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?

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.

Erotographomania

… is the title of the show I created A Pack of Lies for.  Curated by Sarah Jones and in part by my late friend Phillip Watkins, it’s a show coiled around the power of the love letter and it opens tonight at CAST Gallery at 6:00pm.

An installed multi-channel mix of the various episodes of A Pack of Lies  is there in the foyer for presence and so will I and my little family be, just for a short while before the small guys bedtime.  You would be most welcome.

A Pack of Lies

Hi Blog and Blogees.

I’ve been very busy with a small boy but in the gaps I have finished something new and rather large (in content if not physical size).

A Pack of Lies is an artwork I have made for podcast.   That’s right, podcast.  It’s an underutilised venue for audio artworks I think and I hope works well for this kind of narrative piece.

It consists of a series of readings by friends of falsified biographies of my life, which have been crudely adapted from those of famous musicians, actors, sportspeople and artists.

For me, it’s nothing short of astonishing to listen to, and the fact that it is beyond impossible for me to glean what the experience of this work might be for someone who is NOT me, has been somewhat liberating.

I’m usually very audience-conscious, perhaps far too much.  So now this particularly ‘me,me,me’ work is out there and I would really welcome any feedback on it’s successes and failures.

Thank you to my voices: Emma Bett, Monica Coates, Monique Germon, Louise Guest, Andrew Harper, John Ingleton, Kate Kelly, Harry Kollatz Jnr., Amie Oliver, Carol Ransley, Cath Robinson, Peter Robinson, Neil Rowe, Pip Stafford, Matt Warren and Yvette Watt.

You can download A Pack of Lies for free at http://lies.podomatic.com or if you prefer you can access it through the iTunes store, also for free.  Just search my name and the title in the ‘podcast’ section.

And do come back here and let me know how you got on.

Tonight I’m going to HELL

… to Hell Gallery for the Inflight exchange show, (Tasmania is an anagram of) I AM SATAN.  Well… in spirit anyway.  I shall go to bed early and astral travel.

Get along to Hell Gallery if you’re in Melbourne and to m’colleagues – do have fun, I’ll be thinking of you and thanks for inviting me to be a part.

 

 

replacing the Snowglobe rabbits

…beacause I left the originals at the Auberge in Montreal.

Our kitchen has been a veritable plague for the last 3 days.

First day installing today.  Wish us luck.

The Great Escape/La Evasion Grande

Still from video with stereo sound.  Sally Rees + Matt Warren, 2008 – 2010

One of works FINALLY picked up and finished after 2 years which will be in our show, Of Heaven and Earth: works from Montreal opening at 6A on February 12.

Language

January is fast disappearing and I am pretty well at my desk as much as I can be,  getting ready for these two Feb shows, so still not blogging as much as I would like to be.

The art is the thing though eh? I know my priorities…

For the Jazz Festival project, I am working with two wonderful translators for the deaf, Roey and John, to develop a video for the Jazz Café.  I will start shooting the video in about a week but in the meantime, at our meeting last week, Roey generously did some on the spot translations for my still camera of one of the great classics (and a strong childhood memory song for me), Summertime.

While never really having mastered any other languages (I just ‘get by’ overseas) I am always fascinated with the changes in construct, syntax and logic that happen in translation so this part of the project is really interesting.  I enjoy being amazed about how much I don’t know; in this case about how many signed languages are in use in any one place and about how many things cease to make sense or change meaning as they are converted – translation is truly an art.

When the translators (among other people) ask me where the idea came from for the work, I have to confess that I think I lifted the idea from my old friend Louise.  A gifted writer and eternally original thinker, about fifteen years ago Louise expressed interest in submitting some work to a local festival of erotic writing.  There was to be an evening of writers reading their prose for an audience and she had the idea to ask a deaf performer to sign the work for her instead.  She was fascinated by the idea of how the physical signs for her words might heighten their erotic effect.

Unfortunately it seemed to be too touchy a request and she was unable to get any leads to find an appropriate and willing performer so it never happened.  But I never forgot it.

It’s actually a much better idea than mine but I hope in my case a visual translation of these classic jazz lyrics will at least bring something new to them for the fans of the genre.

…and I hope Louise still writes.  I have no doubt she still thinks!

Installation F A I L

I think it’s really important to acknowledge when you get something wrong. So here is the story of doing just that.

Thursday night was ONO (One Night Only) 2 in Hobart. Matt and I missed the first one due to being overseas and were both thrilled to be asked to contribute to the next.

The premise of ONO is to use (through negotiation with the property owners) abandoned/derelict spaces around the Hobart CBD as one-off exhibition spaces. These spaces remain a secret closely guarded by instigators/curators Pip Stafford and Kate Kelly until artists are let in close to the time of exhibition to scope it out and then audiences informed where to be in the days leading up.

At some point, not long after the last event, it impressed (wrongly) in my brain that the next space would be an old motel or some kind of unused acommodation. I decided to that if given the opportunity to ONO, I would re-perform something I developed as part of my second year sculpture submission in 1994. The installation I performed it in was pretty rubbish but the performance itself, only ever seen by an assessment panel of four at the most, I thought could be worth a revisit.

An animatronic fetus (actually a motorised hot water bottle gored up with red latex) on a long umbilical cord that disappears up my nightie flaps between my feet at the end of a bed to which I am bound. Between my teeth is a rope that goes to a pulley in the ceiling and suspends an elephant over the hot water bottle. The whole thing is a scene of intense tension in sustaining a surreal balance. Never let elephant crush foetal-hottie.

I wanted to take it out for a spin again anyway – but…

When the offer came up of course I now have a very real fetus of my very own and the idea of doing this at this time seemed… unsavoury… well… not right anyway.

Keen to use the op to jump back into live performance I thought I could do another pre-conceived one in a bathroom – singing and playing my ukulele under a stream of running water like a shower for the duration. A bit of an endurance thing.

But the space was not accommodation but an ex-department store and to hijack either kitchen or bathroom was impractical.

So when I saw the space I was rather desperately looking for some part of it to click with me.

What did click was an unused staircase – a stairway to effectively nowhere but in actuality to the offices above and it needed to be blocked off anyway. I decided I wanted to use projection to transform it into a waterfall.

Initially I had decided the waterfall would be made up of nude shower scenes but after playing around on a very small scale with projection on tinsel (The tinsel, on minute scale, gave of flickers of mini-projection reminiscent of water reflection), I decided to fill the stairs with sparkle and thought the imagery would be lost on it. Instead I elongated some very high contrast rain footage.

On the bare stairs the projection immediately disappointed me from whatever angle I sent it. You know the old art event standby? Project scratched black waste super-8 into dead spaces to activate them? It looked like that. Poo.

I invested in a wee $10 worth of test-tinsel but couldn’t replicate the effect I was getting at home and to fill the stairwell would have cost me in excess of $100 that I didn’t have.

The end result came from Kate happening upon me chewing the whole thing over, and she mentioned the (unintentional) reflections that had resulted from the plastic I used in a work she had seen earlier this year.

After some of Matt’s help to wiggle the projector into a few other awkward angles, I got some cheap cellophane and we rigged it on a couple of clothing racks that had been abandoned on site.

I felt much better about responding to the site with this version, using the debris of the site as well as the actual architectural space and the cellophane reminded me of the crisp packaging that was once used there.

Hard as it is to photograph projected stuff – here is kinda what it looked like…

So… It’s fine. It turned out OK… but it just seemed to not at all suit the event.

The waterfall audio of rushing water and birds with an ominous thumping bass line underneath was really loud but the work still seemed too… quiet.

When folks asked me where my work was and I told them I kept hearing “oh yeah I saw that… that thing with the… lines…”

Installation FAIL.

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the day of the event, having finished my install two days before, I was thinking with some regret about the performances I wasn’t doing. I was thinking about performance artists I admire and particularly Yoko Ono. I decided that if given the opportunity to do it again, I will be the ONO Yoko.

A half hour before it all kicked off I went through the site with some sticky letters and tagged the place in her name (apologies to the person on whose projection surface I tagged… I didn’t realise the projection was due).

This gesture accomplished in 15 minutes gave me infinitely more satisfaction than the waterfall I agonised over for 2 days.

Bummer.

(Incidentally it will come as no suprise to hear that my favourite work in ONO was by Leigh Hobba. A speaker wedged in an exisiting hole-in-the-wall and playing the sounds of someone hurling their body into the the walls of a very live room. But I was lucky to see it before it all kicked off. I think it may have suffered the same fate as the waterfall throughout the event and been just too… quiet.)