Category: Visual Artists


30 days & 30 nights

Last week we released the program for our 30 Days & 30 Nights celebrations taking place at FraserStudios in June 2012. It’s our last month in the building and we’re giving the public a final chance to come and enjoy the space, see our artists’ work, and have a drink with us in the amazing warehouse building we’ve called home since October 2008.

You can click HERE to head to our website for all the info, but here’s a run through (we’ve tried to keep it brief):

First up is the launch of our archival document 1,386 days at FraserStudios. We’re launching this, and the rest of the 30 Days & 30 Nights program, with a swanky ‘do on Friday 1 June. It’s invite only, but we have tried to invite all of our ex-residents, so if you’d really like to come and celebrate with us (and Clover Moore!) email julia@queenstreetstudio.com and we’ll see what we can do.

We’ve also collaborated with the super lovely  wine brand Cake Wines to have a pop-up bar in Studio 10 for the whole month of June. Open Thursday-Sunday, The Cake Pop-Up Bar be serving wine, beer and cider and announcing some special programming of their own over the next few weeks. Stay tuned.

In Studio 10 our final Visual Arts Residents will present an exhibition called “Our House”; playing with notions of home, domesticity and family. With work ranging from installation, sculpture, painting, audio-visual work and community-based projects, this eclectic exhibition is not to be missed (and well worth a trip down to The Cake Pop-Up Bar which is sharing the same space).

In Studio 12, our archival photographer Arunas Klupsas will display one hundred of some 24,000 photos taken at FraserStudios over the three-and-a-half years. Arunas’ images capture the many and varied transformations of the space and the people who have inhabited it so we can’t wait to show some of his work off!

Strings Attached

And in Studio 14, co-founders & directors Sam Chester & James Winter have put together a program of masterclasses, free drop-in classes, final commissions and showings from some of our favourite Performing Arts Residents past and present…

From Monday 4 June — Friday 8 June, daily masterclasses will be held at an affordable rate of $65 a day with fantastic Sydney artists Kaz Therese, Strings Attached, The Fondue Set, Kate Gaul and Kate Champion. Spots are limited and this is the only part of 30 Days & 30 Nights  we need you to register for in advance. So if you’re a performance-maker, actor or dancer who wants to brush up on their skills, click here for more info or to register.

That same week we’re also offering some FREE drop-in classes from our FraserStudios regulars, not only for performers but for anyone who wants a final turn on the tarkett. There’s Bollywood, stage combat, Jamaican Dancehall & Reggae and Konga… all for free!

POST, Venettia Miller & Ryuichi Fujimura and Wrong Solo have each been given four days in Studio 14 to develop an old or new work, which will then be showed in the space on Thursdays at 7pm, also free. We’re excited to facilitate the creation of work one final time in our beautiful concrete-walled Studio 14.

And last, but certainly not least, Friday & Saturday nights at 7pm will feature Platform 5, curated by Linda Luke, Tin Shed Camping Tours, Double Trouble with Julie-Anne Long & Martin del Amo, The Cardio Church Gala Performance with Matt Prest & James Brown, WHIP IT with Nikki Heywood & Ryuichi Fujimura and The Modern Social, with Anton… a true celebration of all the amazing things that have happened in our space and a chance for you to get involved (sometimes even on the dancefloor!) for one last time.

Then we’ll wrap it all up with an old-school Backyard BBQ on Saturday 30 June at 2pm. Everyone’s invited!

Click HERE to view the full program (and times!) online. We can’t wait to see you in the month of June.

impermanence

A hop, skip and a jump away over at MOP Gallery next Thursday is the opening of “Ex Post Facto”, an exhibition from The Paper Mill directors Aaron Anderson (also a current QSS-Resident), Kate Campbell, Anne-Louise Dadak, Christopher Hodge (an ex QSS-Resident), Sian McIntyre, Stephanie Peters and Laura Pike.

For just over a year The Paper Mill were able to call home a fantastic, slightly angular, space in the heart of the city at Angel Place, which saw its final exhibition late last year. In this exhibition at MOP they seek to investigate notions of impermanence and transience — something we can relate to with the FraserStudios project coming to an end in June 2012.

MOP is infamous for throwing a great opening bash so head along on Thursday 19 April from 6–8pm to see what the Paper Mill directors have been up to ‘after the fact’. Click here for all the info.

To kick off the short week, we’re checking in on just a few of our ex– and current QSS-Residents (and one pretty awesome staff member) to see what they’re getting up to.

Over the next week. ex QSS-Resident Agatha Gothe-Snape will be holding two hour conversations in the CarriageWorks foyer with members of the local community and leaders from Sydney in the fields of art, film and government for a project entitled Every Future Here Now. A creative way of imagining the future of CarriageWorks, who have commissioned the project,  Gothe-Snape will create a large-scale drawing on-site during the sessions to become the blueprint for the future of CarriageWorks and hopefully uncover possibilities never before imagined. Participants include Fiona Winning, the newly announced Head of Programming at Sydney Festival, and Rachel Healy, Executive Manager of Culture for the City of Sydney. The sessions happen over the next four days and if you’re interested you can drop by and have a look and a listen. Click here for the info.

If you happen to be in Melbourne, ex QSS-Resident Zoe Coombs Marr has a Comedy Festival show on in the Melbourne Town Hall called Gone Off which is on until 22 April. Zoe is a member of the performance trio POST, who have a Performing Arts Residency at Heffron Hall later in the year, and is a very funny lady so you should definitely head along if you can. Click here to buy tix.

Current QSS-Resident William Mansfield, who is working with Eddie Sharp and Kenzie Larsen while here at FraserStudios, has been announced as a finalist in this year’s Spirit Of Youth Awards, sponsored by Qantas. Will describes himself as a multi-disciplinary Visual Artist and works across a variety of mediums including graphic design, film, installation, sculpture and performance. Good luck Will :)

Last week also saw the re-launch of the rebranded Museum of Contemporary Art Australia following a $53 million refurbishment which has been highly anticipated in Sydney’s arts community. Reports so far have been glowing, with the museum boasting a new level to house its own fantastic collection plus talks and events going late into the night every Thursday, including a chat with ex QSS-Residents Brown Council and The Kingpins programmed over the next few months. Coming up in June, Performance Space have been asked by MCA Australia to put together a program of performance, site-specific and participatory art called Local Positioning Systems, which will involve six fantastic Australian and UK-based artists including ex QSS-Resident and Blueprint mentor Julie-Anne Long. Plus we’re pretty excited about ARTBAR, which will take place on the last Friday of every month and is run by our very own Events Coordinator Kym Lenoble. We’re hearing great things about the artists who will be involved and are expecting the unexpected. So head along to the new MCA Australia and see what all the fuss is about.

If you’re a QSS-Resident past or present doing exciting things you’d like us to help promote, please send an email through to julia@queenstreetstudio.com and we’ll happily do our bit to support!

 

Craig Waddell’s Archibald finalist self-portrait ‘I see myself in you’

We are thrilled to announce that current QSS-Resident Craig Waddell has been selected as a finalist for the Archibald Prize; the annual prize recognising the best of portraiture around the country.

Craig’s self-portrait, ‘I see myself in you’ was selected for this prestigious award, a painting inspired by his relationship with his wife Jessie and in fact painted on top of an old portrait of her.

Waddell also received a Wynne Prize nomination for ‘The dunce – I will learn the rules before I speak’.

The winners are expected to be announced this week.

Click here to read more about the portrait.

 

 

 

NAVA is currently looking for a Projects Manager!

The National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) is seeking an experienced person for the position of Projects Manager. The person will be responsible for developing and managing projects that address NAVA identified issues within the visual arts, craft and design sector. Applicants will need to be experienced in researching, preparing and updating NAVA texts and as well as public presentations on NAVA and art industry issues.

Click here to read the position description or for more information contact Emma Thompson, General Manager on (02) 9368 1900 or generalmanager@visualarts.net.au.

Applications close Monday 30 January 2012.

Image by Arunas

About two months ago, we put out the call for a final “Bonus Round” of Visual Arts Residents to take over our two levels of artists’ studios during our last six months of operation here at FraserStudios. We received a huge number of applications and the assessment meeting was full of some particularly tough decisions, but without further ado here are our final Vis Artists in Residence from Jan–June 2012:

  • Aaron Anderson
  • Lisa Andrew
  • Tega Brain
  • Tammie Castles
  • Li Cui
  • Sarah Goffman
  • Yvette Hamilton
  • Bronia Iwanczak
  • Francesca Mataraga
  • Ben Morley
  • Parachutes for Ladies
  • Eddie Sharp, Kenzie Larsen & William Mansfield
  • Craig Waddell

This phenomenal bunch of artists come from many artistic backgrounds and have very different practices, so we can’t wait to see what happens during this final six months in the space. Stay tuned for some very special announcements about our wrap-up events at FraserStudios in June of next year…

The lovely folks from Stvdio Artbreak had a chat to QSS Co-Directors Sam Chester & James Winter about FraserStudios. Thanks to current QSS-Residents Monica Levy and Craig Waddell and Blueprint Resident Venettia Miller for their cameos!

Take a look:

 

The Horse Mouth Poster Image courtesy of Vanessa HudgesThis week we spoke to past QSS-Resident Vanessa Hughes about Bambina Borracha’s upcoming project The Horse’s Mouth, a festival of autobiographical writing coming up at the Old Fitz in Woolloomoolloo from 24 November — 17 December as part of the Tamarama Rock Surfers.

As one of the co-founders of Bambina Borracha, how did you come about forming the company  in the first place?

Along with the other directors of the company, I fell into Bambina Borracha to start producing shows on a larger scale, in better venues then we were able to access without the company’s name and supporters. Once we found our first partner, the University of Sydney Union, we had the resources to build seasons of productions and ongoing creative developments.

I didn’t foresee how broad the collection of artists would be that we’d work with. Apart from playing around with my co-founders for four years, that’s been the best part.

Phil Spencer, Scarlet McGlynn and Zoe Coombs Marr and yourself all have something in common as past QSS-Residents. Tell us about Queen Street’s involvement in your career so far. Do you have a favourite memory from time spent here?

The show I developed during my QSS-Residency was Under Milk Wood, easily the most ambitious show I’d tackled in terms of my audiovisual work.

Of course, the consequence of having a saturation of A/V on the stage is that, aside from making it engaging, crucial and beautiful, it also needs to be integrated seamlessly into the direction of the piece and the live performance. For me and my co-creator/performer, Zoe Norton Lodge, it was critical time spent at QSS to bring all those elements together.
The best memory was finally breaking amazing ground rehearsing the show, having not left the studio for 8 hours or so, and then having a Zumba class come in and promptly kick us out.

Can you tell us a little bit about The Horse Mouth Festival ?

Zoe Coombs Marr

The festival is curated by Phil Spencer, Associate Artistic Director of Tamarama Rock Surfers. Phil invited several of the most promising young dramatic writers in the country to create autobiographical works for the festival.We have a total of nine writers involved, their works spread across three programs in the festival, including two Philip Parsons Award nominees, Zoe Coombs Marr and Nick Coyle. I love that all the works are autobiographical. What you’ll see are radically different stories told through the eyes of people that are undeniably still kids. All the writing is set to oscillate somewhere between embarrassing and astonishing. Personally, I can’t quite get past the Premature Memoir concept, and that’s what excites me most.

As a film maker and creative designer, what are other skills you wish you had? 

I suppose I learn more and more about the potential of film, sound and animation every project I undertake, and if I have an instinct to try something new, like claymation, I’ll always try to self-teach. That being said, I would really like some of my lesser-tuned creative skills to magically improve, like drawing. It’s nice that I’ve made the basics my thing — “Look, I can draw circles.” But if I could draw a human body, or an apricot… I would. Someone told me once that anyone can draw, but I think they lied.

Who has been your main inspiration or influence for entering this industry ?

Peter Weir. When I first saw Picnic At Hanging Rockwhen I was little, it scared me senseless, but taught me that sometimes when image and sound go together perfectly, they can suck you down a hole you don’t want to get out of. I think of all the artists, filmmakers and musicians who inspire me, that particular film means the most.

Tim Spencer — Show Me Yours, I’ll Show You Mine

Lastly, what’s up next for you?

A series of animated/live action shorts re-telling, slightly inappropriately, the Just So stories of Rudyard Kipling.

Click here for more information about The Horse’s Mouth.

This week we chat to Stephanie Gallagher, a current QSS-Resident who has a solo exhibition coming up in Studio 12.

Image courtesy of Stephanie Gallagher

You really are passionate about teaching Visual Arts and allowing everyone to participate… how did you get into teaching at STUDIO ARTES?

After completing my first degree in rehabilitation counselling I worked at Studio ARTES from 2006–2007. Studio ARTES is an organisation which teaches art and life skills to adults who have an intellectual disability. I started this work because I have always felt passionate about helping people who are marginalised by society to participate in their community and to help people achieve their own personal goals.

While art can be a fantastic tool in helping people express themselves, this was not the focus at Studio ARTES. The main drive behind the art program was simply to teach skills and facilitate exhibitions for aspiring artists. Many of the participants have genuine talent and have had exhibitions all over Australia and overseas in galleries such as Paper Mill and Blank Space.

I enjoyed working at Studio ARTES not only because I was able to assist these aspiring artists but also because it was invaluable to me and my work to see the world from another point of view. Because of their unique perspective on life they created some beautiful and inspiring artwork. It was a pleasure for me to assist them in their art making process. It was from their inspiration that I dared to follow my own dream and study at the National Art School. However I do still teach occasionally at Studio ARTES.

Has your perspective on the arts developed since graduated from the National Arts School?

Studying at the National Art School was honestly the best three years of my life so far, except perhaps this one. Despite being on the less contemporary side of art, I learnt from every challenge and enjoyed the supportive studio-based practice and of course being around peers. Starting my first year out from the National Art School I was most scared about losing these things, challenges, support and peers, however, I was lucky enough to have a studio residency here which has provided me with different challenges, support and peers. I do think that through this first out of art school my perspective of the arts as developed a lot. Being given the opportunity to work around other visual and performance artists has definitely broadened my ideas on the art world. Having the time to develop my own studio practice and work towards a solo exhibition has definitely taught me some new things.

Image courtesy of Stephanie Gallagher

Can you tell us what you’ll be showing in your exhibition Self & Space?

My exhibition Self & Space explores the relationship between one’s being and the surrounding space, looking at the flow between where one ends and the other begins. Through form and interactive space this body of work aims to create an experience where the viewer can visualise their relationship to an otherwise unseen space. Using latex as a type of skin these forms map finite and infinite spaces in reference to our perceived awareness of where we exist. Just as our body permeates space, so too does space permeate our body, there are as many infinite layers of space inside the self as outside. So as these works protrude through the outside space, where the body engages, the inside of these works also interact with space in a more intimate way.

Who and what inspires you?

I am inspired by artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Anish Kapoor, Yayoi Kusama, Lee Bontecou and many others. I also find inspiration in reading and talking with other artists. A large part of my inspiration comes from nature, from looking at light and shadow and feeling myself absorbed into sublime landscapes.

What has been your greatest achievement?

I think my greatest achievement so far is graduating from the National Art School and getting this residency at Queen Street Studio, although I am pretty excited about having my first solo exhibition, hopefully that will be my next greatest achievement!

Lastly, we are close to the years end. Are you working on any projects or will you have a break?

I have a few small projects in line for the beginning of the year but before that I am getting married and then moving to France, which is very exciting.

Self & Space opens at FraserStudios next Friday 18 November, from 6-8pm.

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