In-Habit International residency September

Stay tuned for more information regarding my upcoming residency at  Abbaye  Noirlac in France September
2011

Abbaye Noirlac

Brief explanation of Punctum's In-Habit International program



Punctum, in Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia, manages an international arts research and cultural exchange program – In-Habit International.

Each year through this program Victorian artists working across contemporary art forms that incorporate cultural exchange are awarded a grant to live and work with a host arts organisation in an overseas country.

Four exchanges are offered per year.

What is In-Habit International?

The aim of our arts research and cultural exchange program is for either

• Regionally based Victorian artists to have access to new and stimulating international environments.

• For metropolitan based Victorian artists to have access to new and stimulating regional environments internationally.

We support artists who seek to learn about their host country and its artistic practices and to contribute to the cultural life in the local community of the Host Organisation. Our hope is that these exchanges will result in ongoing relationships between regions, artists and cultural organisations in Victoria and globally.

The cultural exchanges are professional development opportunities celebrating regional arts practice for Victorian arts practitioners and also act to foster reciprocal relationships between artists and arts organisations.

In-Habit International focuses on arts practice that engages with the site, place and arts orientation of a particular Host Organisation and its surrounding community. Cross art form practices and those that embrace the fabric of everyday life and straddle the boundaries of art, science and technology, social activism, design and architecture and live art are also eligible.

http://www.punctum.com.au/inhabit

Cold Light : Exhibition

Dates: 15 September to 24 October 2010

Opening September 16th: 6-8pm
to be opened by Martin Paten
Director of Castlemaine State Festival.

Venue: Latrobe Visual Arts Centre
121 View St , Bendigo, VIC
Contact: Paul Northam
Tel: +61 3 5441 8724
Email: vacentre@latrobe.edu.au
Web:http://www.latrobe.edu.au/vacentre

'Shadows are a corset for light. When forms emerge unknown they dance on our field of perception, igniting imaginary landscapes and projections of desire.' Tara Gilbee

'Cold Light' is a series of photographic images that utilise the refractive qualities of light, manipulated through lens and mirrors, to distort and transform the materials at hand.

The shadowy imprints explore a psychological landscape. Traversing the beauty of dark looming shapes while seeping into watery fields of the unconscious. Dream like visual fields mesmerize and draw the viewer into a liminal field of possibilities.


opening images:

Link to collaborative work with Lauren Berkowitz

http://www.videoartchive.org.au/lberkowitz/endoscope.html


The Australian Video Art Archive (AVAA) was established in 2006. Its aims are to:

•continue building an on-line video archive and a research collection of new and historical Australian video and performance art works,
•to allow researchers to borrow the material for educational, research and exhibition purposes, and
•to transfer old video or film artworks to a digital format to conserve the work and thus assist in the conservation of a significant genre of Australian art history.
Currently, the collection contains some seminal works by prominent Australian artists. This collection will continue to expand and we are accepting submissions to consider for inclusion.

The archive is the first program of its kind in Australia and has been established with generous assistance from the Faculty of Art & Design, Monash University with the involvement of Prof. Anne Marsh, Matthew Perkins and Elena Galimberti.

New Exhibition at Saxony

This exhibition displays a set of large A1 images, from my new series Cold Light.

It will be launched Monday 12th July and run for 6 weeks.

At the New Saxony store in World Square Sydney

The art and the fashion intersect with the season’s inspiration.
Spring Summer 2010’s theme is:

“In spite of its function as a reservoir for human darkness or
perhaps because of this- the shadow is the seat of creativity.” Carl Jung

Review in Realtime

This link (click on title of post) takes you to a great article on the Inhabit Project 2010 that i was part of:

It starts as

......"In-habit was an exceptional, inventively curated month-long series of 11 performance, live art and installation works situated in and around the Abbottsford convent. Involving nine key artists, more than a dozen associate artists and numerous participants, these artworks emerged out of a collective residency at the convent established by artistic director Jude Anderson exploring site/place/space and cultural exchange".......

Barry Laing is a Melbourne-based performance maker and writer who teaches at Victoria University and Monash University. He is an Associate Editor of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training Journal, Routledge, UK.

RealTime issue #96 April-May 2010 pg. 33

I'm dreaming of a french meadow

Inhabit : I’m Dreaming of a French Meadow.
Jude Anderson

Installation: Thur 25th – Sun 28th Feb, 12pm – 5pm
Live performance: Fri 26th Feb 8.30pm Cedric Peyronnet & Jacques Soddell
Venue: Dormitory Two, Rosina Building, Abbotsford Convent, 1 St Heliers St, Abbotsford

At the Abbotsford Convent there’s a place called the French Meadow where plants run free. From the Convent dormitories where girls once slept in disciplined rows between the strict folds of white cotton sheets, you catch glimpses of the French Meadow. It’s a tempting, gay abandon in this place of precise sleep patterns. In I’m Dreaming of a French Meadow, Jude Anderson in collaboration with photomedia artist Tara Gilbee invites you to a field of reverie; a dormitory now filled with secret gardens where the field recordings of sound artist Jacques Soddell and those of French sound artist Cedric Peyronnet float from each bed and weave through the shifting sleep patterns of an imagined cosmos. A waft of the wild in the girls’ dorm.


VIMEO OF LIVE PERFORMANCE:
http://vimeo.com/23894117


I’m Dreaming of a French Meadow combines an installation with a live performance that brings Peyronnet and Soddell together for a combined field recordings concert.

The installation draws inspiration from the French notion of ‘le jardin secret’ - an undisclosed place of desire or escape, along with the garden beds and secrets of the Abbotsford Convent, and the garden beds tended by the immigrant and refugee gardeners of the Atherton Community Gardens.

Associated artists: Tara Gilbee, Cedric Peyronnet, Katie Sfetkidis, Jacques Soddell.



Digital still: Tara Gilbee 2009

In Situ
Jude Anderson & Emilie Collyer
Dates and times: 3rd February – 21st Feb
Launch Wed 3rd Feb 6-8pm
Then Wed – Sun 10am – 5pm
Venue: c3 Gallery, Abbotsford Convent, 1 St Heliers St, Abbotsford

In-Habit In Situ: Instant Actions
In October 2008 an open invitation went out to over 3,000 artists (via the Melbourne International Arts Festival Card Holder scheme, Regional Arts Victoria and the City of Yarra). The invitation was to attend a tour of the Abbotsford Convent, particularly to buildings that, at the time, were in a state of ‘pre-renovation’ and/or not open to the general public.

After the tours, each artist was invited to return to the Convent during 2009 and undertake an ‘Instant Action’. This could take whatever form the artist chose and would extend for approximately 15 minutes. We asked each artist to document their Instant Action. The documentation is being presented as part of the In-Habit In Situ exhibition at c3 Gallery from 3rd – 21st February 2010.

28 artists elected to perform Instant Actions. Of these, 10 artists carried out their Instant Actions and 8 provided documentation.

Punctum associated artists have also contributed to the Instant Action documentation and exhibition.

In Situ Instant Actions: Artworks and Artists
The laundry - berni m janssen (DVD)
The material and the liminal - Kate Hunter (DVD)
Song cycle for a shadow - Rachael Guy, David Churchill, Andy Jackson (Video & audio recording)
Signs of life/Wish you were here - Amy Tsilemanis (Photographs and Audio recording)
Laundry - Smiljana Glisovic (DVD)
Sacred Heart - Daniel Armstrong (DVD)
koorie~konduit~2010 - Scott Lyon (Print – typography and illustration)
In-Habit: vestiges of research - Artwork by: Jason Maling, Tara Gilbee and
William Head



Digital still: Tara Gilbee 2009

For more in depth information on this extensive research residency into cultural exchange please visit:

http://www.punctum.com.au/inhabit.html

New Works

This is a preview of works currently being undertaken in the studio and on travels. This folio of work is a continuation of my exploration of photographic means of transforming objects, utilising the mechanical modes of lens refraction and projection, i manipulate images in camera via a number of distortions.

The space in between: book project

Main Gallery: 2 October - 29 November 2009

The space in between book project on display in the Main Gallery, 2009


The space in between book project is an intriguing and thought-provoking exhibition that investigates the nature of books and their place within our ordinary lives. It features work by thirty-two artists from across Australia, who have each responded to the internal space of a book carved and presented to them for their artistic intervention.

Wendy Kelly, Threads of Jason's Journey, 2007, mixed media



Curator and collaborator Tara Gilbee has spent many months collecting dozens of books, in English and foreign languages, with colourful and often decorative hard covers and infinite variations of ivory toned pages. With a scalpel and considerable care, she has carved out a section from each book: sometimes guided by the formal structure of an embossed surface, at other times led by the layout of title and text on each cover. The participating artists were presented two objects - the remnants of the book with its empty cavity, and the detachable core - with which to create a work for book project. The end results on exhibition represent a vast array of responses, including sculptural work, installations, and even drawn and photographic reworkings of the original volumes.

http://www.wagga.nsw.gov.au/art-gallery/exhibitions/exhibitions-2009/the-space-in-between-book-project

Deluge

Deluge: Tara Gilbee and Andrew Goodman

Installation with sound track, video, light projections and sculpture.


Deluge was an immersive sound and video project that refered to the anticipation of water and its effect of taking over, temporarily transforming and overwhelming the space or body. It implied a threshold, a transitional state, or a border that can be crossed to another space, place, time or state of being.

The installation drew on a sense of wonder and awe to create elevated feelings of a ephemeral dreamlike state. The work transformed the site ( ICU Castlemaine) into a space that seemed otherworldly – into an hallucinatory portal or threshold, a ‘magical’ secret space. Engaging a dynamic interplay between the underbelly of the building and an imaginary spirit world.
The video work installation revolved around the psychological qualities of eerie but intriguing spaces often utilised in animation and films.



The installation referenced science fiction, anime and Japanese horror films in which the underworld and lurking forces within dark spaces act as an embodiment of the subconscious. These films often exploit an Animist view of the world – where inanimate objects have spirits or a life force within. The building begins to come to life as it oozes water, suggesting a presence in the space.

For a number of years I have worked with Andrew Goodman on a number of proposals and projects.This project Deluge concludes that collaborative work and relationship.

GUISE

Overview: Who Just Happened
The real skill of the practitioner lies not in skilled concealment but in the skilled revelation of skilled concealment... Hence power flows not from masking, but from an un-masking which masks more than masking does.
~Michael Taussing, from Viscerality, Faith and Skepticism

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring,
will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
~TS Elliot

Two artists from opposite sides of the world, having never met, work with issues of how the self perceives the unknown other in physical and virtual space. Exploring myriad methods of projecting and receiving identity including portraiture, identity theft, performance, and installation, the collaboration will mark their progression toward knowing their fellow collaborator and the nature of the project itself.

Collaboration involves both conscious intentions and unforeseen outcomes of working with someone else. There is a loose promise made, a choice to work with someone with whom one hopes to be artistically compatible. Collaboration depends on a certain assumption of known quantities, ie. self and other. Here however, two strangers are combining into one unknown individual, short-circuiting any sense of control.

Tara Gilbee of Melbourne, Australia, and Robert de Saint Phalle of New York City, United States, met via email and quickly realized the possibility of working together from half a world away. The resulting project spans three phases of proximity and embodiment.





Act 1: Facebook Swap
Gilbee/de Saint Phalle's first exchange will be a set of portraits done using the social utility Facebook. After trading accounts, they will create the other's profile using their research and expectations. For several weeks they will operate under their collaborator's avatar, collecting and interacting with the other's social network. Their portraits will shift over time with feedback from the other's friends and colleagues. In this phase, their close virtual proximity belies their actual physical distance on opposite sides of the earth. De Saint Phalle wonders if there is feminism without a body; Gilbee assumes Facebook is the equivalent of nightclub surveillance (or is it the other way around?).











Act 2: Live-Work Share
De Saint Phalle/Gilbee's second exchange was an installation of a shared studio space in Tara's hometown of Castlemaine, Australia. They were in the same space during different times, taking shifts in the studio. Their efforts focussing on the portrayl of their unknown collaborator and consequently leaving evidence of their own body's activity in space. As the self is in the body, they will saught their collaborator's residual presence to inform their portraits. Is this actually a collaboration or just forensic narcissism?











Act 3: Unmasking? : The Performance

The Housemates' “Ignore The Obvious Task” came to a staggering end with tragic results. ~Big Brother, Australia

The studio a central and small brick space, was actually previously used as a toilet block for the school next door, it had then add feeling of the secretive and furtive meeting of strangers in public places.

A invite was sent and a crowd gathered, through a port hole the un masking could be viewed, on the other side of the space a room was set up as an anti chamer and the audience could wait in this space and over the wall hear the conversations and unveiling take place.

Prior to the Unveiling, both Tara and Robert had on balaclava's, Tara asked Robert to look at a mug sheet and pick which one he thought she was. He picked the wrong one!