PICA Residencies - collaborations

30 November 1999

This year, PICA's Summer Residency Program focuses on the fine art of working together. With creative collaborations from Kaerin Hagley & Bronwen Kamasz, d&k (David Turley and Korin Gath) and Tori Benz & Mel Dare - PICA's three studio spaces will be transformed into sites of interaction, experimentation and exchange. For their residency period, Hagley & Kamasz construct a world of diorama, performance, objects and shadows. Text, images and stories of tea drinking inhabit the square room of their PICA studio. The space becomes the nascent site for this conflation of tea things: a charged space full of curious pieces and bits. d&k continue their six-year collaborative practice by any means at their disposal - from short films, video documentaries, installation and performance to costume, fashion and set design. d&k exist to create dynamic, engaging artwork every waking moment of their lives and fulfil their dreams of world domination. 'WE WERE BORN. WE ARE ALIVE. WE WILL DIE'. Following-on from the success of their Breadbox exhibition, Benz & Dare continue their visual conversation. Exploring the interplay of visual language and the intimacy of communication, this is a response-based, yet reflective process, in which the work embodies each painter's perpective, converging into a shared vision. Studio residencies: 10 February - 8 May, 2005 Showing: 27 April - 8 May, 2005 Benz & Dare Benz & Dare's collaborations are visual conversations. From opposite sides of the one work and restricted to 10 minute intervals, they explore the intricacies of communication in both a reflective and responsive manner. Dismissing the niceties, they have allowed for all forms of misunderstandings and banalities of communication. interplay DURATION: 3 months ARTISTS: Benz & Dare (Tori Benz and Mel Dare) PREMISE: An ongoing exploration of visual conversation. FORMAT: Restricted surface and mediums. SURFACE: Acrylic sheets (1200 x 2400 x 6mm) x 3 hung vertically. MEDIUMS: Enamel (black and white), engraving tools, black pens and correction fluid. CONCEPT: Middle sheet = the conversation. Outer sheets = artist's 'filter' of the conversation (response, editing, reflection, internal dialogue). PROCESS: THE CONVERSATION (MIDDLE SHEET) ARTIST'S POSITION: Each artist works on opposing sides of the same acrylic sheet. PARAMETERS: 10-minute intervals per artist (alternating). NOTE: Each mark documented in the book displayed on plinth. THE FILTERS (OUTER SHEETS) ARTIST'S POSITION: Artists face the middle, working on their own outer sheet. Constructing a filter for themselves and the viewer. PARAMETERS: No time restrictions. Begins once the conversation is over. Continues until the exhibition opens. NOTE: Work in progress. 'Miscommunication, frustration, heavy silences, snubbing, prattling, stuttering and tantrums'. After Benz & Dare's 'The Art of (good) Conversation' comes the tumultuous 'interplay'. A shared piece of perspex, 50 sessions of 10 minutes each. Anything goes - Facing each other, a transparent barrier between the artists - to talk/communicate - to understand. The outer sheet of perspex, the 'filter', for editing - hindsight. What is left after the fact? After the conversation. Hagley & Kamasz For their residency, Hagley & Kamasz construct a world of diorama, performance, objects and shadows. The social and cultural histories of drinking tea are blended into a strange dark concoction that forms a most curious tea ceremony inside the queerest little room. d & k d & k studio guest philomela (damian's stones) Domenico de Clario PICA Tower, Perth 6.21pm Friday March 25 until 6.24 am Saturday March 26 2005 (full moon) A couple of weeks ago d+k asked me whether I wanted to make a work of some kind in the tower at PICA. They have been awarded a studio residency there, and part of their strategy is to invite other artists to make work somewhere inside PICA. I feel honoured to be asked and of course I say yes immediately. I have often looked up at the tower intruding upwards beyond the green PICA neon-sign into the striated pinks and greys of Perth's evening sky, a sky I have now been able to befriend despite its initial alien-ness. It's an uneasy, fragile friendship though. It's as though we both know that in the end my presence here can never be validated, and we are simply being polite to each other till my time is up. I have wondered what it would be like to stand up there and look down on the melancholy space below, through which seemingly unhappy people hurryingly attempt to reach other destinations. I have wanted to observe this space (I have also many times hurried through it) from above, so that I could better understand why so many of us move through it so urgently. When d+k finally take me up there we walk through a door in their studio and up another steep flight of steps into the noise and dust and wind that fills the open space under the tower's roof. There's a concrete barrier all around the perimeter though, and it's impossible to look directly down. Still, you can look across and imagine the flatness of Perth extending westwards all the way to the sea, and eastwards right up to the escarpment. The city looks small and vulnerable from here, and the few tall buildings seem even more incongruous from this vantage point than they do at street level. Somehow the sky feels a little bit closer, as if you were suddenly looking right into the face of someone you've been slowly getting to know, someone you're still not so sure of. We all stand around a bit and wonder if a platform can be constructed in the centre of the open space for me to sit on during a possible performance. d+k say they will take care of it, and I'm pleased that they have some ideas about how they see this, how they see me, and how they think I might be approaching this opportunity. At this point I have no sense of how I will spend time up here. Easter is coming up, and as I'm looking over the parapet I propose to d+k that perhaps I could do something on the evening of Good Friday, which happens to also be a full moon night. I feel far away from everything at the moment, and this Good Friday seems like it will be a shadow of what the previous ones have been for me. It usually rains on a Good Friday, and in the wet Melbourne streets the cool of early autumn evenings extends itself for perhaps the first time, slowly seeping into your bones. The smell of coffee mixes with the fragrance of a Colomba, the traditional Italian Easter cake shaped like a dove and dusted with snowy icing sugar. The wind rustles the dried leaves of the plane trees in Lygon Street, and some, already fallen, lie in wet rusty clumps in the gutters. Busy roads are emptied of the normal mayhem, and in the late afternoon I drive to see my parents down in Dromana, once a bayside village and now a far outer suburb being slowly sucked into the vortex of the city. There's something I long to reach, far more familiar to me than what this Friday is likely to bring. I leaf through some of the books that might render this feeling I carry perhaps more transparent; I have many on my shelves that can serve this particular purpose. I have picked out, among others, Isabelle Eberhardt's 'The Oblivion Seekers', Claudio Magris' 'Microcosms', and even Robert Kaplan's 'The Nothing That Is'. In the last chapter in 'Microcosms', which focuses on the lives of the inhabitants of the tiny borderlands extending from Trieste to the Istrian peninsula, Magris describes the city's Public Gardens, named after the Triestine patriot and philologer Domenico Rossetti. He describes the sculpted busts of illustrious poets, composers and writers that have been placed around the gardens. A marble likeness of James Joyce has been given pride of place next to a drinking fountain. A long time ago I learnt to ride a bicycle along the avenues that connect one bust to another. It's in Trieste that Joyce decides the title of the work which summarizes twentieth century literature, and in a play on words (connected with the dubious honour of those enterprising women from the Greek colony in Trieste) he writes of the progress of this novel to Italo Svevo in 1921: 'Ulysses - a Greek mother, a sea of a book'. Eberhardt's last story in 'The Oblivion Seekers' is titled The Breath of Night. Its last paragraph reads: In the morning the west wind arrived suddenly. You could see it coming, raising high spirals of dust, black as smoke. As it moved toward us through the calm air, it made great sighing sounds. And then it was howling like a living thing. I had a fantasy of being lifted up and carried of in the enormous embrace of a winged monster, come to destroy us all. And the sand showered onto the terraces with the steady, small sound of rain. Somewhere I need to read something about the nightingales that sing in vast dark green woods where dew evaporates at first light. Then I remember that I have a compact disc of nightingale songs. I anxiously search for it, and finally I find it at the bottom of a drawer. The liner notes specify the dates (1953) and locations of the recording sites: northern Greece; Bourgogne; an Alpine valley; a wood on the Ile de France; at the edge of a small lake, beside a marsh and at the edge of a forest, all near Bresse; beside a stream and on the edge of a wood in Provence; in boggy moorland in southern Finland, and on the Danube delta and beside a stream in Rumania. 'The nightingale is found throughout western Europe', the liner notes explain, 'and arriving at the end of April, it sings until the first days of July and then falls silent until migrating back to Africa a few weeks later.' I play it and I listen to the nightingales over and over again. In the summer of 1984, when I was living in a farmhouse in the Tuscan countryside, one evening I was astonished to hear through the open windows (I had never heard this sound before) nightingales repeatedly modulating their songs through the woods beyond the house. I stood at the window listening to this strange new language until the full moon rose. I knelt to rest my head on the windowsill and continued to listen to the singing. I eventually fell asleep like that, and I awoke to a silent dawn. The ancient Greek word for nightingale is philomela, meaning a poet. I wonder if Domenico Rossetti's understanding of the structure of language extends to the warbling of nightingales; in the pocket Oxford Dictionary philology and philomela are listed one after the other. Has a nightingale, flying free, ever sung here in Perth? Some nightingales ascend high up in the sky and then modulate their song as they descend at vertiginous speeds, building up towers of sounds, towers of sung nightingale language, as they repeat their journey throughout an entire night. The PICA tower contains several languages; firstly the language of measured time spoken by the clock mechanism installed in 1897, continuously and patiently reminding us of its endless flow. Then there's the language spoken by the native birds as they commune with each other in the branches of the eucalypt that stands besides the tower almost as her twin sister, filling intimate space between them with the whispering private language that only siblings understand. There's also the melancholy language that is still embedded in the memory-circuitry contained within the tower's walls, honouring, as memory must, its first function as a government school. The walls of the tower are pierced seven times by a window, and through these seven windows a spectrum of colour is projected. This constitutes yet another language, that of light. This morning Damian came in to my office to show me some of his sister's photographs of the barefoot walk he recently undertook from his home in Coogee all the way to Mount Lawley. He began his 30-kilometre walk at 2 am and he held close to his chest a plastic bag filled with gravel until he reached his destination. Damian is a second year painting student, and he speaks slowly and sparely. I think of the ascension of nightingales, Trieste's Public Gardens, Joyce's 'sea of a book', Rossetti's philology, Eberhardt's black sandstorm and the blue expanses of Odyssean water in the gulf of Istria. I think of Damian's stones, and his martyred feet. On Friday evening the full moon will rise in the east as the sun sets in the west, and the following morning the moon will set in the west as the sun rises in the east; it's enough to think of that, isn't it? And of long gone poet-nightingales speaking to us through the full moon night from the Rumanian deltas, the German marshes and the Alpine valleys of fifty years ago. Ascension, and then descent. I will sit in the centre of the tower and touch the keys now and then. I will listen carefully to the world around me. I wonder if nightingales will sing in Trieste's Public Gardens this northern spring? Domenico de Clario March 24 2005