Hey! So the Che Cosa! exhibition that I talked about in the last post has now sadly come to a close, but, as the old saying goes, when one exhibition closes another one opens.
Late last year I was lucky enough to be in an exhibition at the Monash University Museum of Art, the show was titled Art as a Verb and curated by Francis Parker, Charlotte Day and Patrice Sharkey. I really liked that show and I guess other people did too because very excitingly it's now traveling to ArtSpace in Sydney and will be opening this Thursday June 4 (aka tomorrow!) from 6-8pm. Come along! Here's the flyer.
Artspace is one of my very favourite art spaces so I'm super chuffed to show my work there, not to mention how amazing it is to once again be exhibiting alongside so many of my homies including Yoko Ono, Anastasia Klose, Claes Oldenburg, Martin Creed, Fischli and Weis, DAMP, Marina Abramović, Robert Rooney, Heath Franco (who in the last blog post was seen eating an italian Twistie out of his partner Jodies' nostril), and also exhibiting in Art as A Verb is british artist Ryan Gander.
Last night I went to see Ryan Gander give a public Q and A with curator Hannah Matthews at the State Library of Victoria, presented in the lead up to his show that opens tonight at ACCA, (the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art). I really like Ryan Gander, he's pretty darn awesome. Here's a drawing I did during last nights talk.
In my drawing the Powerpoint slide you can see on the big screen is a photograph documenting an artwork Ryan Gander made where every once in a while a wind would blow through an otherwise empty gallery. I picked that slide to be the drawing cause it's such a funny piece to try and document, it's essentially just a photo of a woman in a white room with her scarf blowing a little.
But it's probably too hard to pick that up from the above photo, as you can see it was pretty dark during the talk, way too dark to be drawing and trying to do so kind of strained my eyes. It was only after the talk when the lights came up that I was able to really even see what I'd drawn.
21 x 29cm. Acrylic on 225gsm paper.
And it turns out that in the drawing I'd made Ryan Gander look like an awful lot like an alien.
I guess I'm just not very good at drawing. Well, either that, OR, what's a far more plausible possibility than me having done a drawing inaccurately is that maybe Ryan Gander actually is an alien and the only way you can see his true form is by drawing him. This would explain why he's such a star and his art making is so out of this world. Let's just hope he comes in peace.
While I'm mentioning Ryan Gander's show at ACCA another thing that I'm over the moon about is that on Saturday July 25th I'll be doing a workshop at ACCA from 12-4pm, responding to the Ryan Gander show, as part of their kids and families workshop day.
Three other artists (Meredith Turnbull, Sean Peoples and Veronica Kent) will also be running workshops in the space at the same time, so on the day you can drop by for a gander and stay at any of the workshops for as long or as little as you like, and best of all it's free!
So if you're in Melbourne and you've got kids, or you are a kid, come along to ACCA on July 25 and make some art, or at the very least, have some fun. Here's a link if you want more information and I'll be sure to bring it up again when it gets a bit closer, what's more important for now though is that you are very much invited to Art as a Verb at ArtSpace.
Artspace is at 43-51 Cowper Wharf Road, Woolloomooloo in Sydney. Art as a Verb kicks off tomorrow night between 6 and 8pm and remains open until July 26, so if you're not in Sydney now you've still got a good 7 weeks to get there.
Anyway thanks heaps for reading, the truth is out there, hope to see you soon and in the meantime now that the Che Cosa! exhibition has finished here's the video from it that I mentioned in the last post. It's filmed by Georgina Lee and documents when I was at the Colosseum last year and painted a sculpture of the movie Gladiator on blu ray.
(And just for fun, speaking of blu-rays, here's the alien version of Ryan Gander shooting an audience member in the head with a blu ray gun.)
