SarahRyan’s exhibition ‘Two worlds, one of them being ideal’ was a great success on Friday night. The lenticular works were incredible and the catalogue which was included with the show was wonderful called ‘The Clearing’, which can be viewed on Sarah’s website. Thanks Sarah. x
Tarn Sarah and I installed the ‘Two worlds, one of them being ideal’ yesterday afternoon!! It looks amazing, I am so excited to share it!
Tonight kicks off at 6PM, then we’ll mosy on to MADE from 7ish, and then to OLIVE BRANCH for Vinyl, which will be great!
Check out Sarah’s website here! I’ll put up images after the show tonight, stay tuned.
Image via Wikipedia
I just watched this film for the first time after it being recomended to me by Bryann Ellis a few years ago in Graduate school at UNCG. Why did I decide to watch this now you ask? I was going through my grad school notes and stumbled upon the name of this short film.
Here’s the link ,
Powers Of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames
How does Wikipedia describe the film?
Powers of Ten is a 1968 American documentary short film written and directed by Charles and Ray Eames. The film depicts the relative scale of the Universe in factors of ten (see also logarithmic scale and order of magnitude). The film is an adaptation of the book Cosmic View (1957) by Dutch educator Kees Boeke,[1] and more recently is the basis of a new book version.[2] Both adaptations, film and book, follow the form of the Boeke original, adding color and photography to the black and white drawings employed by Boeke in his seminal work.
After watching this film I was reading something in CABINET MAGAZINE that mentions the film. Through out the article called, Adventures in the Vertical the writing contains some great ideas about perspective and seeing scale. The article is a review of the W. Watson-Baker’s 1935 book, World Beneath the Microscope. Later on the same article goes into depth about the film the Eames husband and wife team made but keeps the ideas of scale and perspective in the dialogue. The I deas I like best and take away from the reading are about the mirror between traveling into outer space and inner space as part of one dialogue in the terms of scale. Mark Dorrian puts it best when he says, “… this in turn endows the film with a strange circularity, almost as if the poles of the vertical line along which we have passed were bent to meet one another. ”
Check out the film on You Tube by clicking the link above and enjoy!
– Sam a.k.a. Raygunlab’s overseas consultant/advisor
On Wednesday the 8th of February at 6pm ADAM MOSER who exhibited at RAYGUN with ‘We Wouldn’t Trade Those Years’ hung out at Phat Burgers and discussed his work. Adam explained the project and discussed social practice and also told us about some of this other projects. CHECK OUR ADAM’s NEW WEBSITE! hang out with Arthur for a minute and get acquainted
(ps. thanks to the Phats boys for having us)
TIFFANY SHARFAN
RELICS OF ALL THINGS PRECIOUS
Tiffany is a wonderful friend and artist and her work is both fascinating visually and interesting conceptually, Tiffany is also wonderfully articulate regarding the ideas behind the work, so come and have a look and a chat.
About the work:
‘Relics of All Things Precious’ explores what it means to collect as an artist and how memory and association is not only expressed but is also constructed through objects and images. Taking their cue from Sigmund Freud’s Mystic Writing-Pad and Surrealist games of chance, the works in this exhibition investigate the slippages of meaning that occur when objects and images are removed from their original contexts and are repositioned as relics of their past material, cultural and personal histories.
Rather than interrogate the grand narrative of History, this exhibition focuses on what I call ‘petit’ history – a history of the individual mediated by personal experience and without the critical distance of the historian who classifies, rationalises and simplifies the overwhelming condition of being in the world. As both a site of amnesia and memory, fact and fiction, the collection becomes a space of counter-memory conflating interior microcosms and exterior macrocosms. Using assemblage and collage, as well as painting and drawing, the works become material strategies of mapping and navigating a personal space of discovery that seeks to expose what it means to be ‘precious’.
Sarah Ryan at RAYGUN in February.
1. As a practicing artist what are the issues\concerns you have been
consistently addressing within your artwork?
I guess, my greatest fascination and most consistent concern has been with ‘looking’ and ‘seeing’. I’m really interested in slowing down the process of looking – of looking at what’s there – and dwelling at length on detail. I have now been working with lenticular imaging techniques for over 10 years and I am one of a few artists using this medium. Lenticular images create an optical three-dimensional effect and/or flow of motion within an image. They are most commonly associated with 3D postcards, greetings cards and novelty items and they are primarily produced by companies who own patents on the specialist production processes. Extending the lenticular medium beyond its novelty usages and associations forms and integral component to my art practice. While this approach appears materially tricky it is also conceptually honest about how things are looked at; we often pretend that we are accustomed to single or still images even though their existence is really an illusion in our heads.
2. Do you classify your art as being one thing more than the other
e.g. photography, film, painting, sculpture, music or installation and
do you see an expansion into other mediums in the future?
I am often described as a photographer but I’ve never trained in photography so I see myself more as an artist who takes photographs. My work has been photography-based over the last 10 years but I am open to exploring other mediums.
3. When you think about making new work do you always consider
applying a degree of historical content or do the works weigh more
heavily towards a more personal investigation?
It’s both really with a leaning towards a more personal investigation.
4. When you look back through this body of work do you see any answers
unfolding within this investigation? I am more interested in questions rather than answers so I don’t see answers as such unfolding in this exhibition/investigation. In each exhibition I am always trying out new approaches with some ending up working better than others. It’s a case of living and learning and keeping things interesting!
Sam Peck sent me the following link this week, check it out. The pdf is the book ‘The Future is Now’ by James Voorhies and has a sentence or two on each page with the essentials making it so easy, I’ve just read it twice. It looks at the exhibition, the role of the curator, artwork being exhibited as itself without the gallery or exhibition space. Super interesting stuff.
On Sunday my brother Richard took me to Brisbane where we stayed with friends on The River, visited the boutique hotel LIMES in the Valley for cocktails with friends, went to the Old Museum to listen to and see Beth Orton sing some serious tunes, woke to an indulgent breakfast of smoked salmon on rye at Southbank and finished off the stint with a trip to the Gallery of Modern Art to see Matisse, Yayoi Kusama and works by Dinosaur Designs to celebrate its fifth year. For some reason I took more photos of Yayoi’s interactive installations so have had to go to the site and download images for Matisse and Dinosaur Designs. Each artist more than engaged the viewer, with colour, space and light,
leaving room for inspiration and reflection on what ever level you were prepared to recieve. If you’re in Australia I highly recomment you make the time. If you’re abroard…….it doesnt matter what the decade, just create and engage. tx
Lots of people came through at different times and people wrote letters, there were also others who had conversations about the photos and didn’t write. Everyone loved it, and were so excited to be able to write to Grandma, I think there will be some very wonderful letters, people took time and sit write and talk together.
Tarn and I shared a cup of tea thismorning to discuss the exhibition and some of the feedback Tarn recieved included people with goosebumps and others who became teary with the nostalgia of the show and how the photographs related to their own families and experiences.
The only thing that we struggled with was the technology, so we were unable to speak with Adam but hope to do so soon. We have loved having Adam’s show at RAYGUN, everyone has loved it!
Thanks to those who came down last night and if you haven’t seen the work and can’t make it on Sunday call us, we’ll make a date and show you through, it’s not to be missed.
love as always,
Tarn and Ali
INTERVIEW WITH ADAM MOSER
1. As a practicing artist what are the issues\concerns you have been consistently addressing within your artwork?
Although I haven’t directly addressed this issue in any of my projects I often think about the work “work” in relationship to what I am doing as an artist. Sometimes I get hung up on this if I am describing my practice that way because I think there should be some utility, need, or objective attached to it. I understand the term in the historic way it’s been used concerning the arts – oeuvre, canon, retrospective of work, etc. But somehow I think if we began to think more in about it in another way, say, like a bus driver thinks about his work, things would get really exciting.
2. Do you classify your art as being one thing more than the other e.g. photography, film, painting, sculpture, music or installation and do you see an expansion into other mediums in the future?
I just identify as an artist most of the time. Most of my projects could be considered Social Practice, though.
3. When you think about making new work do you always consider applying a degree of historical content or do the works weigh more heavily towards a more personal investigation?
Not usually, it’s different for everything though. Mostly what I like to do is leave room for those discoveries to be made by the people experiencing it. Lots of times because of this I learn about something I wasn’t considering initially.
4. When you look back through this body of work do you see any answers unfolding within the investigation?
To me this project came out of a couple of experiences I have had with my grandmother this past year. I went to visit twice and both times I had a new friend with me who hadn’t met her. My grandma, Esther, is 92 and each time I introduced her to my friends she would pretty quickly start recalling memories. Pretty beautiful conversations came out of this. I tended to sit back and just listen and watch. At one point, my friend Dana asked about a photograph, this lead to more stories. I could tell my grandma enjoyed telling them too. So, in a way it’s about using the photos as a catalyst to allow her to continue to enjoy her rich history.
RAYGUN 