reeling and writhing

Birkensnake's providers: an interview at Black Clock blog

See, this is how a thing of beauty comes into being:

Providence has this awesome place where you can get left over industrial materials for 10 cents a pound, so we went there and found the radiology folders. They were too good to pass up so we decided to use them not knowing how they would react to the ink or fold or tear or wear over time. For the second issue Brian got very excited about branding or burning elements of the design, and then he found the flocked paper (at the above place). He and Joanna did a couple of test burns and mailed them to me so I could think about it, but we still really had no idea how the burning would interact with the ink until we took the printed covers to the park and blow torched them.

From Elizabeth Hall's interview at Black Clock magazine's blog with the editors of handmade literary mag, Birkensnake. Sarah (aka Chemlawn) McDermott, artist and founder of The Kidney Press, is part of the creative team at Birkensnake, and spoke to Elizabeth Hall along with Birkensnake's editors at the Black Clock blog.

 Red Gallery's exhibition program this month includes an interesting group show, Strange Nature, of photography and painting, which opens on Wednesday evening.

This exhibition of new paintings and photography takes a trip into a world where the natural and artificial have seductively merged.

In Dena Kahan’s painting, 19th century glass models of plants and marine life are re-created as surreal objects, more like part of a fantastic landscape than scientific tools in a museum case.

In his studio, Peter Lambropoulos makes “unreal” worlds specifically for the camera. He does so by transforming banal everyday substances into the extraordinary. Micro-sculptures encrusted with crystals are presented as hallucinatory visions.

Jan Parker’s photographs offer viewpoints on nature and the alchemy of light. Through analogue and digital processes, she conjures up uninhabited and often myopic landscapes, cryptic in their placement but also referencing the actual work of the eye.

Other artists exhibiting at  Red Gallery this month include Sarah Gully and Amelia Lackman. So, plenty to see, along with my friend Dena Kahan's paintings of glass models of flowers and invertebrates from the Blaschka collections at Harvard and Cornell Universities. Last year, she exhibited paintings of scientific marine models from UK collections at Red Gallery, and further works on these beautiful subjects are in the offing. Enjoy.

body of water - Fifi's exhibition launch tonight

This will teach me to skip posts saying "I have been busy". Particularly where artists are concerned. Ow, Ow.

 

red dress floating

My blog friend and fine painter and photographer, Fiona Dobrijevich Edmonds, launches her exhibition, body of water, tonight in Darlington, Sydney.

It is at Sheffer Gallery at 38 Lander Street until the 22nd of May.

There are more samples of her work on the blog, but I strongly urge you if you are lucky enough to be in Sydney to go and see it for yourselves. I wish I was going, I have left it too late and now have other things on. Damn, damn, damn.

A Peace Of Wall in Hosier Lane

Yes, I was critical of the lack of news feeds on the new Literary Magazines Australia site, because the following is the kind of news I like to pull down in my feeds.

Martin Hughes, publisher at Affirm Press, invites you to several events supporting the publication of Peace Of Wall, a book of street art from East Timor:

Our motivation for publishing Peace of Wall is to engage a new audience in their plight, to invite people to consider this tiny and fragile country wedged – in more ways than one – between the giants of Indonesia and Australia. I love the idea of a city like Melbourne, so savvy in its appreciation of street art, learning about East Timor in this light, and people have responded really enthusiastically.

We’re bringing over three young artists – Etson, Alfeo and Zito – from Dili this week, to participate in a week-long programme of events we hope will create enduring links between street artists here and in East Timor. (Etson’s visa was delayed while he awaited clearance for TB, which in itself paints a fairly vivid picture of the differences between these neighbouring nations.) The cultures are so different that putting them together in one medium is bound to create some fizz. I’m looking forward to seeing what they make of each other’s work – the stylised scene in Melbourne compared to the more rudimentary, descriptive and political-charged art from East Timor.

Events include:

Saturday 8 May at 5pm
Painting a wall in Hosier Lane, followed by the opening of Chris Parkinson’s Exhibition at the Until Never Gallery.

Tuesday 11 May at 7.30pm

official launch of Peace of Wall – Street Art from East Timor Southpaw Bar, 189 Gertrude St, Fitzroy (with a live painting by the lads and music by East Timorese musician, Gil Santos)

Thursday 20 May

Restoration of East Timorese Independence Day.

For more information, drop Affirm Press at line at info[at]affirmpress.com.au.

green thoughts, green shade: Understorey at Geelong Gallery

At Geelong Gallery from now until June 6 you can take in Understorey, a joint exhibition by Melbourne artists Amanda Johnson (also known as the poet and novelist A. Frances Johnson) and Michele Burder. The artists have explored botanical gardens in Victoria to bring together these works, investigating 'a range of historical, personal and metaphorical 'under stories'' as they go:

Johnson’s illusionistic ‘paper documents’ on canvas are replete with stains, watermarks and foxing mould copied from deteriorated botanical documentations. Her painterly parodies of ‘first contact’ drawings and nineteenth-century garden designs suggest the melancholy possibility of last contact, while luridly modified Victorian garden plans (after William Guilfoyle and others) are a futuristic revisiting of the botanical archive.

Burder’s paintings signify how perceptions of gardens and landscape painting can change, or be ‘seeded’ as memory. Her pictures suggest that we can never be sure of the origin of the garden; that gardens may reside in memory or myth as well as in the experience of the boundaried public garden that many people know and love.

The catalogue accompanying this exhibition features an essay by garden historian Paul Fox. There will be a floor talk by the artists at the gallery on May 19th, if you live in the area and would like to hear more about the works.

Shaun Tan at the Wheeler Centre this weekend

via wheelercentre.com

Where else, I ask, will you get to hear Shaun Tan give a free keynote address on graphic novels and attend a weekend of graphic storytelling related events?
At the Wheeler Centre on the Anzac Day weekend, that's where.

Saturday sees a bunch of panels led by luminaries of the art such as Bruce Mutard, Nicki Greenberg, Tan, Dylan Horrocks and Oslo Davis, while on Sunday there are some very reasonably priced workshops with practitioners such as Bernard Caleo, of Tango fame.

I'm only providing a couple of links today - I would love the Wheeler Centre to provide 'one link to rule them all, one link to find them' - somewhere in that calendar AND Thank you for your comment, Mim, for THERE IT IS NOW!! and doesn't that look a lot better. I like that.  I'll just begin at the beginning, and You can scroll down to find the rest.

to yeu and yeu and yeu

Wellll....it's time for a longer break, for a lot of good reasons (which is, of course, a far, far better thing than taking it for bad ones.) Think 'talking 25 year old son with autism' for starters. I will be flashing intermittently here like a sick modem till June, if at all, and then taking stock again.

For now, the Internet's going to continue as a fine distraction, taken neat, rather than an enthralling one, diluted with mixers (for example, if I see one more post on e-readers in my feeds I will probably mutate into an iTablet myself). I will lurk on my friends' blogs - that's a given, and there might be a review, or two at some stage - but only general maintenance will be undertaken here.

You might like to follow* LiteraryMinded, the Wheeler Centre, SPUNC news (yes, that's the feed to the whole site down in the lefthand corner of the homepage), the engaging blogs of the book artist known as Ampersand Duck , Emerging Writers Festival director Lisa Dempster, and artist Fifi at Strange Fruit, and keep an eye on this page, and things magazine, while I'm gone.
Till June, adieu.

*apologies to those left off this list earlier today....what was I thinking?

while walking one day on the lower south side...

Strolling in South Melbourne last night, digesting dinner prior to taking in the Christmas instalment of this show, in which a family member got a few shots at the mike, I came across an exhibition in the process of being put together, which I was permitted to inspect briefly: a lovely thing to be able to do on a quiet spring evening.

The exhibition is a group show opening tomorrow night - the people in the gallery were busy attaching large framed glass prints to the roof by chains, so they could hang loose and be backlighted (the production method is being patented by artist Chris Gillard.) I also saw delicate giclee prints of botanical subjects in reds and blacks, some long, narrow landscape oils which whisper of clotted Cezanne, and beautiful fabric and wire sculptures of sea creatures. I can't do justice to one set of oil paintings which were abstract in tone but captured light and water and waving textures - I think this is one of them here, but there were more. 

 

                

                            

wire viper fish sculpture by Cristina Metelli.

                                                                                         Grass by Chris Gillard, photography in 4-colour separation on glass           

Natural Selection is at the greenwood gallery, 1 Hotham Street, South Melbourne, from 3-24 December. It features work by Llewelyn Ash, Patrick Christie, Pip Davey, Chris Gillard, Josef Marzi, Cristina Metelli, Anthony Vanderzweep, Nikai van Garderen, and Dolores Malloni.

The opening is Thursday night, December 3, 6-8 pm, and greenwood gallery is open 11-5 from Wednesday to Sunday.

books, spelling, e-readers, ghosts galore

Just In. A simply smashing post on early writing from Penni Russon.

My other top selection for the week is this stupendous post about Venice and Tintoretto, from Fiona's exceptional Strange Fruit blog on painting, photography and writing.

It is time to thank poet and writer George Dunford, of Hackpacker, for his great article on litblogs in last week's Big Issue, which I fortunately got into town to buy late in the week while attending to some panel discussion and the launch of Nathan Curnow's  Ghost Poetry Project, which was a very moving occasion (photos from Sean M. Whelan there). More of that anon. (Update: the article is now available to read on George's blog.)

Feel bad that others can't see what you are reading when you carry your Kindle/iPhone/iLiad/whatsit around? (Not really an Australian problem yet, is it?) Etsy may have the solution. Via Three Percent.

In Readings in Hawthorn this morning, saw a very attractive display of Faber Firsts - enjoy those retro covers for the modern era if you haven't seen them already. (Let's face it, I saw mine in the shop, so I'm last to the party.) They are rather fine, and for some reason I think I like them better than what I've seen so far of the poetry. A little overdone? I just don't know.

this garden universe vibrates complete

Dena Kahan has an exhibition, Strange Garden, opening on the 17th of June at Red Gallery in North Fitzroy

Another opportunity to report on the work of someone who has gone on to more exciting things since we studied lit together, and a show to visit! - and a beautiful picture for this blog to display (photo by Ian Hall).

'Dena Kahan’s paintings of miniature glass marine specimens address the historical relationship between art and science.

These most recent works are based on photographs taken by the artist while visiting specialist glassware collections in the United Kingdom, and are an extension of her previous work with the Victoria and Albert museum in London. Strange Garden reveals the shifts in translation incurred in the movement between objects and representations, softly prying apart the paradoxes inherent to taxonomy and systems of museum display.' (www.redgallery.com.au)

Strange Garden will be at:
Red Gallery
157 St George's Rd.
North Fitzroy 3068
tel: 9482 3550
17 June – 4 July . Opening hours Wednesday – Saturday, 11 – 5.

wall to wall intelligentsia at the Potter this summer

Update: hear more about this exhibition at Radio National's Artworks program for the rest of March, here.

Intelligentsia, a retrospective exhibition of Louis Kahan's celebrated portrait series for Meanjin, has opened at one of my favourite art spaces, the quietly shiny Potter gallery at Melbourne University. A goodly crowd turned out in searing heat last Wednesday on February 29 to hear guest curator Vivien Gaston and writerly/academic representative and poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe speak on the singular experience of standing in a room full of 'faces with thoughts inside' as Wallace-Crabbe so succinctly put it.

One of Kahan's portraits of Patrick White is on display - another garnered the Archibald Prize in 1962 - as well as many fine ink drawings of top writers and thinkers published in Meanjin from 1955 to 1974, including a couple of people I used to know and barely recognised, as of course they were MUCH younger then. Also on display is a video of writers included in the portrait series talking about Meanjin - I did glimpse Dame Mary Gilmore, but will return to watch it in a quieter moment as I could not hear very much of what was said.

Of the process of sitting for Kahan, historian Geoffrey Blainey is quoted as saying, "When I left, I had a slight feeling that I had been x-rayed."
Poet Fay Zwicky is quoted in Gaston's notes, which can be found on the Potter site:

'it seemed an easy thing to do, to sit

and let the master work his miracle,

humming away over black pots and nibs,

the sunny room, the light, the harmless ease of it.'

There are some beautiful photographs of Kahan at work in his studio too.*

This is quite a show, and I am assuming that some of these were among portraits by Kahan collected in a volume by Melbourne University Press in 1981, Australian Writers: the Face of Literature. The mind boggles at the thought of the cost of similar commissions for such a journal today. Many thoughts, many voices, indeed, and Kahan's inimitable style, fluid and emotionally intelligent, unites them all.

My favourites at first viewing I think are the captivating, surprisingly angular Patrick White portrait, the Miles Franklin, Francis Webb, Marjorie Barnard, Alan Marshall and the series of dinner sketches capturing Clem Christesen, Stephen Murray-Smith and a bunch of others at Meanjin's 21st anniversary dinner. There's a sense of listening in over their faces, rather than their shoulders, that's quite arresting. (So nice of Ms Gaston to pop all the notes on the website like this. Made to blog, and I hope they stay there.)

Louis Kahan was born in Vienna in 1905, and had a rich and fascinating creative life in Europe, North Africa and the US before coming to Australia in 1950. He was qualified as a master tailor, like his father, but used his father's customers as his first artistic models before taking on portraiture in the Army in the Second World War, where he felt his true artistic apprenticeship was served:

From 1943-5 Kahan began his personal contribution to the war effort, drawing thousands of portraits of wounded allied soldiers, mostly Americans, signing them modestly "by a guy from Paris". Copies of these portraits on 'Victory Mail' were sent to loved ones back home and many of the original drawings are held in War Museums in Australia and the United Kingdom.

In 2005 several hundred of these were presented to the Red Cross Museum in Washington by his family. Through these portraits, Kahan honed his skills and his ability to capture the essence of his subject with economy and speed. These qualities proved useful on his return to Paris after the war, when Kahan was employed as a staff artist by Le Figaro to cover the war trials of Pétain and other collaborators and they remained the hallmarks of his work.

(http://louiskahan.com)

He designed sets and costumes for the National Ballet and Sadler's in the UK as well as for Australian theatre and opera productions, and on his 90th birthday his peers awarded him the Australian Painters and Sculptors Medal, an honour given only to a handful of artists. More about his remarkable life and work, here; I hope to borrow Lou Klepac's 1990 bio soon from a public library near me.

Kahan drew painters and musicians in Australia as well as writers, and clearly had developed the art of capturing the face of creativity, if that's not too hackneyed a way to come at it. My thanks to Dena Kahan for inviting me to the opening, a truly moving and momentous occasion in Melbourne life and letters.

The exhibition will be at the gallery on Swanston Street (near the corner of Elgin Street) until April 22nd.

ern is alive, well and painting up a storm

If you're going through or around or near Bendigo on or before March 18, make sure you catch this.

I had a bit of R+R up there the other weekend, and enjoyed it very much, as well as a trip to the Bendigo art gallery itself just across the street, and a good hike around the city (AND A RIDE ON A COUNTRY TRAIN for the first time in about thirty-four years. Why have I left it so long? Added to list of excellent 3/4-hour writing spots - the cafe at Southern Cross Station, overlooking the country platforms. 'I had not thought death had undone so many', AND IT'S CLEAN AND SHINY and there's bloody good coffee.)

I lifted a quotation from an installation of winebottles at the exhibition I was in town for, to give you a taste of the Heide-mentary flavour artists Kahan, Johnson and Burder infused it with. See this as a bottle label, of course:

Grunge Hermitage

Grunge Hermitage is generally regarded as Australia's
most influential red. Full bodied and spicy, it is the
ideal accompaniment to any art of a modernist
flavour. This great wine is made from selected
hermitage grapes grown on the rolling hills of
Bulleen in Victoria. Matured in small and exquisitely
crafted Murrumbeena ceramic ramekins prior to
bottling, Grunge Hermitage will appreciate with
additional historical perspective. During bottle
maturation it may show a slight crustiness -
therefore it is recommended that it be debunked
prior to serving and imbibed with due irreverence.

Worth seeing for the cheeky kitchen and modernist en plein air photos alone. And I didn't even mention the 'Chorus Line of Images of Evil Plus SpaceHopper', did I? Or the 'Stoush in the Kitchen Garden', or the Ned Kelly wallpaper? Even Max Harris' hair is not immune from the  mockumentary treatment. This is the show's second outing so far: to top it all off, it was created at Bundanon when all three were on a residency there. There were even a few penguins in view...