Sunday, December 22, 2013

Wham, Bam, Artbank you ma'am

Hey pal, hope you're well, here's two things I'm really excited to talk about. 

The first is that my car now has antlers and a red nose. Here's two goofy photos of me installing them.
Attaching the nose was pretty tricky, it's a good thing I had these instructions.
And so if you hear of any reports of reindeer sightings on the roads of Melbourne, although there's a good chance it's the real Rudolph, there's also a chance it might just be me.

The second thing I'm really excited to talk about is that a 1000-word writing / image art work type of thing I was commissioned to do has officially been published in the very first issue of Sturgeon

Sturgeon is a new publication that's being put out by Artbank Australia. (Artbank is a government support program that helps contemporary Australian art by buying artists work and allowing companies and individuals that might not be able to actually buy art the opportunity to rent it.)

Here's my name on the Sturgeon list of contributors page, just below the great Patricia Piccinini. Sadly I can't help but feeling that her bio is just slightly more impressive than my bio.


Also appearing on Sturgeon's list of contributors is Tim Flannery, an "internationally acclaimed scientist, explorer and conservationist" who in 2007 won Australian of the year, ha, so nobody's bio can compete with his.

Anyway so basically for my piece I was invited to look through Artbank's collection and pick out a handful of works to respond to, in a similar way to when I've done things like putting my painting of a newspaper into a newspaper stand
or taking my sculpture of a Macbook Pro to the Apple Store.
The piece is titled 5 hours, 10 Artworks, and the title is pretty much the entire concept for the work; I documented the process of giving myself exactly 5 hours to photograph 10 artworks. 
I'll write more about the project later but for now I just kind of wanted to mention it so that if you want to you can get your hands on a copy and hopefully it can just speak for itself. (Click on this sentence for a link to see all the places you can find it.)

But so yeah, a huge thanks to Daniel, Maria, and the entire amazing team at Artbank, as well as Mark from Chapman and Bailey. I'm really lucky and proud to have had the opportunity to work with these guys, it was so much fun, and also I'm really grateful for being given so much freedom, trust and encouragement to do what I do.

I also really want to thank the artists whose art I had the privilege of working with. (Howard Arkley, Jon Cattapan, Marcel Cousins, Greg Creek, Anastasia Klose, Colin Parker, Adam Pyett, Lisa Radford, Victoria Reichelt, Darren Sylvester and Ben Taylor.)

Oh and I also wanna say thanks to the team that designed the layout of Sturgeon for doing an awesome job in presenting my piece in such a unique and effective way.

And so yeah, that's about it, I'm really happy with the thing and hope you get a chance to check it out.

Oh and so lastly, the publication's called Sturgeon because it's named after the founding director of Artbank; Graeme Sturgeon, however it's also called Sturgeon because sturgeon is a type of fish that produces caviar. I've never tried caviar before so I figured what might be a fancy way to wrap up this blog post would be to go out and eat some. 

The cheapest restaurant I could find that has caviar charges $170 for a serving of 30 grams. Ha, obviously that's out of my price range, but alternatively I discovered you can buy caviar in a jar for $5.50 from Woolworths.

I didn't really know what to do with the caviar once I got it home, but it looks a lot like Vegemite so I just treated it the same; butter some toast and spread it on top.

It tasted pretty yuck, but not as yuck I was expecting. It was just an overwhelming fish taste, and I don't really like fish too much. It's no peanut butter that's for sure.

Even though I gagged and teared up on the first bite I got used to the strong flavour pretty quick and, partly due to the fact that I was really hungry, I ate every last bite of the toast.

But ok that's all I wanted to say, thanks so much for reading, I Ho Ho Hope you have a very merry Christmas and I'll see you soon.
On a side note, while driving home from buying the caviar one of the antlers fell off my car, so if you happen to see a red nosed reindeer going in circles around and around a roundabout this holiday season, either the real Rudolph has lost an antler as well, or it's probably just me in my lopsided car.

Sunday, December 15, 2013

Duck in the middle with you

Hey grown up how's it going? I'm a little bit closer to being a grown up myself now that school's out for ever. No longer am I an art student, now I'm just an art ist. 

Here's a photo taken of me just before I deinstalled the VCA Honours Grad Show, using a Nikon d90 DSLR to document my sculpture of a Nikon d90 DSLR.
And here I am using an iPhone 4s to document my sculpture of an iPhone 4s.
And after that, here I am eating Vegemite toast in front of my sculpture of a toaster, as well as drinking tea in front of my sculpture of a Mug, out of the mug that the sculpture was based on.
Yesterday I finally paid the overdue fine I had at the uni library which meant that I could access my results, and I'm very pleased to say that my marks weren't terrible. 

Can you believe I actually got dux?

Ha, no, I didn't really get dux, I'm sure plenty of people would've gotten higher marks than me. I don't even know if they award dux in Australia or if it's just something I learnt about from American TV. Coincidentally though I did actually get ducks. 

Two of them. 

Donald and Daffy. 

Here they are hiding in the ferns next to the duck garden ornament.
I was a bit annoyed when I first heard we got ducks, because we've had them before and gave them away because of the mess they make; ducks poo so much, way more than chooks, but then I actually saw the ducks and I didn't care about that at all.

Just looking at these guys makes me so happy.Wait, what was I trying to say before I started going on about ducks? Something about being a grown up. It doesn't matter. These ducks are cute, with their big beaky grins, quacking away as they waddle around never further than a meter apart. 

Best of all is that since we've got the ducks walking about my backyard now makes everything else in my head feel as humble, heartbreaking and hopeful as being in a Leunig drawing.
Thanks heaps for reading, hope you enjoy the nest of your day and I'll let you get quack to whatever it was you were doing.