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.
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
Image: Matthew Sleeth
Centre for Contemporary Photography, 205 Johnston Street Fitzroy VIC 3065 Australia
Gallery hours: Wednesday - Saturday, 11am - 5pm