Yeomans Exhibition and Field Trip

I posted previously about working on a project for Ian Milliss and Lucas Ihlein called the Yeomans Project, which has just finished exhibiting at the Art Gallery of NSW. I went there on Monday and finally got some decent photos of the exhibition just before it closed. I also went on a field trip to one of Yeomans' original farms organised as part of the public programs. Here are some of my photos from both:

I'm also working on transcribing the talks by Kirsten Bradley, Joanna Mendelssohn, Stuart Hill and Wendy Yeomans from the public programs. These will eventually be up on the Yeomans Project blog.

The BIG FAG Dance

Big Fag Dance graphics designed by Pat Armstrong

A while ago we were told by Firstdraft that unfortunately we cannot stay at their depot in Woolloomooloo (which is this strange shaped building here):

Photo by Pat Armstrong

It was really sad for us because we have so many wonderful relationships in the area with Firstdraft, Artspace, The Cross Art Projects and many others.

However, we applied for and were successful in getting a City of Sydney Accommodation Grant! This is a really fantastic opportunity for us. So, our new home is in the Glebe Viaducts in Jubilee Park:

Photo from Google Images

Unfortunately, to get our 4 tonne machine there is tricky, and expensive! So in December we launched a campaign on Pozible to raise money.

I came up with the idea for Zoe Sadokierski to produce a print which looks at the history of printing presses. She decided to focus on the FAG family of presses.

Here is her beautiful limited edition print:

Big Fag Dance, 2013, Zoe Sadokierski

She also did some other drawings for us, which we printed onto small cards at our good friends the Rizzeria.

Dance Cards by Zoe Sadokierski, printed on The Rizzeria

We also made this brilliantly embarrassing video:


Big Fag Press » Big Fag Dance from Big Fag Press on Vimeo.

..and sent out some press releases which landed us a few shout outs like Art Almanac.

We also had some fabulous Big Fag Tshirts, aprons and little badges, and after 18 days of dancing, we had doubled our goal of $3000 to raise a total of $6297!

It was then clearly time to ACTUALLY DANCE!

So we organised a great 70s themed party with local DJs and lots of great food and beer. Alex Stevenson and I even got outed by Two Thousand!

I even made a cake. Here are Lucas & I with my cake:

A close up of my cake: (Yes I have cake making problems)

Now all we have to do is actually move the press this January!

The Yeomans Project - Art Gallery of NSW

In 2011, I started working on printing a series of works by Lucas Ihlein and Ian Milliss for the Yeomans Project on the Big Fag Press which was to be exhibited at ACCA in Melbourne. You can see I wrote a post about it in my blog here. The prints went on to win the 2012 Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award.

Here is Lucas holding up one of the prints:

In the lead up to another Yeomans exhibition, this time at the Art Gallery of NSW, Lucas Ihlein and Ian Milliss asked me to assist them in some of the legwork for the show, mainly making up some posters, and designing a newspaper based on their research blog.

The Yeomans Project recognises the work of PA Yeomans, an Australian inventor who came up with what's known as the Keyline concepts in agriculture and farming. The AGNSW exhibition is interestingly retrospective, as a similar proposal for an exhibition was rejected in the 70s when the trustees felt that such work was not art. Just goes to show how the meaning of art has changed in the last 40 years!

The posters I designed were based on websites of other artists or artist groups who use agriculture, farming or food as the basis of their art practice: (f)route, Artist as Family, Milkwood Permaculture and Diego Bonetto (who is also a partner of the Big Fag Press).

An interesting off-topic note: When I did my short course on social media business marketing at Media School, (who have no particular association with art or agriculture), Milkwood Permaculture were their prime example of awesome social media marketing. Small world, huh?

Anyway, for the posters, I had to request high resolution images and names of fonts, and loosely put together information about each artists' practice in one poster for the exhibition. Here are some of my proof prints stuck to my hallway wall! (yes they look better in the art gallery).

And here are the posters in the gallery (and Diego next to his one). I keep meaning to get back to the AGNSW and take some better photos of the whole exhibition but I haven't had time! If you wanted to see some of Lucas' photos of the launch, they are here.

The University of Wollongong (where Lucas teaches Media & Arts) funded the production of a newspaper for the exhibition which was based on the Yeomans Project blog.

It was a great experience getting it printed at MPD in Alexandria. At the Big Fag we print one hand fed sheet at a time, one colour at a time, about 100 imprints a day, not to mention an hour of cleaning up. I've explained our process in more detail in this post from ages ago. For this newspaper, MPD were using their web press machine. Now, the big fag is big, but, this is a BIG machine:

These are the rolls of paper they use to feed through the machine:

And here are the first proofs I had to look at to see if the colours were all right. (This took a bit of time).

Then see all these knobs here? Apparently they change the balance of the ink somehow. So for example, when I said a page was looking too yellow, they could fix it for the next proofing.

Here is my contact at MPD, Eleanor holding up one of the plates they use in the machine. They don't look too much different to our Big Fag plates! And on the right is the big roll of paper being fed into the machine.

So, the Big Fag does about 100 imprints of one giant page a day, and that's just one colour... this web press machine does 15,000 copies of a full colour newspaper in 1 hour! Here are some videos of the newspaper being printed:

Amazing! I would love to know more about how the web press machine works, I think it's fascinating.

So, all this was great fun but a harrowing few weeks designing the posters and newspaper during the time I was working at Sculpture by the Sea. I'm really proud of the way it all looks though!

 Art Gallery of NSW advertising for the Yeomans Project

The AGNSW exhibition is on in the Contemporary Project Space until 27 January 2014. The newspapers are free at the exhibition, so please pick one up!

*All photos and videos are mine, unless captioned otherwise.

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'

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

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.

Big Fag Press Artist Residency Programme 2013

* Flier design mine

Supported by Artspace and Australia Council for the Arts, the Big Fag Press got to host an Emerging Artists' Residency for 3 weeks in January with two artists, Laura Hindmarsh and Pat Grant.

Both artists were looking at introspective notions of art work, and it was great to be able to do test printing on the Press and spend time mentoring the artists and helping them create works that really took into account the unique functioning of our machine.

Here are some images from the residency and launch.

 

 *All photos are mine