Hello!

The show is tomorrow! You are receiving this because you either have attended a show before or are attending this one :) if you are in the former please purchase a ticket from here: https://luma.com/rsskgtb2

Some things:

LOCATION: 15 Thompson Street, Kensington. Head up into the big empty courtyard and there'll be a room there. Please knock, I do not have FOH so you'll have to be a little brave.

TIME: 6:00pm!!! Don't be late Sophie!

FOOD: I think a biiiiiiigggggg harira soup! Check the ingredients if you can't eat any of that. Also message me if you'd like to come early and help peel garlic or something :)

Looking forward to seeing you all!!

Okay little essay as usual (Martha in 🧡, Ryan in 🩵):

🧡

When I was young I had a friend who had a girlfriend who was an artist. She did this artwork where she would just take pieces of paper and fold them and then put the folded paper in a frame.

It was designed to make you, and the artist, think about when art is “done”. There weren't any guidelines beyond:

1. 1 piece of A4 paper.

So the determination of when the art was “good and finished” was entirely gut instinct. And you saw how what was considered good, or interesting or finished changed from the first artwork compared to the last.

A strange artistic pattern emerged of:

some folds -> increasing amount of folds -> almost no folds -> some folds -> repeat

You could see the artist making a determination based on prior works. What was considered “too much” or “busy” changed depending on how many, and the kinds of artworks that came before it. A single diagonal fold felt rich and different after a sequence of tiny strips that looked well beyond the 7 fold limit.

I'm only 5 shows into my set of 12 and already I feel the pull of my prior works. Ryan has seen most of the others, so came into this work wanting to do something bigger and bolder than I had set a precedent for. I wanted to simplify it. Make it simpler and more achievable. Hence the theme.

When determining my next fold though, should I reflect on my last 100? Is it even possible to not? Is this good for me? To have the trail of versions of things I've done sitting above me as I work. Sitting above those I work with.

I wonder if one day I will strip my work back so much or fill it with so much detail that it's only able to be interpreted by me. Maybe that's why there are still stone tablets and manuscripts we cannot translate.

🧡

 

🩵

Here’s a couple of opening paragraphs for my essay. Pick your favourite and imagine the rest x

The other day I was ‘interviewing’ a designer who I want to work with (I use quotation marks because we both wanted to work together, so this was just a time to chat through the specifics) and he said to me casually: ‘I mean, we’ve worked together before haven’t we?’ and I said something along the lines of ‘No, Jack. We’ve never worked together. I’ve barely made work, really, like .5 works a year when you count it out. I just am always around, always yapping at an opening night, so maybe it feels like I’m doing more.’

or

This week I’ve started a new job in a not for profit (yay) and I have spent a lot of time thinking about how much faster I work as an independent producer. With a big team of people there are endless approvals and nobody ever has the full picture and there are about eight different places you could put a spreadsheet if you wanted to and it’s entirely dependent upon who you’re gonna send the spreadsheet to. But when I work by myself as an indie producer, I can smash out like ten good TikToks in two hours and then spend the rest of the day chilling. More for less. 

or

A couple years ago I saw a production of Burnout Paradise by Pony Cam (the ones who went off broadway with it) and I didn’t really like it (ask me about it on Saturday lol) BUT what I do have to begrudgingly admit is that it was a phenomenal metaphor for artistic careers; artists running endlessly on treadmills trying to do everything. I really don’t want to do everything. I mostly just want to hang out and yap and maybe sometimes make something I’m proud of, but also get eight hours of sleep and see really nice art from my friends. But I don’t get to just do that and I think that sucks. 

or 

I really hate talking about my artistic practice to people because I stupidly wear a lot of hats and also I don’t think I do anything that’s notable enough and what I do think I do well (social media) is kind of trite. It’s happened a couple times this week where I kind of panic and go ‘oh like… indie producing and also arts criticism’ which is technically true but like, I rarely produce and when I do it’s mostly my own work and is it even arts criticism or am I an influencer shill for corporate art and PR tickets?? Last night I saw we come to collect at RISING which kind of gestured at this stuff; it wasn’t good enough for me to say ‘YOU SHOULD GO’ but it was fun, and I enjoyed a show which spent like ten minutes shitting on people asking ‘so, what do you do’ 

or 

I just saw Florentina Holzinger’s show A Year Without Summer at RISING and that is a show that I unequivocally recommend you see. It closes on Sunday and I think it will change the way I think about my arts practice. My life is split into a BFH and AFH now. It’s this two hour (no interval) show which is kind of about modern medicine and systems of medicalisation and the desire of immortality (and also climate change and AI and all the contemporary anxieties) and I gotta say-–completely unlike anything else I’ve seen in a long long time (the most similar thing would be The Bride and The Goodnight Cinderella which I also saw at RISING two years ago). Florentina is this European director (she did the Austrian pavilion at the Venice Biennale) whose work transgresses form. Tonight I watched something that was musical/body piercing/circus/drama/dance/robotics/clown/concert/performance art. I think in our shrinking arts sector there’s not much space to dream about work that is explosive and full of ideas. It has to be succinct and communicable and Valuable and… watching Florentina… I mean… I don’t think a work as unwieldy as that could’ve been made here in Aus. So. Yea. My mind has been rocked by the prospect that the stage can be a sight for excess.

or 

One of my favourite artworks (It’s tattooed on my right ankle) is An oak tree by Michael Craig-Martin, an Irish conceptual artist. The work is ostensibly commenting on the thing in Catholic mass where wine becomes blood (having never attended mass my understanding of this is a little hazy), but I love it because it’s a work which reminds me that theatre is a practice of turning what we have into what we could have. Michael’s work is a single glass of water on a glass shelf, about 200cm above the floor, accompanied by some text which is a faux Q and A with the ‘artist’ who declares that the glass of water is not a glass of water at all, but somehow magically changed into an Oak Tree. I saw it at the NGA in 2019 and just sat staring at it for like 20 minutes; because yes, things become other things when we believe them to be so. I think there’s a lot of potential in that realisation. 

🩵

Excited to see you all there!