THIS COULD NOT BE ANY BETTER

I really needed some European retro variety show hijinks today.

Lourdes: a slight return

So, as you might have read in my previous post, I plan to once again revisit The Pilgrims, a work undertaken in Lourdes and Paris with Canadian Filmmaker Toni-Lynn Frederick in 2004. Excuse me if I’m repeating myself – I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately and I know I cover it briefly in my artists statement for The French Connection – but I could never extract a satisfactory ‘outcome’ despite trying several times. With the project already in my mind, hearing Sarah Rodigari speak of her project, Strategies for leaving and arriving home recently was like someone had just cleaned a window, metaphorically speaking. As Sarah talked about the art contained in the walking and the journey itself, it dawned on me that this is precisely what had happened on our own journey in 2004.

In 2004, Toni-Lynn Frederick and I met in Paris, and flew together to Lourdes, in it’s low season.  Throughout our week in Catholic Mecca we looked, we felt, we shot film and video, we held long (recorded) conversations about our experiences growing up Catholic and the details we remembered as well as the details we questioned.  We cast great doubt upon the sanctity of St Bernadette. We ate at the same mixed-asian restaurant, Xuan, every night, with a fruity but charming Vietnamese host who delighted in giving us complementary sake in little pornographic cups while giggling and presented us each with a sweet but wonky watercolour painting to remember him by when we ate our last meal there. Mine is of a water-buffalo. I can’t remember what TLs is.

Then we collected 4 litres of the famous Lourdes water, so often attributed with miracles by the faithful, took it back to Paris and used it to  mix up chemistry in which we developed the film we had shot.  The black and white film developed to blue on blue.  That heavenly ‘Virgin Mary Blue’. I was thrilled.

But until I heard Sarah speak, I hadn’t realised that this journey, from Paris to Lourdes and back was the work and that there was no other outcome I could edit, mix or display that could be any more the artwork than this journey itself.  I also realised that all who know of this project seem to have accepted that unquestioningly over the following years, and that was only me, and perhaps Toni-Lynn, who ever had any thoughts otherwise.

So, my plan now is to create a new, dedicated online archive of what physical and data remains there are of The Pilgrims.  Letters, diaries, photos, video and yes, the resulting delicious blue clips of film. I’ll add reminisces along the way and make sure Toni-Lynn has access so she can too.

I asked her how she felt about my revelation and resulting archive plan and offered her one of the stills I’ve sent to The French Connection and she replied:

Yes, Pilgrim, go forth with my blessing... the 3 nuns look like a rock band. This would be my choice… I’m excited you’re doing this. The project still has life for me; wish we could do this together. It was a great excursion. I loved it.

I loved it too.

So stay tuned, it will be a long process and with no-one in particular waiting on it, it can take as long as it does.

I’ll keep you posted.

P.S. While travelling we plotted our next collaboration. A trip to Mexico where I would attend a wrestling school and TL would document (Yes I have loved the Lucha long time). I know this has now been seen on screen numerous times and perhaps has a flavour of a slightly unsavory exoticism, but we could still do it, right?  And we could take husbands and a toddler yeah? It would be great wouldn’t it?

Un grand nombre de Sœurs

Here follows my artists statement for an upcoming show, The French Connection, opening in Richmond, Virginia (that’s right – the one in the USA) on February 24.  It’s not the most succinct artists statement I have ever written but thinking about my time in France unleashes something of a torrent, it probably reflects that.

“The primary purpose of my arrival in Paris seven and a half years ago was to collaborate with Canadian filmmaker and fellow lapsed Catholic, Toni-Lynn Frederick.  We had met and become fast friends in Vancouver, Canada 4 years earlier.  TL was working on a PhD in the UK at the time and it we managed to orchestrate this meeting, somewhere between our two homes (I live in Tasmania, Australia) quite successfully.

She joined me in Paris and we travelled together to Lourdes (in it’s off season), shot black and white reversal super-8 film, ate at the same mixed-asian restaurant every night, drank, argued about the Catholic church and discussed our experiences growing up within it and tried to record as much of this as possible. We collected 2 large 4 litre jugs of the famous Lourdes water and carried them with us back to Paris where TL taught me to hand-process reversal movie film in chemistry we mixed up with the water we had transported. The film when processed, turned out to be a divine blue-on-blue rather than black and white, like the blue of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s robe.  TL assured me that this sometimes happened in hand-processing, but I prefer to think of it as our personal Lourdes miracle. We planned to call whatever we made with what we had done,The Pilgrims.

I have tried many times in the years since to turn what we have, the film and recordings, into SOMETHING.  I edited together a short video piece soon after but it left me unsatisfied. I have screened short loops of the film (the crown on the Basilica, the ring of stone lambs just a few hundred metres away) for a couple of exhibitions but nothing seemed an appropriate use of this material.

Even prior to being invited to exhibit here, I had made a resolution for 2012 to resolve this work. This exhibition and it’s collision in timing with a local symposium on socially engaged and relational artworks at which I was speaker, exhibitor and audience suddenly made something clear to me – The Pilgrims WAS the trip.  I couldn’t make the work because we had already made it.

I now plan to create a blog to document The Pilgrims, pulling together letters, diary entries, film, video and photographs to act as coda to the project but this has not yet happened so I offer up instead, two small film stills from the project, that I have, rather unimaginatively. titled Two Nuns and Three Nuns respectively (lets date them 2004 – 12) each blessed by me with some of what remains of the Lourdes water. I kept some in a Mary-shaped bottle. As well as ‘rebirthing’ the images, this kind of treatment/abuse of prints has since become somewhat of a signature for me.

The Pilgrims took up one month of a four month residency and while there were brief visits from my husband, some other family and from Europe based friends, for much of the time I was lonely. I suffer periodically from both agora and social phobias and I was gripped by both while resident at the Cité Internationale des Arts. I also drank very heavily.

The video Encore was shot in my studio over an afternoon and night, as I sang along repeatedly to an aria from  Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers that had continually brought me some comfort while simultaneously breaking my heart, Je Croix Entende Encore.  The first take was performed sober, and subsequent takes performed as I consumed a sequence of martinis. The drunken take used was after about 9, but in actuality I continued to drink until I collapsed and had a little blackout on the  marble floor of my studio. I had hoped that some great truth might be revealed in the comparison.  You know that old furphy that you always tell the truth when you are drunk?  This video suggests it is a lie. While sober me is reserved but open, drunk me is a game-playing showoff. She looks like a liar to me.

I’m glad now that when I met our curator Amie Oliver at the Cité I was sober.  She and another Australian artist, Eugenia Raskopoulos ambushed and commandeered me as a fellow body to storm the Australian embassy and crash an exhibition opening there in protest of the fact that we were not invited. These two women tore me from my solitude and ensured that my last month there was not so lonely, nor wasted. We three linked arms and together crashed more events, drank hot chocolate, walked in the snow and adored Paris together. I will always be grateful for their friendship.

From the distant to the recent, A Pack of Lies is my first artwork made for podcast and incorporates the voices of both our curator, Amie and her partner Harry Kollatz Jnr. (who I was lucky to meet in Paris also) who volunteered as two of the sixteen readers of alternate biographies of my life. Biographies borrowed from film-stars, musicians and sportspeople. It was always important to me that the lies were openly declared as such and so I assembled a selection of readers who knew me personally.  I am not a good liar or a happy one and can only tell lies if I also confess immediately. How very Catholic, I imagine you thinking. Someone told me recently of this work They know it’s not true. I can hear the smiles in their voices. I think I’m happiest when friends give in to my vision and join me in a quest for the ridiculous. This was just such a project.

My time in Paris tore me down and filled me up again and was entirely instrumental to my continuing body of work that has proceeded as an an investigation of identity and the self.  It was a time where I learnt new skills in both craft and diplomacy and was given the opportunity not only to meet with friends and collaborators old and new but to also be truly with myself in a completely messy and exploratory but ultimately constructive way. And all surrounded by the greatest beauty I could ever imagine.

Sally Rees
January 2012″

Below: Me, Eugenia, Amie – @Angelinas for the finest hot chocolate in the known universe. Paris 2004

…and a week later, my Touchy Feely wrap-up.

So… where were we?

I was off to the Debate/Panel Discussion which turned out to be neither but instead a very general discussion, ably chaired/managed by Sarah Rodigari* on the topic Art should be instrumentalised to make a better world.

But just before I go into that I should briefly mention the CWA CBD who spoke the following night about their branch and projects. It was unfortunate that so many of the participants had been called back to busy lives by the time Paula Silva, Bec Stevens and Judith Abell spoke on behalf of their project on the Friday  Saturday night which is jolly interesting in terms of socially engaged practice both for its adopted model of and legitimate entry into the CWA network (the acronym stands for Country Womens Association, just in case you didn’t know) but just as much because of the vague confusion it caused me.

Unfortunately I had to leave this session before it ended, but I did get to hear a bit of talk about Bec Stevens CWA project STOP. REST. PLAY. , which was rewarding because this was precisely where my confusion lay.  Bec, who became a mum for the first time well within a month of when I did too, conceived it as a resting space for parents and young children. A place in the city where kids could safely play, tea could be made, nappies changed, sandwiches eaten and fruit divided: a place such as did not currently exist in Hobart. As a new(ish) mum also, I found this space to be an oasis in the city during it’s 3 weeks of operation and I quickly volunteered to be available for some shifts to help keep it running. Why not? I welcomed it, it helped out the CWA project and it was the easiest place to be with my son, Arthur, in tow. Plus Arthur loved to be there.

My confusion lay in the fact that although I loved it, welcomed it and have volunteered myself should another, more permanent, setup be orchestrated, I found myself unable to assess it as an artwork. I assumed I was so grateful for it’s existence in my role as a mum, that I was simply unable to look at it with a critical ‘art’ eye. And in the end I did love it. Why did it matter if I identified it as a good facility or good art? But it troubled me because I really wanted to be able to respond to it as a fellow artist.

When Bec spoke at the final night of TF, she talked about the small CWA shop, a few blocks up from the city centre, and how it was the only place she saw elderly women in the city. About children who are also visually absent from it’s streets.  Without anywhere to ‘be’ within the city centre, factions of our community like children and the elderly have lost ownership of the city. In fact the city is gravely in danger of becoming a site where only commerce has a home as opposed to a place where people ‘live’.  Bec sourced a site for the project with a broad shopfront with the express purpose of allowing children, families, breastfeeding mothers to be VISIBLE, and in doing so provided a valuable picture for our city of just how else things might be. This visualisation of a suggestion, an aspiration… well, of course that’s art.  And I’m suprised at myself that all it took was for me to be inside that frame to have difficulty seeing that.

But back to Thursday night…

It was a pretty rousing conversation and the entire room spoke with passion across the evening.  I do wish I had taken better notes (er… or any) or at least written this summation fresh off the back of it because mostly all I can remember well enough to report accurately are my own thoughts.  I’d hate to misrepresent anyone so this is all I shall tend to here.

I do hope the audio record of this event goes up on the Touchy Feely Tumblr some time soon because, in very brief summation, it was a ripping chat.

I listened and listened and when I couldn’t hold my thoughts any more they tumbled out of me like a big, wordy fountain.  Much of it was thoughts I had already constructed that day and written into my previous blog post but at the core of it was this:

That for me, the word should was highly problematic, for it suggests that artists have some social responsibility beyond attempting, with all authenticity, to produce relevant, wonderful, fine and GOOD art. In my opinion this is the only should an artist should concern themselves with.   This does not negate the work of the artist that does, as a part of their works construct or function, enact some direct societal change, but to agree with this statement somewhat discredits the work of artists that investigate an infinite variety of other subjects, themes and concerns.  It would suggest for instance, that an artist whose works are highly visual, aesthetic investigations does not have the same value as an artist whose work creates a more tangible societal ‘improvement’ (and I think we have all agreed through this project how malleable and subjective terms like ‘improvement’ are anyway).

Ultimately I would argue (and I did) that if you believe in the value of culture; it’s ability to both enrich and elevate society, then you must also believe that to ‘make a better world’, all one need do is to continue to practice as an artist and attempt through that practice to produce relevant, wonderful, fine and GOOD art.

This is no small thing.  For as one participant in this discussion so rightly pointed out, Australia is a country that doesn’t really value it’s artists. I noted last post (and suggested this as a reason for the current prevalence of relational and socially engaged practice), that artists are viewed very suspiciously outside our own field.  To continue to practice and identify as an artist is actually somewhat of a transgression against the wider Australian community. I know that I have been guilty of embarrassment in social situations when answering the question ‘What do you do?’, I have apologetically mumbled ‘Oh… I’m an artist…’ and extricated myself with some speed to avoid accusation and confrontation.

But I don’t do this any more, because despite making work that might appear to be entirely self-absorbed, I do believe that this is my role, my job and the best contribution I can make and I do my very best to produce relevant, wonderful, fine and GOOD art at all times. Of course I don’t hit that target each time. I just keep aiming and hope the bullseyes come more frequently.  And how very Australian of me to construct a sports analogy to defend the value of my societal role as an artist.

So yes, while I have managed (as I so often do) to turn this into a rant about myself, in truth this is my statement of confidence investment in the profession of visual artist. Cheerleading, if you will. Some of you make amazing art projects that, in a very direct fashion, work to improve lives, but relational and socially engaged works are a narrow mode of practice in the larger scheme of culture and there are an infinite number of ways to make art. So if you are an artist who wants to be the good in the world, just go make things and have ideas. Try very hard to make good art. I genuinely believe that this will also make a better world through providing ideas, aesthetics and aspiration.

Yes. I am that idealistic and sentimental.

And so what of sentimentality? The single niche I found for myself within this whole symposium. Is socially engaged art too sentimental? Is my art too sentimental? Well… we never got to that. And sadly I didn’t get a single response to my yardstick work.  So I have to then surmise that yes, it is too sentimental for discussion. I’m still unsure of details such as whether that means that people just don’t feel comfortable talking about it with me because the sentimentality makes them uncomfortable or because the sentimentality makes bad art which makes them uncomfortable, but the experiment so far speaks for itself. Or does it?

I would still, really, like to know.

* Yes, I’ll throw Sarah’s name in again.  She’s interesting, engaged and stayed to contribute right across the duration of the event. Plus she wore a lovely blouse. Okay -  full disclosure: I do seem to have become a fan.

Touchy Feely thoughts to date.

I want to use my blog to here organise some thoughts I have after last nights Touchy Feely presentations and discussion. I hope those practitioners more directly involved in relational or socially engaged practice will forgive me if I am rehashing thoughts you have already talked to death amongst yourselves. I feel like a visitor in a country under slight unrest. I apologise wholeheartedly if this is relational aesthetics 101.

Last night the most burning issue seemed to be about outcome. How do you record an ephemeral work for reportage back to those who funded it? And how remarkable that most artists speaking have, at times or all the time, not felt comfortable reporting the negative aspects of their social engagement, instead packaging the projects in the aftermath as something that more resembles the utopian glimmers of their initial, very genuine, aspiriation.

I find this a little suprising as I have always believed it was an important step in moving forward and in my small experience (I stepped away from the funding circuit some years ago and am only just starting to consider hopping back on the gravy train) reports of the ‘failures’ as well as the ‘successes’ were always a welcomed, and I always assumed, expected, part of the acquittal process.

Last night I raised the subject of ‘community arts’ as opposed to ‘art that engages with the community’. I trailed off a bit without making any particular point as, to some degree, I was thinking out loud. But I was certainly not moving to suggest that one was the right way to go about things and the other wrong… I think where I was going with that subject is it that it seemed a general consensus that it is very hard to get the genuine, bona-fide public to actually engage as you would wish which is often what leads to the ‘failures’ (we also discussed the impotence of the terms ‘success’ and ‘failure’ last night but I use them here for their convenience.) that occur. The participants instead become the invested art community, friends and family rather than the broader community.

When I began my work of the last 10 years where I have focussed almost exclusively on the self, it was in part because I felt very much that artists were mistrusted by the non-arts public. That we were viewed as tricksters, charlatans and scammers (I think I hoped I could win back some general-public pals to the cause of culture by giving up something of myself instead of asking something from them). I think that could also contribute to an explanation of why this mode of working is on the rise. We want to contribute positively. We want to be seen as contributing positively. Anyway… I raised the community arts subject last night because I think in the shift from ‘community arts’ to ‘art that engages with the community’ that there has been another shift where the responsibility of storysharing/data collection and presentation has moved from the public themselves to the artist, and that makes it harder to disprove these negative views of artists and our utopian experiments within the community. The term I used a lot last night and in the wake of the Iteration Again project is ‘colonialism’.

While I have to believe that the sentimentality of the artists impetus is entirely genuine, I do feel that the appearance of ‘colonialism’ must be very carefully negotiated and shed because of the way it pushes potential participants/audience away. And I do believe something may be able to be gleaned from the field of community arts practice to assist in that negotiation. Because regardless of whether artists begin to talk about and celebrate the failures as well as the successes, unless we view each artwork as the experiment it is, learn from those failures and take that knowledge forward, there is a distinct possibility, as Amy Spiers suggested, that artists may become trapped in a cycle of wishing to do good in a world that simply does not want their version of what ‘good’ is.

I may be wrong, but when discussion turned to funding last night, I got the impression that, largely in this mode of practice, funding goes towards the cost of documentation. Well produced photographs, video or a publication that asserts the artwork took place. If it is true that the failures fail to be reported and investigated because one feels responsibility to the funding body to present only a positive outcome, then surely it is better to dispense with the idea of funding a document at all. Just make a work. Let it be over when it is over except in your thoughts and words and the way it goes on to inform your later practice. I suspect I’m oversimplifying the problem but perhaps, as in Sarah Rodigaris case, the work remains truly ephemeral. It just happened. The work for anyone but Sarah or those she encountered must remain an elusive concept and we must simply trust that it occured.

By this I don’t mean to naively suggest that projects centered in human interaction should cost nothing to produce. Just that perhaps this problem might be simpler than it appears. When I was a child and wanted something that cost I found ways to make the money or if you like, to fund the project. It might serve us well to revisit this mode of operation as Sarah did in selling off her belongings. Sell something. Make something someone needs. And when we do apply for funding, rather than focussing on publications we should consider instead, applying for an area of the project where ‘value’ is more concrete- the wages of the artists involved. I know the artists time and talent is often devalued in favour of other aspects to enable a project to take flight on limited funds, but it should be non-negotiable. It shouldn’t require documentation or a successful outcome, merely a well-kept timesheet. Success or failure, receiving a wage will still help you move forward to the next project. But I have digressed…

At the risk of sounding like a sudden evangelical Sarah Rodigari fan, I was cheered by her reluctance to give too much away of what occurred on her journey. She seemed protective of the people she encountered, who became enmeshed in her artwork along the way and the more I digest what she has made and what she has to say, the more I believe that this may be a little lacking – that is to say, the lack is an understanding that when you are engaging with the public for the purposes of creating an artwork, those who do enter into the role of participant are doing so very generously and we need to consider more carefully what they receive in return for their engagement and what we do with the material sourced from/through them. And this is outside of any University driven ethics requirement, but rests simply in human responsibility to other humans.

Unless we are particularly resourceful, we pay in some way for every other material we might use as an artist. How are we paying for this material? How are we paying the public for their engagement? We can’t be naive and ignore the fact that a successful project is often our stepping stone to the next opportunity. But how are those giving time and sharing their lives being valued and compensated? I don’t believe that answer is that participants should be paid (I was uncomfortable with Hobart artist’s James Newitt’s 2009 work $1 for your story because of the named value it put upon the participants contributions) but I do think consideration of the possibility that neither the artist nor a funding body entirely owns the content (their likeness, experience, words or emotion) that people contribute (whether or not they are anonymous) is an important ethical idea that must be given greater consideration in documentation, reportage and promotion. The art project merely becomes a facility where this data is stored and respect for the data and it’s true owner must not be forgotten.

Perhaps this has not become as big an issue as it (arguably) should, because as many pointed out last night, the reluctance of the general public to become involved means that so often the demographic of participants is made up of friends, family, other artists; people with a personal investment in the success of the project. But if this issue was to garner greater consideration, perhaps the desired participants might not be so hard to source, projects might have more genuine outcomes, experiments might have more accurate results that we can learn from…

What do you think? I don’t know if I’m right about any of this but I certainly wonder about all of it.

I am glad to have all that off my chest and in safe blog storage for later rumination because tonights Touchy Feely panel discussion examines the suggestion that ‘Art should be instrumentalised to make a better world.’ and requires me to think about different things.

Now, hopefully, I can go talk on topic without doing boring dredges back to last nights yak-yak that send everyone snoozing and are alarmingly ‘off-point’.

I shall hit the ‘publish’ button and go form my thoughts about that right now…

Duet for Friends: alive and dead (2012)

My Disquiet Year exhibition of 2009 was sentimental. It consisted of works of a theraputic nature that I made to help me make sense of a time of distress and ill-health and that I had not really thought about showing until the opportunity came up quickly and I wanted to take it and they were just what I had waiting in the studio at that time. I had less feedback on and direct responses to that show and those works than most other things I’ve done. I wondered if it was embarrassing for people… if it was too much…

Much of the work I make would easily be classified as sentimental and with the ‘S’ word being key to the whole Touchy Feely thing, I decided to make a yardstick work; the most sentimental work I could produce.  Not a pictures-of-kittens, remember-when, ha-ha-I’m-so-lame sentimental work but something genuine and heartfelt. Then we might have an answer to TFs queries about whether it’s possible for things to get TOO sentimental.

Ten years ago this coming November, I suddenly lost a very close friend who I had known since high school.  She was an energetic, creative person who breathed music and was the first great influence on my musical tastes after my older siblings.  She died just before I began my MFA research which focussed on popular music and once I was done I dedicated my thesis to her.  I would be lying if I said that I still think of her every day but I do still think of her most days.

After her funeral her brother sent me a cassette tape of recordings they had made together, cover versions of old blues, folk and rock. Guitar, piano and voice, recorded casually, probably over a single weekend.  From this I chose their version of Bob Dylan and Rick Danko’s This Wheels on Fire not just because of her lead vocal but also the poetic commentary on our friendship that it provides. You know the way songs mean everything and describe your life perfectly as a teenager? Just like that. I think her brother actually played this recording at the funeral service but it’s one of those things that it’s hard to remember.

I recorded myself singing it with her. Very simply, re-singing her vocal line. This is the work.

I don’t think you need any further details about her or me or our friendship for the work to have value and I won’t be making a file of it available online for you to listen to.  It’s a very intimate thing and if you want to hear it you should go to the gallery and slip on the headphones.  If you can’t get to this gallery and you really want to hear it maybe you could try to get it to play in a gallery near you. I don’t mean to be difficult but context is everything, yeah?

I don’t think I would make this work without having this vehicle as an opportunity to ask the question: is it too much?

So – Inflight in Hobart, from the 25th to the 29th, 1 – 5pm.

And I really want to know what you think.

Duet for Strangers: Tricky and Jess (2012)

This is an approximation of one new work which I hope will be seen (gallery space pending) in Touchy Feely next week. The two videos will play on small monitors placed in relation to each other in the room and loop constantly. That looping is not going to happen here of course, but you can hit play on both and get a sense of what will be.

The genesis of this work is that these two friends of mine who have never met and do not know each other have each, independently, expressed that they think they are capable of making the most annoying noise that is humanly possible. And these are those noises.

I’m happy with this in many ways.  I was so tired of looking at my own face as I worked that I stopped making videos last year.  I obliterated that face with paint. I made audio works. I am gently edging back but to look at these two brilliant creatures instead is, for me at least, sweet relief.

And I can’t help but romanticise it. I think they will be like two sweet, strange little birds calling to each other in a room.

Happy New Year.

P.S. Apologies in advance to my dearest husband who works in the gallery where these will be.

UPDATE: Due to the number of artists and space being at a premium and all that, this work WON’T appear in the Touchy Feely exhibition after all. It waits patiently for it’s eventual venue. Please stay tuned for a post on the work that will DEFINITELY be in.

Touchy Feely

Touchy Feely  will be much of my life next week. Based here in Hobart it’s a… well… not exactly a symposium, it’s much more casual than that but something LIKE that and it seeks to answer the question ‘Is socially engaged and relational art too sentimental?’.

Now rightly or wrongly, I’ve never really aligned myself with the school of thought that is relational aesthetics, and I draw a long bow to describe myself as particularly ‘socially engaged’, but I AM a sentimental idiot and quite blatantly and deliberately so in many of the works I have made over the years and so, once I stopped worrying about how relational or socially engaged I might be, I was really pleased to have been invited to exhibit and talk and play and swill around in a pit of ideas for a brief 5 days. Because I also LIKE to talk art and dissect ideas and swill around and this year folks, I’m prising the chrysalis open a little wider and hoping to be more active and participatory than I have been for a while.

The Touchy Feely exhibition will open next Wednesday, 25 January, 5:30 at Inflight ARI and will feature a series of lightening fast artist talks from those taking part.  It’ll be like the speed dating of artist talks.  They call it Pecha Kucha but I’ll lay it right out on the table and tell you  – I don’t really know what that means. I think basically before you have a chance to be bored by me, I’ll be done and someone else who may interest you more will be talking and flashing pictures at you.

So come along if you’re in the area. You can check out the Touchy Feely Tumblr for the schedule of events for the rest of the week and more info about the artists involved.

I’m also taking part in a debate of the statement ‘Art should be instrumentalised to make a better world’ er… it may be a debate but it may be simply a discussion panel.  I’ll prep for one and wing it for the other.  See? CASUAL.  What a spiffing way to spend a Friday night. Especially since So You Think You Can Dance, US, Season 7 has finished.

If you’re interested in this project but not in Hobart, I plan to keep blogging my way through it (What? Yeah!) as do the curators, Pip and Amy who also hope to post video of performances, talks etc.  So tune in.

Shortly will come a couple more posts about the two NEW works I will have in the exhibition. Stay tuned.

Later Gators.

P.S. I know I haven’t blogged in a very long time. I haven’t meant to avoid talking about activity but it’s been lots of studio noodling and mothering,  then Xmas, then some more noodling and mothering to now. Some of the noodling coming to fruition. Some of it is rubbish. We’re over a hump now.

Bootleg movie posters from Ghana

From Awesome Robo.  Click for more.  Cujo‘s a gas.

This is a public service announcement.

Hi.  How are you.

When I look at the stats for this blog I can see what people have been looking for.  It’s enlightening reading.  Often they arrive accidentally, a lot of the time by Googling the word arse, searching for someone named Keyra Augustina (and more specifically her arse or ass), Kate Bush’s breasts and also, more mystifyingly, what is a ferret.

But I can also see that people are looking for more specific things, usually specific videos of mine and possibly leave this blog a little befuddled and disappointed by not finding a YouTube branded link.  Maybe all the stuff on the blog is confusing but I’ve always found my art and life to be intrinsically linked so haven’t felt the need in the past to separate them more divisively.

My tip to jump straight to the art, is to use the tags and categories on the right side there. Art will limit the chit-chat purely to art whereas i made this will limit more specifically just to my art (and words and things).

I used to have a website for years but I killed it for various reasons.  Even when I did, I only used video stills, not actual video.  At the time I couldn’t afford the space to host videofiles at a quality that satisfied me and I was dissatisfied by the compression available through YouTube and such and preferred to directly provide people with video upon request, which is still as I prefer to share what I do now (outside of exhibitions). It’s been my little filter of quality control.

But great leaps have been made in the available quality through the YouTubes etc. and they are now very different beasts and whats more I have opened a Vimeo account where I am about to start loading up an archive of stuff. Even more startling I am building a new sally-rees-artist website but it’s taking some time, so I hope those of you who are finding the blog frustrating can bear with it just a little longer.  If you want moving images, please email me (sallyrees70@gmail.com) with your address for a showreel or enquire direct about a specific work and I’ll be more than happy to pop something in the post to you.  That’s how I roll.

This blog will stay an integral part of my online presence as I find it a great place to write my thoughts about a works genesis/creation/life, write about other artists work, make announcements, post inspirational nuggets, noodle about my life and occasionally just get on my soapbox about something. There will be a link back here from the website when it is done.

Be patient with me.  I’ll reward you with moving pictures.  Lots of moving pictures.

Thanks for listening I hope this is helpful.