Louise Kate Anderson: December 2013

Monday, December 30, 2013

Supported Studio Networks - new questions in art?

This post is an addendum to two previous blog posts about John Demos' residency at the Big Fag Press, and his exhibition at The Cross Art Projects that followed.

Josie Cavallaro of Accessible Arts came to visit John during his residency, and asked me to be a panellist on a forum she was organising at the MCA on 7 November about Supported Studio Networks.

Me, John Demos and Kevin Meagher at the MCA

John and I were to be panellists on the section called 'Building Culture', and we had to talk about various aspects of the project we'd just done.

So I sat down with John and chatted about the project, what he'd gotten out of it, what things worked well, what challenges we had, etc. I ended up with a good set of notes both of us could use for the panel. I also had a few notes about some questions we had faced during the course of the project about disclosure and journalist responsibility.

The forum Supported Studio Networks: Possibility and Potential took place at the MCA. Glenn Barkley was the opening speaker, and other panellists included Damien Minton and Evan Hughes. Many of the delegates were key figures in the Sydney art community.

I was a little nervous, but several people said I was very engaging, so I suppose it went well. I was very proud of John who I'm sure was just as nervous as I was. His speech was great too.

An article by Gina Fairley emerged a few weeks later on arts hub called 'Is Outsider Art finally over?' which quoted several of the things I'd said. I wish they had quotes John too though.

I wrote a small response to the forum for the Runway news section, 'Out with Outsider Art'.

The Accessible Arts forum podcast and transcript will be available soon in 2014 online.

Program for the Section 'Building Culture'

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Runway Australian Experimental Art - goes LIVE

Runway is a niche artist run magazine of which I joined the management in February this year. We've been working all year on relaunching as a free, online journal rebranded as Runway Australian Experimental Art, and expanding our audience to an international readership in order to promote the work of Australian contemporary artists both at home and overseas.

I was elected secretary of the management board, was part of the website design subcommittee and have been running the social media platforms.

The website <http://runway.org.au/> goes live as I'm typing this in 27 minutes - I'm so excited!

Here is my board member profile page.

And here is a blog post I wrote for the news section regarding another project I've been working on.

And here is the launch poster if you'd like to come along. The Sydney launch is at Archive Space in Newtown at 6pm tomorrow.

Monday, December 2, 2013

John Demos at Big Fag (at The Cross Art Projects)

In this post I spoke about our Big Fag Press Residency with John Demos, a project organised through Accessible Arts.

The residency went very well. John got a lot of prints and experiments out of his budgeted printing days, and was thrilled to see the press in motion printing his work.

Kristina Tito and I applied on his behalf to NAVA for a small grant to pay for some promotional material and other odds and ends to fund John's exhibition at The Cross Art Projects.

I designed a small catalogue, which was printed on our friends in print The Rizzeria.

John Demos Catalogues, Photo Mine

You can "read" the catalogue here:

The exhibition gathered John some publicity, like on Two Thousand which I was pleased about. I spoke about the residency and the exhibition on Eastside Radio in an interview, and an article about the project, Finding a place in the artworld, by Lucas Ihlein was published in Realtime Arts Magazine.

Antitoxicus Toxic by John Demos, 2013. Photo Louise Anderson

Blue Light and Black Window by John Demos, 2013. Photo Louise Anderson

Exhibition at The Cross Art Projects, Kings Cross, 2013. Photo Lucas Ihlein

Josie Cavallaro, Accessible Arts. Photo Louise Anderson

Josie Cavallaro from Accessible Arts made a small speech about the project to open the exhibition. Unbeknown to anyone, John came along with his own little speech written out on a tiny piece of paper, to thank everyone for the opportunity. It was a very proud moment for me.

From the left: John Demos, Artist; Tim Barbarino, Big Fag Intern; Lucas Ihlein, Big Fag Partner; Kris Tito, John's liaison at Project Insideout; Louise Anderson (me), and Diego Bonetto, Big Fag Partner.

Josh Charles' beautiful documentary was screened in its entirety at the exhibition as well:

John Demos at the Big FAG Press from Josh Charles on Vimeo.

The project was part of a panel discussion at Accessible Arts on 6 November 2013, but that's a subject for a later post.

Sculpture by the Sea

You may have noticed I've been very quiet on here. The next 4 or 5 posts should definitely explain why!

I was very proud to get a 2 day/week internship at Sculpture by the Sea about 4 months ago, which quickly progressed into a full time paid load unexpectedly. So for the past 2 months or so, I've been Exhibition Assistant to the Exhibition Coordination team for the Bondi 2013 show. Along with my French HSC tutoring, and various other freelance commitments, it's been a very stressful couple of months.

My responsibilities in the office included data entry, organising the office move out to Bondi, liaising with artists, social media scheduling, phone and reception assistance, putting together volunteer and artist information packs, stock ordering, helping to write our e-news, redirecting our mail and helping to finalise details like sponsor logos, dimensions and images for our exhibition catalogue. I also used my Indesign skills to create lanyards and badges for all staff, artists and volunteers.

Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi exhibition catalogue cover

Once we moved out to Bondi, in addition to the above, I was organising and directing volunteers, distributing catering, assisting with general enquiries, directing traffic and parking, driving various visitors in our sponsored car, communicating with all staff and site crew via 2 way radios, conducting visitor surveys, counting crowds, liaising with our publicity team, and occasionally assisting in small urgent situations like injuries. Sydney had a tough day a couple of weeks ago with some very windy weather, and being on the coastline was a tricky situation.

One thing I was particularly responsible for was artist talks on the weekends. I contacted and scheduled the artists and ran the artist talks event, which included distributing posters and information, bringing all the necessary material and moving around feather banners, beanbags, A frames and signs.

Here are some images of artist Simon McGrath explaining his work Virtually Melted, which is a site specific work consisting of a smart phone application that makes the image of an iceberg appear above the water to recognise the effects of global warming. These photos are mine.

I kept meaning to get up super early and take some great sunrise photos, but the role was very tiring and I didn't manage to actually walk through and see all the sculptures until just before the end! Unfortunately with the sun setting in the west as it usually does, sunset photos weren't as spectacular as the ones I've seen of Sculpture by the Sea, Cottesloe, in Perth.

We've just finished the Bondi show, I fell in love with quite a few of the works (my taste generally leans towards the more contemporary ideas or to works which have a political or social concept behind them).