Centre for Contemporary Photography opens four new projects today. Collaborative artist team Nat & Ali present THE ART BAR, a mixed media installation/event transforming CCP's front gallery into a public bar and artist hang-out. TOUR OF DUTY presents a significant and sustained visual investigation into the international presence in East Timor immediately following the Independence ballot in 1999. Jack Sweetman and James Cecil examine the ways in which we desire to occupy personal spaces, and the traces left behind by our familiar routines. Meniscus is a series of interactive web works that explore ideas relating to subjectivity, scientific belief systems and the body.
Nat & Ali Present
THE ART BAR
Gallery One
Collaborative artist team Nat & Ali present THE ART BAR, a mixed media installation/event transforming CCP's front gallery into a public bar and artist hang-out. Surrounded by atmospheric lighting and an original sound mix, Nat & Ali invite gallery goers to shake-off their inhibitions and party unselfconsciously with one another. Providing a playful entry into lifestyle and identity politics, THE ART BAR parodies glamourised notions of the art celebrity or superstar, slyly referencing the number of artists who currently subsidise their practice through casual bar work. THE ART BAR incorporates found images, media clippings and exhibition ephemera installed lightbox-style into the service area of the bar. These image-bank collages are influenced by the Dada tradition of photo-text montage and are composed from an extensive archive of found and second-hand material.
Nat & Ali will be serving drinks 'in the flesh' during 'happy hour' from 3pm to 5pm, Thursday, Friday and Saturday afternoons for the duration of the exhibition.
THE ART BAR forms part of the Cultural Component of the 2002 Melbourne Fashion Festival and is supported by Arts Victoria and the Besen Family Foundation. The opening night is sponsored by Sub Zero.
Matthew Sleeth. TOUR OF DUTY
Gallery Two
TOUR OF DUTY presents a significant and sustained visual investigation into the international presence in East Timor immediately following the Independence ballot in 1999. Sleeth uses the visual vocabulary of traditional documentary photography and disturbs and undermines it with techniques and angles borrowed from cinema. His vivid colour and jaunty angles humorously yet incisively track the Australian army and the accompanying media and entertainment caravan in Timor to form an impression quite unlike the one we have received from mainstream press. A far more complex view emerges, formed of multiple layers of meaning. Importantly, the East Timorese are not pictured as victims or bit players in their own redemptive drama. Instead, this challenging body of work focuses on the construction and staging of history.
Sponsored by Bond Imaging.
Jack Sweetman & James Cecil. LOCATION
Helen Mcpherson Smith Project Space
The spaces within which we construct our own ideas of 'home' have often been inhabited by others before us, and may be again after we have moved on. A place once private becomes public, and we search for a new space with features that match those we already have in our imagination. Jack Sweetman and James Cecil examine the ways in which we desire to occupy these spaces, and the traces left behind by our familiar routines.
This project was supported by a Pat Corrigan Artist Grant, managed by NAVA with financial assistance from the Australia Council.
John Tonkin. MENISCUS
e-Media Gallery
Meniscus is a series of interactive web works that explore ideas relating to subjectivity, scientific belief systems and the body. In this series the ease of personal transformation and improvement promised by the convergence of new media technologies and biological research comes in for some serious lampooning. Personal Eugenics, the third in the series, explores the expectations of living in a cultural tradition that privileges progress above all else. While eugenics was discredited by the excesses of the Nazi holocaust, its thinking continues to be a prominent strand in intellectual thought, manifest perhaps most explicitly in the emerging field of biotechnology.
A part of the 24-7 Digital Art Program. Curated by Daniel Palmer and supported by Film Victoria.
IMAEG:
Jack Sweetman
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