language is contaminated by linguistic differences – it is in reality a paradoxical task. A translation is never an exact similarity but always both a copy of an original text and an original in and of itself owing to the fact that interpretation and reformulating are necessary. Therefore the act of translation is an unpredictable space in which the cultural background of the duplicate is inevitably mixed with that of the original text both restoring and erasing it. It is in this space in-between that we operate.

This exhibition is an attempt to create a meeting ground of experiences between the country we have travelled from – Denmark, an old European nation and colonial power – and the country we visit – Australia, a young nation and former colony.
2017 marks the centennial of Denmark’s sale of three Virgin Islands to the US. Still to this day Greenland and the Faroe Islands are a part of the Danish territory. Unlike the Commonwealth of Nations that Australia is a part of Greenland and the Faroe Islands are not fully independent. In the exhibition we look at, how colonial structures to this day influences racial structures, immigration policies and experiences of privilege or discrimination in Scandinavia.

Through an open call created by the collective Hvid[mə] Archive we invite you to participate in the exhibition with contributions on decolonial practices within Australia.

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September 9, 2017
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GINA FAIRLEY: Art Career Booster

In May this year we were lucky to have met the fantastic art writer Gina Fairley during her joint visit to Toowomba with Sharon Louden and Hrag Vartanian.  On the side of writing and reviewing Gina spends time sharing her knowledge about living day to day as a professional artist and arts worker and we are super excited she’s taking the time to venture back to our region and deliver a workshop and discussion on the topic. Numbers are limited and first in best dressed. Email us at RAYGUN to reserve your seat.

Ali and Tarn raygun@raygunlab.com

September 3, 2017
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DAVID AKENSON Participatory Game #4 Kusama

Friday night saw the opening of David Akenson’s Participatory Game #4.  The board game required 4 players to execute and we had some keen punters to carry out the task. David was able to give an outline/premise behind the show and explain the rules. See below for a review of the show, with words by Graeme Kelly. It’s all about the grid. Thanks David for showing with us.

 

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Participatory Game #4 Kusama, words by Graeme Kelly

A lecturer in Visual Fine Arts theory Dr David Akenson is one of the University of Southern Queensland’s most respected identities. Among his research interests are modern art, Australian art, contemporary art, art history and German idealism. David also expresses interest in the relationship between art and life. “Art, like life, is a game with rules that can be followed or broken, but must always be observed,” he says. This theory has been taken to a new level by David with a showing of his Participatory Game #4: Kasuma, which was launched at RAYGUN PROJECTS in Margaret Street, Toowoomba, on September 1. “This work is a hybrid form of art that belongs to a series of such works I began a few years ago,” David told an audience of admirers, who packed into the gallery for the launch. “It is an abstract game of art for two to six participants. “It consists of a set of rules; a number of objects used in the game; a group of participants; and a location, in this case RAYGUN Projects, Toowoomba. “The work represents a convergence of a number of influences. The dot work of Yayoi Kusama, the grid works of modernists, the games of the Dadaists, Fluxus and the Situationists, and the participatory works of artists aiming to include the viewer as participants in the created ‘situation’.” The game David has devised is played on a square measuring one metre by one metre placed on top of a plinth with some round discs denoting various values, which are placed around the board. Although the rules of the game were displayed on the gallery wall there was much mirth as those attending the launch tested themselves against each other. The showing will continue through until the end of September.

August 30, 2017
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METER (Copenhagen) I would prefer not to

We are super charged to see METER Copenhagen up and running as a critical art space in Denmark. This space takes an investigative and critical view of society and structures within society through art and artistic practices..

This group show I would prefer not to, Co-Curated by Louise Lassen Iversen   who has shown with us in the past at RAYGUN,  explores the notion of time and holds the work of Eva Koch’s 1997 video piece Transit  Check it out.

July 17, 2017
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TRANS Group Show

A Group Show curated by Stephen Spurrier and Kyle Jenkins exploring the intersections between abstraction and representation including artists Victoria Munro, Arvid Boecker, Brent Hallard, Karri McPherson, Katie Wagner, Tiffany Shafran, Tarn McLean, Kyle Jenkins, Stephen Spurrier, Chasley Wilson, Brodie Taylor, Ursula De Kretser, Ute Braatz, Cahterine Parker.

 

TRANFER, TRANSPOSE, TRANSPLANT, TRANSPIRE, TRANSPARENT, TRANSMITT, TRANSITIVE, TRANSLUCENT, TRANSITION, TRANSFIGURE, TRANSFORM, TRANS:

RAYGUN projects, July 2017

Within a world of shifting consequences where an image, a moment, an experience, a concept is both held within its juncture of inception but consequently consumed by the layering of collapsed multi- communal, national and global positioning, the artists invited to participate in this exhibition are positioned within a theoretical and aesthetic engagement with TRANS. TRANS in this exhibition is both a theoretical and visual descriptor that both governs the artist’s work e.g. the materiality of paint as ‘transparent’, a narrative that visually ‘transpires’ through a compositional discourse, an artwork being made transforming from material into object , deconstructed and then ‘transferred’ into something else, moving from one medium to another within a practice that is constantly transitive in visual outcomes but rigorous and permanent in conceptual intention etc. Collectively, individually and through a shared connectivity the artists in the exhibition deal with various ideas of TRANS: and how a work is both set within a moment of permanence, born out of the studio, released into the world and fixed within that visual moment of being. However like the word ‘trans’ and the many variations that come from its linguistic beginnings, these artists through their work look to leap off from similar traditional beginnings (origins) of painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing and to move beyond, traversing their own creative histories as they intuitively look to produce something new in their artistic outputs.

Nothing is ever made up of one thing, but instead a multitude of transformative fragments that come together, collapse into a moment of artistic production and then break apart to be conceptually reassigned new meaning when the next work comes along to be created. In many ways the exciting part of making a work of art is that as the work is conceived, developed, built and constructed, in this studio moment, it is a success. However once the work is finished, what transpires is the fact the work is a conceptual success and a visual failure all at once. It may align itself with its intentions but it can’t say everything about an artist ‘as evolving thinker’ visually. That’s why artists make another artwork, and another, and another so forth. It’s the same reason why museum curatorial practices collect multiple works from the same artist attempting to bridge the life of their career collapsing space into a transitive experience within the one or two spaces within the museum housing the retrospective collection.

Artists don’t think within the singular and to many there is no finality because they keep searching for an answer to a problem that can never be found, because they themselves ‘as an artist’ is the problem. For every artwork made there is another one to begin that may get them closer to an answer or a point of closure. But is there really any answer? Any closure? It is precisely at this point that this exhibition brings together this group of artists to offer, within the singular exhibition space of Raygun projects, their personalised intentions in terms of their own practices. Some may be linked through exhibiting previously, undertaking collaborations, however on the whole the exhibition is a survey of artists whose practices engage in TRANS, if not knowingly then through the history of the works they have produced and intuitive decisions they have made within their individual practices.

 

 

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