March 27, 2014
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SAL RANDOLPH – OPEN TO CHANGE?

We are super excited to be welcoming Sal from New York to RAYGUN as our contributing artist in April. To give you more of an idea of her expanded practice check out her current work Open Engagement which involves the idea of gift giving and social exchange. Her Money Actions in which she gives away money to members of the public as both provocation and invitation have been featured in the 2011 Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia, the Live Biennial, Open Engagement, and in Cabinet Magazine. She has recently been doing research and teaching on the topic of attention as a visiting fellow at Princeton University and is developing new work for upcoming exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and at RAYGUN Projects in Toowoomba, Australia. She is also investigating experience, value, games, play, and language. salrandolph.com. Be sure to visit her on her opening night with us on Friday April 4th, 6pm.

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Free Biennial – Photo Sal Randolph

March 24, 2014
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SAL RANDOLPH (USA) in April

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Sal Randolph will be at RAYGUN for the opening.

Library of Art: Expanding Universe Raygun Edition

 The Library of Art is an instructional artwork exploded into an atomic state. It begins with the simple proposition that works of art can be thought of as instructions for their own making. Could there be a system that expressed every possible artwork as its instruction? A vast library of possibilities? A tool and a toy, a game and a method of analysis, the Library of Art is also an experimental text, one that can be played with in any order and combination, meant to be used rather than read.

The Library of Art is in constant state of expansion. The current edition  produced specially for Raygun, consists of 16 volumes:Material, Process, Structure, Action, Situation, Duration, Social,Subject, Style, Color, Antagonism, Post, Rules, Participation,Anthology, and Biblio. And now for the first time there will be a single volume version of the collection: The Handy Condensed Library of Art, given away to visitors during the show.

The volumes in the Library each contain one category or aspect of a potential artwork.  In the volume Material, there are 150 materials (plastic, beer, steel, stories…) in Process, 150 processes (loosen, pickle, cut, sweeten…) In Structure, 150 formal structures (triangle, network, melody, box…) and on.  Material,Process, and Structure might be used in combination to create instructions for sculptural works or installations. Action,Situation, Duration and Social can be used to realize possible performances, interventions, and social architectures. Subject,Style, and Color can be applied towards paintings or other two and three dimensional works. Antagonism offers a repertoire of options for the critical stance that every contemporary work of art seems to need. Post lists postproduction activities and effects to extend the work. Rules suggests ways that the volumes can be played as an art game or a studio tool. All of these can be mixed or combined in any number or manner; misuse is encouraged. Participation is a blank volume, waiting to be filled by visitors or users with imagined works.

In addition, two new volumes will be under development at Raygun:Anthology and Biblio.  Anthology is a collection of historical and contemporary examples of instructional works (statements, word events, scores, imaginary paintings, conceptual art propositions, unrealized projects, experiential declarations, descriptive titles, procedural protocols, algorithms, recipes).  Biblio is a bibliography and reference list for future research.  Visitors will be encouraged to submit ideas for both volumes, and for future volumes yet to come.

March 21, 2014
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Aphids

Aphids creates epic contemporary art projects using performance, music, site-specifity and new technologies. Collaborative and driven by a passionate belief in the social role of art, Aphids investigates what is current and urgent in contemporary culture.

2014 projects include the premiere of Game Show at the Festival of Live Art (Melbourne), the Drive In Project at the Dromana Drive-In, a tour of Flyway to Rotterdam and Bulgaria, and creative developments in Taiwan, Tasmania and Melbourne.

Aphids is led by Artistic Director Willoh S.Weiland in collaboration with Artistic Associates Martyn Coutts, Elizabeth Dunn, Tristan Meecham, Lara Thoms and Thea Baumann (Shanghai).

 

The last project features here I think is the most interesting, check it out.

 

http://aphids.net/about/About_Aphids

 

March 20, 2014
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Jason Sweeny, Stereopublic

 

I have been researching Australian participatory artists and one of my favourites is Jason Sweeny, I’m taken with a project of his called ‘Stereopublic’. The project exists as an app, and is described as ‘crowdsourcing the quiet’. If you have the app, you can either add a place in your city that you go to to find quiet, or put in your location and source the quiet.. the app will give you directions to this quiet place, so that you can take a minute, be quiet and escape the world.

 

 

Here’s the website http://www.stereopublic.net  and a video of what the quiet sounds like.

 

 

 

 

March 18, 2014
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WHILE PASCAL WAS HERE

We continue to hold the installation of our current artist, Pascal Dombis, who visited from Paris early this month. On viewing his work in the RAYGUN space it is prompting to share his previous works, with one in particular that he shared through describing in an artist talk he gave at the University of Southern Queensland on his second day with us.

The work from 2010 describes a project he installed at The Palais-Royal, with its famous arcades, is a historical place full of signs and references. For two centuries, it was the most fashionable and visited place in France and even Europe – the true core of Parisian political and social intrigues. Its popular cafés were patronized by philosophers, writers, politicians, revolutionaries as well as gamblers, whores, performing freaks and criminals of all kinds. http://dombis.com/works/textefiles/ While the work has many underlying connotations and undertones, he mentioned that one spectator in particular took the time to  move along the floor installation and read every story held within the 252 metre text based work. A beautiful story. Check it out

 

March 8, 2014
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Mixed Grill(e) Pascal Dombis Opening

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For more than 20 years, Pascal Dombis has been using computers and algorithms to produce excessive repetition of simple processes. He exploits the paradoxical coexistence of orderly control and chaotic aleatory forces to produce unpredictable, unstable and dynamic visual forms which he synthesizes into digital wall drawings, lenticular pieces or video installations. Through an abuse of technological processes, Pascal Dombis tries to confront the human viewer with ‘his/her’ own primitive irrationality.

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