BRISBANE EXPERIMENTAL ART FESTIVAL 2014

16 June 2014 | 1 comment

DATE : Saturday 9th August, 6:00pm - 11:00pm

VENUE : The Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts

PROGRAM : Festival Timetable

Brisbane Experimental Art Festival 2014 was held at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts on Saturday 9th August 2014. The festival encompassed the Judith Wright Centre for a one night critical mass program that showcased and explored the emerging and experimental practices being developed by Brisbane-based artists.

The festival was run by a group of engaged cultural leaders whom worked towards highlighting, facilitating and supporting Brisbane’s arts sector.

POETRY IS DEAD

13 June 2014 | 1 comment



Poetry is Dead is a collaboration between writer/poet Josh Donellan and musician/soundscape artist Mike Wilmett. Josh is the author of A Beginner’s Guide to Dying in India and the forthcoming Killing Adonis, as well as the acclaimed new theatrical work We Are All Ghosts. He has been performing as a poet since 2012 and has appeared on stages at the Brisbane Festival, The National Poetry Slam and the Laura St Festival.

Mike is a sound/AV artist and designer with a visual art background. While also moonlighting in band My Fiction, works of note include Room 328 (World Theatre Festival 2012), Aurealian (Brisbane Festival 2013), Synapse (2013), This Is Capital City (La Boite Indie 2013), and Fifteen (Melbourne NextWaveFestival 2012, Brisbane Festival 2012).

Poetry is Dead takes Josh’s poetry - heavily influenced by everything from hip-hop to stand up comedy - and meshes it with Mike’s vast array of projections, sounds and samples to create a kaleidoscopic audiovisual experience.

Performance

REBECCA CUNNINGHAM

13 June 2014 | 1 comment


I am an Australian researcher, project manager, curator, sound, and performance artist. I hold a Bachelor of Music, Performance from the Queensland Conservatorium of Music, Griffith University and Bachelor of Creative Industries 2A Honours, Interdisciplinary from QUT and am currently undertaking a PHD in Business exploring the operation of trust in the global performance art network.

I have been involved in visualization which began during my PhD research which has extended into both my art practice and research. I am currently undertaking a life work ONE whereby I am making a bio portrait of one million people – exchanging, extract and visualizing one million persons DNA.

Further to this, I am also involved in the online visualization of the national and soon global performance art network. In 2012, I [along with exist] began the Live Art National Network Development project [an exist initiative, supported by the Australian Council for the Arts]. This project will culminate in an online web based source, www.performancemap.org mapping the National network of practitioners, venues and curators –enabling artists and curators to better connect and work together. This site will extend to the global network,and will bring together and catalogue existing archives and online sources for live artists globally.

I am the founding member of the Artist Run Initiative exist and in this capacity have curated five international festivals and one conference to date [2008 – 2013]. I have also performed locally and internationally as wellas having work in the Australian Video Art Archive [Monash University, Australia], Die Schwarze Lade [Köln,Germany], and Bristol University [UK].

Artist Website

Performance

LEENA RIETHMULLER

12 June 2014

Fitting into yourself from Leena Riethmuller on Vimeo.

My work investigates contextual and subjective bodily experiences that occur in response to dominant ideals for the body. My artistic outcomes take the form of live performance, video and sculpture. My interest lies in observing and experimenting with mainstream’s engagement with the body in the areas of popular culture, hygiene and medical practices, bodily maintenance and beauty trends and the influence of religion and philosophical discoveries. I have limited the majority of my research to the place and time in which my body lives, a time where the body is particularly individualised and capitalised upon. Through my work I aim to critique bodily engagement and look at new or alternative methods to engage with the body. I have been influenced by the work of body philosopher, Richard Shusterman, who believes that by connecting with and understanding ourselves better, we can connect with and understand others better too.

Artist Website

Visual Art

RUTH McCONCHIE

12 June 2014



Ruth McConchie is a visual artist currently based in Brisbane. McConchie’s practice focuses on arranging relations between memory, personal histories and the sensuous orders of materials to form elaborate object-based environments. McConchie completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) in 2008 and a Master of Arts by Research at Queensland University of Technology in 2014. She has exhibited at LEVEL, Boxcopy, No Frills*, Accidentally Annie Street Space, Metro Arts Galleries, Blindside and Firstdraft gallery. In 2013, McConchie was awarded the Melville Haysom Memorial Art Scholarship and was included in the Institute of Modern Art’s ‘Fresh Cut’. McConchie is a co-director of inbetweenspaces polyamorous living lab, which developed work through the Kickstart program for the 2012 Next Wave Festival .

Artist’s Website

Visual Art

sOUNDS//iMAGES

12 June 2014



Sam Pankhurst, Ben Marks and Brodie McAllister are dedicated to pushing musical and conceptual boundaries through free improvisation.

In a meeting of Improvised, classical and printed traditions, “sOUNDS//iMAGES” is the coming together of music, art and people in a straight-to –the-point fashion. Where the music being played influences the score, and the score then influences the musical outcome. This is an acknowledgment of the moment-to-moment nature of art, and the immediacy of human response.

The improvisation will be guided by a graphic score, which will be collectively created by the audience and simultaneously interpreted by the musicians.

Samuel Pankhurst is a double bassist and musical jack-of-all-trades. His unique improvisational approach rings of western art music, jazz, rock and experimental practice. Sam is a member of The Marc Hannahford Trio, The Wild and Trouble with Templeton among many others.

Benjamin Marks is a freelance musician based in Brisbane. He is a member of the ELISION Ensemble and Specializes in the performance of contemporary music, including collaborations with visual artists and free improvisation. With ELISION, Marks has been involved in many projects involving Brian Ferneyhough, Richard Barrett, Aaron Cassidy, Klaus K Hu?bler and Timothy McCormack.

Brodie McAllister is a Brisbane based Trombonist/composer that deals with the blurring of lines between score and improvisation. Brodie has experience performing and composing in a variety of musical landscapes spanning from pop outfit Inigo through to ELISION Ensemble. He is a full-time member of The Jazzkill Bandits, BULLHORN and Ensemble Eigengrau.

Sound

ZOE KNIGHT

11 June 2014 | 1 comment



I work in three-dimensional sculptural forms that are made through working with found materials that tend to be mass-produced including things like: rope, electrical cable, bandages and tape. I examine these materials through play and intensely work them to transform each into a self-involved knot, which is then installed in a gallery space with the help of framing devices. My creative process is improvisation rather than design so my works are produced through reading and responding to the material I am presented with. In some ways they are a productive form of fidgeting. Due to the repetitive, often obsessive, process of making my works seem to contain a bundle of stored energy in their cores resulting in a perceived solidity of mass. I employ specific techniques and sensibilities to determine the final work and these take time to complete so the end product is very considered.

Artist’s Website

Visual Art

LUKE JAANISTE

11 June 2014 | 5 comments



Luke Jaaniste is a sonic and visual artist, writer and researcher, currently based in Brisbane. As an artist he explores embodied experience of ambient space, through sound- and visual-based projects and events. This includes individual practice, co-direction of several ongoing collaborations and working in a range of communal settings. His Portal project involves the collection of multiple vintage keyboards (Yamaha PortaSounds, 1981-1984) which are then unleashed into homes, studios and art spaces, next being BEAF at Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Art Brisbane (July 2013). With the Body-Sound-Awareness Collective, Luke is exploring a new wholebody listening-movement practice within drone fields called Dro Fo (Drone Focusing). Luke also works with children and other communities drawing on all these practices (including Jump, Dads-in-Schools and Living City) and is co-director of Super Critical Mass.

As a visual artist, he has exhibited installations, still and moving images, and temporary public art. His research work includes a doctorate exploring ambient modes of experience (QUT 2003-2007) and research fellowship around arts, innovation and policy (QUT/CCI 2008-2011), and he is now the studying and writing commentary on philosophy of living Eugene Gendlin (A Living Process). Other current writing projects are focused around the conditions of lively living and thinking as it’s surfacing across all out human practices (e.g. Hello to Thinking, Hello to You).

Sound

CALEB COLLEDGE

11 June 2014


“In our day and age, we have become so dependant on technology and social media that we have lulled ourself into a false sense of reality.”

“We barely look up now, more concerned with what other people are doing, in another place at another time.”

Our False Reality, is Caleb Colledge’s sonic response to this societal norm created by us.

By manipulating field recordings of the very city we reside in, coupled with tuned, un-tuned and found percussion, Caleb Colledge exemplifies sonically the world we have created for ourselves by our fixation on something happening elsewhere.

He seeks to severe that fixation and bring the audience into the very moment in which time is progressing. By creating a sonic landscape in which the audience can take part in at any time with the use of their smartphone. This interactive atmosphere will help to re-emphasise the beauty of a naturally formed human connection.

A current student of the Queensland Conservatorium of Music, Caleb Colledge is exploring many experimental avenues in percussion and electronics. He has had the recent opportunity to collaborate and improvise with resident artists of Jugglers Art Space as well as students of the Queensland College of Arts.

His new site specific creation for the B.E.A.F, Our False Reality helps us remember what is really important and brings us back into the moment.

Sound

THE FEN

11 June 2014


A dark exploration of Australian landscape myths. Audio visual motion assemblages inhabiting a space.

The aim of this project is to create a ‘story space’ that cultivates and challenges enduring dominant myths about the Australian landscape through perverse and abject audio-visual strategies and ‘postproduction art’ practices. The dominant cinematic myths of Australian landscape underpinning this project relate to non-indigenous Australians’ largely unconsummated desire to understand and unite with an intolerant and sometimes vengeful landscape.

This project draws on Australian writer Ross Gibson’s theories on dominant cinematic Australian landscape myths and an aspect of Bulgarian psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection from her book “The Powers of Horror” (1982) to challenge these myths. Metaphorically, abjection describes anything that is cast-off or excluded from the dominant societal norms, and can include people, objects, spaces, motion and stories. Cast-offs represent the binary opposite of what is accepted by the dominant societal norms, such as right and wrong, life and death, or “human and non-human” (Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine 1993, 8).

This physical lived story space consists of audio-visual artworks that present an abject interpretation of trees inhabiting under-represented swamp and native forest landscapes located in Moreton Bay and Byron Bay.

Merri Randell: Artist statement

I am fascinated by myths that demonise difference. I create worlds full of beautiful, hybrid monstrosities that seduce, beguile and disturb.

I work in distorted realities, combining digitally manipulated, highly-detailed photographs with audio and motion design. I currently photograph under-represented indigenous Australian forest landscapes such as swamps and pristine national parks with deep humus and rotting trees. I incorporate audio of human consumption, respiration, digestion and reproduction with these images and syncronise the audio with uncanny, suggestive motion design. I use these materials to challenge social norms to promote acceptance of difference.

I combine signifiers of human bodily functions with trees because I think its important to de-comodify nature. I believe if we respect nature and its right to survive we can in turn believe in our own right to survive in an era hell-bent on its own destruction through over-consumption.

I feel strongly that if we embrace difference a more sustainable, balanced existence can be achieved. My recent series of artworks - ‘The Fen’ - is a playful but dark exploration of dominant cinematic myths of Australian landscape which seeks to challenge post-colonial social norms.

As a non-indigenous Australian of migrant parentage, my artworks examine relationships between identity, nature and post-colonial Australia.

Screen

HOW DO WE MAKE THE WORLD WORK ?

11 June 2014


The post-liberal bloc must be crazy, I can’t see a thing beyond my nose but the radical has happened and the revolution did not happen but it does not feel like the past anymore and we know that we’ve rubbed against all the stiff and the preordained and the boundaries are so broken that you can promise that Anything Can Happen and Anything Will Happen and they (the good ones, the you ones) will take it into their own hands and if it becomes Beyond Control then that’s fucking it man it’s Beyond Control.

Bio

Andrew McLellan and Kiah Reading regularly collaborate on different odd ends, and are members of Golden Solution with Michael Candy.
Andrew McLellan has relatively abandoned most of his tactile creative output in favour of answering requests from Berlin to finish his records. Kiah Reading is currently considering his relationship with the Office as he trades .PDFs and hostile conversations with his (e)mail delivery agent, all in the name of Work.

Performance

COURTNEY PEDERSEN

11 June 2014



Courtney Pedersen is a Brisbane-based artist, writer and academic. Her work is primarily concerned with the nexus of personal experience and the public realm, with particular interests in feminism and social history.

Artist statement:

This current body of work, Summers with Hilma, takes the seascapes of Queensland and the Scandinavian coastline as its formal departure point. By bringing these images into conversation with the geometric abstraction of Swedish mystic painter Hilma af Klint, the avant-garde film making of Viking Eggeling, and the cinematic concerns of Ingmar Bergman, I am creating imaginary geographies that approach a place where I belong.

Visual Art

GRACE KEVILL-DAVIES

10 June 2014



In my practice I make constructed environments out of found and made objects. I interpret materials through the lens of the diorama, using processes of play and chance to make work. Because of this fluidity, my work shifts between video, photography and installation. These mediums allow me to explore different types of narrative that can occur using a combination of found sound, toys, images and sculpture. By juxtaposing these things together, comic effect is used to subvert meanings and expectations.

Visual Art

FELL

10 June 2014


In a corner of the Judith Wright Centre, a bedraggled, weary bird has made his nest.

‘Fell’ is a durational performance-installation exploring the price of selfishness, failed ambition and rejection. Each audience member becomes a close friend, invited into the previously unexplored internal life of Anthony Vian, a reclusive, brutally honest writer. Stricken by failure, he seeks to make amends, opening his life in an attempt to reach understanding with the people he has estranged. ‘Fell’ invites the audience to interact, manipulate, or simply view the disintegrating reality of Anthony’s apartment. If they wish, they may come into the depths of the nest, and face to face with the fallen man himself, sitting down at his writing desk and sharing a story of their own, adding it to his ever-growing collection of regrets.

Creatives: Regan Lynch (Performing) & Jennifer Bismire (Designing)

Artist’s Website

Performance

AMY COMMINS

10 June 2014


My creative practice has evolved through my interest in exploring contemporary ideas about nature and its cultural representation. This interest stems from my own mediated experiences of engaging with the physical environment. I am currently undertaking my Honours in Fine Art at the Queensland University of Technology and my current practice is concerned with exploring the distinction between representation and reality. This distinction is explored through the use of representational images such as landscapes, which act as pictorial devices that structure our internal and external realities. Combined with the use of text and image, I am also interested in the arbitrary and constructed nature of language and images, and the slippages and processes of negotiation between ‘reading’ and ‘seeing’.

Artist’s Website

Visual Art

STARCH HEARTS

10 June 2014


Starch Hearts is a collaboration between Henry Mills and Bonnie Hart using audio, visual and kinetic stimulus in a theater of circumstance. Electronic and analogue audio signals are generated and manipulated in real time by the artists who are simultaneously immersed in a theatrical melodrama. Voice and movement, prop and installation. Using a unique blend of narrative, aesthetics and mechanisation, Starch Hearts addresses issues of fun, industry, lust, talk-back radio, dance party, confessionals and abstraction.

Performance

ZOE PORTER & FRANCESCA JAIYEOLA

9 June 2014 | 1 comment



Zoe Porter

Zoe is a Brisbane based artist and has recently been awarded a Doctor of Visual Art (Queensland College of Art, 2014). Zoe’s practice is interdisciplinary exploring primarily a drawing practice, which also extends into painting, installation, performance, sculpture, site-specific works and video. Zoe exhibits regularly in Australia and internationally.

Her work often depicts the animal-human hybrid in an attempt at crossing the boundaries between the animal and the human, real and imaginary states, chaos and order. Her performance-based works are often collaborative and merge art, theatre, sound and physical performance highlighting the artistic and creative processes involved in producing artworks. Her performance-based works have taken place in both traditional galleries and festivals including the Woodford Folk Festival (2009- 2011), The Judith Wright Centre (2012) and Current Rising (2012).

Francesca Jaiyeola

Francesca Jaiyeola is a performer whose practice includes contemporary African dance, music, circus and theatre. As a West African and contemporary dancer, Francesca’s creative direction is often derived from her mixed Nigerian-English heritage. Jaiyeola has performed as a dancer regularly in Australia and overseas as well as teaching dance in Brisbane. She has participated in a number of collaborative projects and has produced several dance performances and workshops at various festivals including the Blues and Roots Festival (2014) and Earth Frequency (2012 - 2013).

Performance

MINO PERIC - SUPER DISCO #1

9 June 2014


Mino Peric is a Brisbane-based musician, producer and sound artist. His work primarily focuses on the blending of sound as art and sound as music and its relationship to visual mediums.

The piece, Super Disco #1, explores the repetition and motion of travel via the projection of footage taken of Japan in January 2014. In the vein of sound artists such as Christian Marclay and Philip Jeck, the visuals will be reinforced through the art of turntablism.

Sound

JAMIE BEHRENDORFF

8 June 2014


My visual art practice stems from a very personal sense of curiosity and affection that I feel towards the everyday (and often minute) traces of human inhabitation. It explores my attraction to physical residues (dust, dirt,debris) and various discarded or abandoned objects, through an intuitive desire to collect, sort, arrange and repeat. The artworks within my practice reflect an interest in the act of looking; questioning how it is that we perceive the spaces and objects that surround us by creating a balance between close proximity and obscurity. I am particularly interested in engaging with my attraction to perceptions of insignificance, through the scope of digital and 2-dimensional media.

Visual Art

BEAF TEAM 2014

7 June 2014

FESTIVAL DIRECTOR - RACHAEL PARSONS



Rachael is a curator and academic within the Creative industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Honours (Visual Arts) in 2006 as well as her Masters of Research in 2011 from QUT. Rachael’s masters research explored new curatorial methodologies for the exhibition of digital art and culminated with Virion – a distributed screen and on-line based exhibition. She has exhibited her own work both in Brisbane and internationally and has worked as an independent freelance curator focusing on digital media exhibitions. Rachael also facilitates creative workshops with both QUT’s Creative Industries Precinct and the Flying Arts. In 2011 Rachael joined the curatorial team at QUT’s Creative Industries Precinct as the Exhibitions Officer and curator, facilitating their new media exhibition program. In 2012 Rachael joined Brisbane-based artist-run initiative Vegas Spray as a Co-Director to facilitate a range of programs and platforms that support and promote cultural ecology of Brisbane including BNE Art and the Brisbane Emerging Arts Festival.

PERFORMANCE CURATOR - KIERAN SWAN



Kieran is an artist working in combinations of video, objects, and actions. His work ruminates on physical and systemic constructs of the contemporary urban experience; the state of aloneness, cities in decay, and repetitive activity. Heavily invested in process, his work often manifests as sparse and meditative gestures. With a background in different modes of performance and visual art, Kieran is keenly interested in the bleed between forms and artists, and has cultivated this interest in study at both QUT and VCA. He was part of Transparency Collective, a discursive constellation of artists investigating solo and collaborative practice, and from 2004-2009 co-led the Restaged Histories project, a contemporary performance outfit developing new work and experimenting with syzygetic collaboration. His work deals with post-minimalist and queer reference points.

SOUND CURATOR - TOBY GIFFORD



Toby Gifford is a music technologist, sound designer and acoustic musician. He has recently completed his PhD in interactive music systems. His Jambot software has received national acclaim, appearing on the ABC New Inventors program. Interactive installations have been exhibited in the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the Museum of Melbourne, Splendour in the Grass music festival, and the European Capital of Culture Festival in Patras, Greece. He has been artist-in-residence at the Gallery of Modern Art developing live soundtracks for silent films. He is an active acoustic musician, live electronic music performer, and works at the arts/science nexus. One of his arts-science collaborations has been awarded the prestigous ANAT Synapse residency program for 2014. He currently lectures in music technology, interactive installation and sound design at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music.

VISUAL ART CURATOR - RACHAEL HAYNES



Rachael Haynes is a contemporary artist, curator and writer. Her art practice explores the limits of language and subjectivity, and re-examines art history and philosophy in relation to gender politics. Rachael’s professional experience includes lecturing in visual arts at Deakin University, VIC and at the Queensland University of Technology, working in publishing, including for Eyeline: Contemporary Visual Arts, and service on committees for Metro Arts, Artworkers Alliance and as a board member for the IMA. Rachael was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy in Visual Arts (2009) with an Australian Postgraduate Award and her research interests include gender politics, alternative exhibition spaces and feminist pedagogy in the visual arts. She has been involved with artist run initiatives in Brisbane since 2003 and is the Gallery Director of Boxcopy Contemporary Art Space and a founding co-director of the feminist collective and artist run initiative, LEVEL.

VISUAL ART CURATOR - JENNA BALDOCK


Jenna Baldock is a Brisbane based Curator currently studying her Masters of Fine Arts (Research) at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (2011) and a Postgraduate Certificate of Business (Public Relations) (2012) from QUT. Central to Baldock’s research is the investigation into the contingent dynamics of exhibition spaces and their affect on the production and perception of art. She examines the impact of critical dialogue on arts production, and how this may be utilised when planning exhibitions and arts programming. This knowledge is employed in her roles as Co-Director of Inhouse ARI and Curator of Spiro Grace Art Rooms (SGAR).

Baldock’s major curatorial projects include PRESENCE/ABSENCE (SGAR, 2014), Out of House (Metro Arts, 2013), Fission (Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Art, 2012) and Pinkification (The Tidy, 2011) as well as co-curating a series of exhibitions at The Alley, Brisbane (2011 – 2012). In 2012 she was the Public Relations Manager for the Brisbane Artist Run Initiative (BARI) Festival.

Festival Team