John Demos' Accessible Arts Residency at the Big Fag

John Demos. Photo Louise Anderson

John Demos working at the Big Fag Press, Photo Louise Anderson

John Demos with his original work "Antitoxicus" Photo Louise Anderson

For about 3 months we've had John Demos down at Firstdraft Depot working on some prints on the Big Fag as part of his residency mentorship program thanks to his Amplify Your Art grant. John has been coming in one day a week to create his beautiful works and experience the process of making those works into prints on our offset proofing press.

I've been mostly managing this project solo, and it's been an amazing experience for me. Art is the way John experiences his life, and his works are an exploration of belonging and home, and the words and images that mean those things to him. When he's not practising, John is browsing countless Sydney galleries where the attendants all know him by name. This is a kind of passion I feel is rare in just about any field.

Whilst down at the Press, I introduced John and his liaison Kristina Tito to Jo Holder from The Cross Art Projects gallery. He's been offered the opportunity to exhibit his work at the end of our mentorship there in October/ November. This is such a great opportunity for him to make contacts, show his work and most importantly give a voice to artists like himself who benefit so much from Supported Studio Networks.

We're just in the printing phase now, and the entire project is taking shape. I organised some paper sponsorship from K.W. Doggett, which has been great for John to experiment on. He loves discovering new kinds of paper and mediums to work with, and asks endless questions about ink mixing, how the press works and what kind of things we've printed on before.

We've made up ten metal plates of John's work separated into different colours, and he'll end up with a series of about 4 works, plus a few others where he will experiment with layering different works on top of each other, and then using them as a basis for more hand- rendered work.

Josh Charles has been making a short documentary of the entire project.

Spending any time at all with John has shown me that he has a little story about everything. It's really important to give John a platform from which to tell those stories - through his art, but also his practice, which can potentially, as he says, "influence other people towards art".

Life of Pi

[image from Google Images]

I had to do a post about Life of Pi. I hadn't read the book and didn't even know much about the film when I saw it - other than there was a tiger, and I'd vaguely heard that the book was amazing.

Well, I just have to commend both the author Yann Martell and the film produced for bringing me this masterpiece that had me laughing, in hysterical tears, and feeling thoroughly enlightened at the end. I'm an atheist but I loved that this little boy was so adventurous and sought knowledge of all these religions as a way of explaining his reality.

The end of the story made perfect sense to my beliefs. The two stories of his shipwreck survival was that the phatasmagorical tale which included lands he'd never seen, and a mercurial relationship with this tiger was the story he preferred, the story many preferred over the distressing version where he saw his mother die. The way I interpreted it was that god was his survival in the ocean - and he brought him this magical world to explore and this tiger that somehow kept him company, as well as alive. He prefers this story, as he prefers to believe in god because this belief is what got him through it. But he realises that perhaps reality doesn't exactly work that way.

As an atheist, this is pretty much my belief. God exists to those who believe in him, and I am glad he does, I know many people to whom god is an unrelenting power of strength. To me, god does not exist, I find my beliefs in other places like nature, science and love.

On another note, after I saw the film, I learnt from my usual googling of how well the film industry treats its animal actors, that surprisingly, many of the animal scenes were computer rendered. No endangered Bengal Tiger needed to be on set for this film - a few photographs were sufficient to computer generate the animal scenes in the entire movie. And frankly I couldn't tell, the animal scenes were so real, there wasn't a moment I thought through my tears "this poor dying tiger looks a little photoshopped". Now, I can be a master of photoshop when I need to be, but the idea of "photoshopping" for filmscreen seems like an unfathomable amount of great technology coupled with great talent.

I know The Hobbit too used some computer generated animal scenes. But I am still disappointed for those 27 animals that died due to lack of sufficient care, on a budget that could have easily guaranteed their safety and comfort.

And here is a movie all about animals with far fewer dollars to spend who managed to get it right - and still win its prizes and accolades. Very well deserved. I'm now reading the book.