Cross-marital promotion

Hey. How are ya?

I know I was going to do a catch up about the last year of my OWN stuff, and that IS coming, but right now Matt (Warren – my husband) has a show on at Inflight that I want to encourage you to go and see if you can.

SÖNARIS really grips me and if it were not ‘weird’ to do so, I think I would want to review it.

It’s kind of a new direction for Matt, increasing his abstraction and embracing hauntology to make something as experiential as much of his installations are, but particularly open and… well… a word I keep coming back to for some reason is ‘breathing’.

He told me about a comment someone made at the opening about it being a bit ‘goth’, but I think they were missing something.  Reworking sound and visuals trawled from his personal mental ‘library’ of publicly released image and sound (well known pieces of stock footage, pop music), as well as fresh shot and constructed stuff, Matt constructs and then deconstructs a personal audiovisual symbology, and while atmospheric, for me the overall vibe is upward. The content inverts negativity, creates mystery out of the mundane and adds interest to the merely pretty.  It’s positive.  It’s beautiful. But maybe then I’m missing something… why not go see it and tell me what you thought?

Dual projections on the ceiling are abstracted further by the architecture and randomly create new pairings as well as as also randomly sandwiching with the dense, bubbling soundtrack.

While I understand the interest in forcing an audience viewpoint, if it were my work I would have put in a daybed arrangement in so it was easy to really settle in and view.  The constant looking up is a little hard on the neck, but I find spending time with this really rewarding and totally transporting.

My tip is – take a pillow for your head and spend some time on the floor.  But the biggest tip is simply go and see it and go with some time to spare.  Next Saturday will be the last day but it’s raining today and open for another couple of hours..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(images courtesy Matt Warren)

…and…

Tricky Walsh also designed this beautiful web-poster.  Musn’t let it go to waste…

Oh… and here’s your invite…

Friday @ 6.

Do come.

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.

This man is a doctor so I can’t show you his face.

…but this happened just before Christmas. It was so great that M’s Dad, Graham, Sisters Mel and Jayne and niece Abbey were able to come down for the ceremony.

Dr Art is now also in his second week of his new job as Inflight Gallery Coordinator.

Congrats Doc, there’s so much to be proud of.

Sneak Peek

Matt’s PhD submission, Suspension of Disbelief – The representation of poetic faith through time-based media opens for public viewing tonight at 5:30 and will remain open over the weekend before being dismantled on Sunday night.

Edit: at the Plimsoll Gallery, Tasmanian School of Art, Hunter Street, Hobart. D’oh for not mentioning.

The work pictured is a recent one, In Haunted Attics, a sound and video installation.

Although obviously biased, I think the whole submission is pretty amazing and you should really try to check it out if you can. Matt kinda suffers the same fate as me in that it’s not often that you have the gear and the space to show this stuff so don’t miss the rare opportunity to see this great collection of work in the context of one another.

It’s just beautiful and I am immensely proud.

Piggybox

Anyone who saw Matt’s Portal Lux Aeterna (there is a little still of the dotty video here) in the Parallel exhibition (the same one NAP was in) and then read here that the whole exhibition was going on tour for two years, may have wondered how on earth that installation of his could pack into a crate and be remounted at every gallery.

Here lies the answer. Portal Lux Aeterna V.2. Matt and I have designed and built this tiny traveling version (the fact that the box looks like a square little pig is entirely incidental). We built the wooden enclosure over the weekend and here it is before it gets it’s Black Japan woodstain. A small clamshell DVD player/screen unit sits inside with a false floor resting over the unit and I sewed a tiny poncho with theatrical curtains that slips over the stand-up screen like a glove puppet.

Viewers will look through the porthole/pignose on the front.

My friend Cath is one of those rare breeds called ‘homeowner’ and when I visit, has frequently made what seem to me like remarkable tear-down, rebuild, cut-hole-in-wall alterations. Once when I expressed admiration for her efforts she replied ‘Well I’d only call in some bloke to do it otherwise. I figure I’m as smart as some bloke’, or words to that effect.

We are both usually more electrically adept than ‘handy’ but tried we to be a bit ‘Cath’ in our approach to this little project after rejecting the idea both of adapting some existing object and of worrying over which ‘bloke’ to commission to build it for us. Now we are marching around the house quite full of ourselves, giving ‘Piggybox’ a proud pat whenever we pass. We too are as clever as ‘some bloke’.

Haberdashery

Matt mounted a test installation of one of his PhD works Whitepinkblack Noise in the Entrepot lounge gallery. I sat up until 2 in the morning sewing 25 black floor to ceiling curtains with Chanel-style chain hems. It’s one of his interview-based works and I really enjoyed how the voices talking about the effects of sound upon them ended up feeling like the work was giving a critique of itself.

But then I had been sewing curtains till 2…

niblets

There has been so much stuff going on in our lives recently both good and bad. I seem to only have blogged the bad (other than Gino) for a while so here it is – catch-up time in short digestible niblets.

Matt had a soundwork – Cantus 35 – installed at Port Arthur as a part of the 10 Days on the Island festival. It’s a work he had been thinking about for years and was developed as a tribute to the memory of the 35 people who lost their lives in the shootings there a decade ago. But it was also developed as a way for Matt to excorsise the sound of the gunshots that he heard broadcast on the radio soon after the incident – presumably recorded by one of the tourists there on the day. It was installed in the Sentry Hut adjacent to the prison ruins, by the water and facing the site of the demolished café where a great deal of the tragic events took place.

It seems to have been received generally as one of the standout works from the exhibition and Matt has been ovewhelmed by the support for the work from the Port Arthur community – the families and friends of those who died – as well as the Art community.

There are great reviews of it everywhere but a visiting US academic, Mary Jane Jacob, gave it a particularly glowing reference on Radio National. You can hear the podcast of that interview HERE (scroll down to Sunday 15 April “Port Arthur and public art”).

Matt’s own record of the work (including a brief video clip with audio) is on his website HERE.

Sorry if you may have wanted to see it. I’m so late in reporting it that’s it’s over.

But for the record, my husband is awesome.

Apparently Nothing

Part 2 of Matt’s collaboration with Deborah Pollard ‘Apparently Nothing’ opens at Inflight ARI on Thursday.

A bunch of performers will be eating my borscht as a part of the installation so as a result there are fuschia stains all over the kitchen and me yet again as I whip up a jumbo batch for tonights test run and the big night itself.

I wish my kitchen best was something less stain-y but it is a failsafe special.

We can’t have those actors NOT eating just because I serve up something too experimental…

Plus it’s super-pink and will look super-pretty… this is art after all…

Here is Matt being interviewed on Edge Radio on the Arts-on-Sunday-with-Josie-and-Aaron program.

He made them play some Scott Walker… I hope he didn’t freak out the Sunday aftenoon audience too much…