STUDIONONSTOP

I WANT TO BE LIOELN DOOLSN an account

‘Only one and a bit days to go’
Mikala Dwyer
Darren Knight gallery, Sydney.
28 june – 23 july 2005

I WANT TO BE LOIELN DOOLSN
performed by Justin Butcha, Grzegorz Gawronski, Tom Isaacs, Jum and Ben Terakes
28/6/05

published
VOLUMEVERYTHING
chapter ‘Delirium’ selected by Bianca Hester
CLUBSproject
Melbourne, 2005

[download pdf [1.2MB] or read full text below]

Turning up to an opening can inspire a moment or two of presentation anxiety. Approaching the entrance you’ll do what you can with your hair, straighten clothes and hope there’s nothing stuck in your teeth. Crossing the threshold swells this hyped exteriority, the work suddenly a dim pretext for your arrival to play a part in the galaxy of interactions, signs, signals and social insincerities that greet an exhibition into the world of interpersonal relations on its opening night. Though the gears will change quickly, the moment you’re afforded to assess the situation (who’s here? who’s not here?) from its ‘outside’ swiftly collapsing as you’re swept into its overflow with a hello, an observation, an exchange. Becoming suddenly of and integral to the human context field of this artist, this exhibition, this gallery. Depending on how at home or in good company you feel inside this ‘inside’ there might be flashes back to that outer rim (glancing eyes, things said and unsaid), as a roomful of people go about interconnectedly generating and processing a meshwork of messages and meanings around, about or beyond the artwork they’ve come to see.

Funny things were happening at the opening of Mikala Dwyer’s ‘Only one and a bit days to go’. Planted into this given theatre of interactions seemed to be a cast of players acting at subtly externalising and frazzling these edges of personal conceit and consciousness. It wasn’t obvious at first, and remained slight enough to be unsettling even when you ‘got it’. Continue Reading »

reading:

Metronome No. 10
Future Academy
Shared, Mobile, Improvised, Hidden, Floating
Oregon, 2006

ON EMPTINESS
MP: you need to have a practical fear in order to raise the value of life. Do you still remember the Cittadellearte when there was the idea of emptiness and no decision, no definition…?
CD: Yes, and no studio. Do you remember when the exhibition was the studio and the residents were always searching for their own place?
MP: I still think that this empty space is very basic and very important. If you have something that has already been decided on you don’t find anything different. Organisation is not about filling things, but about emptying things. An artist today has choice, but only one choice, which is to put their work in a collection, a gallery, or in a museum. There is no other choice. But if you make an empty space maybe an economy will grow that can enable art to become a job in a different way? The need for this void is essential.
CD: That word institution is not necessarily bad. Institution means an association of people…
MP: I don’t complain about institutions! I complain about institutions that I do not like.

Interview with Michelangelo Pistoletto, CD, Biella 04

Garden Cities of Tomorrow

1. gallery view
2. New Tree (Sony Center) & New Tree (Darling Harbour) 2004
inkjet print on heat transfer, scrap MDF
3. Rubbish & Rubbish Trees 2004
inkjet print on heat transfer, fabric
4. Water (aloe) 2004
live plant, plaster, Bach flower remedy, waste timber
5. Water (bamboo) 2004
live plant, plaster, cigarette ash, waste timber

Down the road from the studio
Josie Cavallaro, Sarah Goffman, Lisa Kelly

Chrissie Cotter Hall
january 24 - february 7 2004
Sydney

Grasping the Thistle

essay

published
Zones of Contact: 2006 Biennale of Sydney
A Critical Reader
edited by Natasha Bullock and Reuben Keehan
Artspace
Sydney, 2006

[download pdf [84kb] or read full text below]

In the time allocated for questions at the close of a session titled ‘Art, Autonomy and Hospitality: Networks, Transmission and Locality’ in the June Zones of Contact: 2006 Biennale of Sydney symposium ‘Biennales, Cosmopolitanism and Locality’ at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, I had a question to ask. In the course of the session the tilt towards curatorial rather than artistic practice had become pretty clear, with far-flung interpretations by panellists to the plainly over-packed topic. My question outlined that I’d been attracted to this session by it’s hum of particular buzzwords - ‘hospitality’, ‘networks’, ‘transmission’ and ‘locality’ - and that I’d likewise heard the word ‘inclusive’ in the air a lot over the last few days of Zones of Contact openings and events. I was interested to hear thoughts, particularly from the Sydney-based panellists, as to how these principles might actually be put into practice in light of the insignificant inclusion of Sydney artists in this Biennale of Sydney? After a pause the session moderator turned to the panel and asked, ‘Right, who’d like to grasp that thistle?’ Continue Reading »

1. The Lively Plane
Dennis Tan & Lisa Kelly

I C A N
15 february - march 2 2008
Sydney

room diagram [28kb] & list of works [24kb]

In 2007 Lisa Kelly undertook an Asialink residency in Singapore and met artist Dennis Tan ~ founder and housekeeper of the independent artist space The Other House in Little India. There they grew the makings of a cooperative dialogue grounded in a mutuality of interests and attitude around practice, hosting, talking, walking and urban observation.

The joint project ‘1.The Lively Plane’ at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Newtown saw a city swap and cultivation of this dialogue via Tan’s one month visit to Sydney. The exhibition roamed around the artists’ material thinking on the constructed environment, relations, building, propping, sculpture, drawing, streetscape and locality.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

‘Inside a small room with white walls and polished timber floors, a plane tree sprouts snug and unassuming from one corner of a raised wooden platform, its top leaves flattened awkwardly against an indifferent ceiling…’

~ read Reflections on a Lively Plane by Tessa Rapaport at Makeshift Journal

Tentcraft
Lisa Kelly & Alex Gawronski

SOUTH
30 march - 10 april 1999
Sydney

1. Life Security 1999 (with Alex Gawronski)
found chairs, nylon rope, dyna-hooks, hardware
2. Ljus Och Viss Varme 1999
twig, camping lantern, citronella candle, hardware
3. Cobweb 1999
projector, spider, glass slide, plastic, dowel, acrylic, cork, adhesive mesh
4. Burning Desire 1999
cyalume light sticks, dowel, blutack, hardware

[all photos: Christopher Snee]

catalogue text
Alex Gawronski & Lisa Kelly (italics)

A working motivation unravelled from the container of a word.
t e n t c r a f t
faded advice soon re-developed amid Parramatta Rd.

Thinking of movement, a conflict of mobility and stasis,
and the parallel world of stuff that crafts a migration elsewhere.

Camping is a word embroidered with numerous associations. It is inscribed with various international codes that nevertheless belie a desire for universalism. It is colour coded, bound up yet it suggests escape and freedom, freedom from life. When we take off we hope equally to get lost, without necessarily abandoning the familiar texture of our lives back home. Indeed it is familiar difficulties of the emotional, financial and social kind that we seek to replace with the difficulties of a sort we can readily overcome. These are primarily practical difficulties. What they represent is an A-Z guide on how to: stay dry, stay warm, keep cool, avoid bites, avoid falls, maintain orientation, remain mindful of the environment and of our co-travellers and of ourselves. At the same time we seek to erase temporarily our local presence and to become (if only partially) wild. The camper seeks a reunification with those things that he or she takes for granted, those things technology keeps us safe from whilst seeking to maintain our complicity with our natural selves.

Continue Reading »

studiononstop 1997-2007

1. British School at Rome, 2000
2. Camperdown, Sydney 1997-2006
3. Viafarini, Milano 2002
4. Stonevilla, Sydney (with Jo Daniell) 2006
5. Artspace, Sydney 2006
6. p-10, Singapore 2007
7. Redfern, Sydney 2006-2007

All Girl Line-Up

essay

Lives of the Artists #5
Spring 2003 - Chicks Issue
Edited & published by Elizabeth Pulie

[download full text pdf [48KB] or read below]

Italy has been spoken of as ‘the land that feminism forgot’. What the English speaking world knows as ‘International Women’s Day’ on the 8th of March, translates in the Bel Paese as ‘Festa della Donna’, which might translate back as something like ‘celebration of woman’. Note the lost collective and authoritative dimensions and you’ll come to appreciate the reality of a largely commercial appropriation that has more in common with the art of chivalry calendar dates of Valentine’s and Mother’s Day. Dragged out into a week-long occasion for men to buy specifically mass-marketed flowers and chocolates for the women in their lives. To all appearances, many Italian women find it a load of tokenistic rubbish. Younger women in particular aren’t falling for it, as a series of interviews with school students in the national newspaper La Repubblica for the event made clear; one saying simply that all she had to do was take a look around to see that no positions of authority in her society (read judges, lawyers, editors, politicians) were occupied by women. While comparatively this makes the role of women in public life in Australia look pretty progressive (though hardly as progressive as New Zealand), local indicators might otherwise be pointing some way towards ‘ a land that is forgetting feminism’. Continue Reading »

reading:

Slow Living
Wendy Parkins & Geoffrey Craig
UNSW Press 2006

‘A fundamental concern in slow living is time. At its heart, slow living is a conscious attempt to change the current temporal order to one which offers more time, time to attend to everyday life.’
(p.3)

Attention seekers__________drawings with invisible objects

open studio
thursday 16th august

Asialink visual artist in residence
june-august 2007

p-10
Singapore

download room notes as pdf [44KB]