Archive fever paradox, Natalie Harkin curator: Ali Gumillya Baker

 

Natalie Harkin's exhibition Archive Fever Paradox is the second in a suite of four 2013 nunga odradekaeaf exhibitions curated by Ali Gumilya that present South Australian-based Aboriginal artists who work with moving images, new media, text, and performance.

 

A Note from the Artist

love-letter offerings to blood-memory-haunts that pulse and repeat-without-end where invisible clever-maneuverings trace beyond the colonial-archival-record, our evidence, as sacred as her last breath whispering new beginnings to breathe-in deep, and in that moment before exhale I know with clenched-fist-resist to remember.. remember… to thank her

Natalie Harkin, 2012

 

 

Moving through the Aboriginal landscape, Michael Bonner

curator: Ali Gumillya Baker

 

A Note from the Curator:

These four seasons of nungaodradekaeaf 2013, connect four South Australian based Aboriginal artists who work in moving image, new media, text, and performance. There is a long history of singing to the stars and the whales in the lives of my Nunga ancestors. There is a long history of collection in the lives of my colonising ancestors: knowledge, objects, ideas, faces and data. Small and large things link us all to these moments - this land and our stories. Invasion and unsettlement. Fleets of words and images. Framed. Bound by the words. Active silence. Our bodies in the land. The best ways to use our time. If you look you can find us here. Sovereign protest.

A Note from the Artist:

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have always been connected to this land. The landscape around us continually changes and we have always adapted. Today it is no different in the city. When you know your history and take in the landscape, you will see we have survived and will always be connected to the land. Everywhere I go, I see my brothers and sisters, aunties and uncles. I see our flag sometimes in the most peculiar places and I remember the things that most do not. Join me on a journey around the sovereign landscape and see what I see as an Aboriginal person.

Artist Bio: Michael Bonner is a descendant of the Yanyuwa people from the Gulf of Carpentaria in the Northern Territory. He is an independent filmmaker with a working background in Archaeology, Cultural Heritage and Museums.

Curator Bio: Ali Gumillya Baker is a Mirning woman from the Nullarbor on the West Coast of South Australia. A visual artist, performer and fimlmaker, she has a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Hons) from the University of South Australia and a Master of Arts (Screen Studies) from Flinders University, and is a current PHD candidate. She is now a lecturer at Yunggorendi First Nations Centre at Flinders University. Her areas of research interest include: colonial archives, memory, Indigenous visual arts and performance, Indigenous screen production and representation and intergenerational transmission of knowledge.

Specter Ophrys,Anastasia Booth

curator: Riley O’Keeffe

 

Objects within my practice are rarely left in their original state without particular material intervention, deconstructing, altering or amplifying their original purpose beyond what I had originally had in mind. The found or adopted object, when placed in relation to a series of other forms, has the ability to subsume everything under the banner of the sexual. There is a sensuous materiality in objects that exist in close proximity to the body, the animism in these objects is directly linked to a feeling of sexual gratification.

Artist Bio: Anastasia Booth is a Brisbane based visual artist. Working predominately in sculpture and installation Booth's practice explores sexual fetish as an instrumental strategy, seeing it as a mode to work across different theoretical and material discourse, with a particular focus on the re-imaging of female desire. 

Curator Bio: Riley O’Keeffe is a an artist, musician, writer and curator based in Adelaide. He is currently undertaking a Master of Arts degree by Research at the South Australian School of Art, Architecture and Design as welll as Co-Directing the artist-run initiative, FELTSpace. Riley has exhibited and performed widely in Adelaide, including at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, The Experimental Art Foundation, FELTSpace and Format. In addition to this O’Keeffe has exhibited at Bocxopy in Brisbane and Inflight ARI in Tasmania. His multidisciplinary work focuses on notions of mortality, time and the infinite.

half-gifts, Nathan Farrant

In his suite of three odradekaeaf exhibitions, curator Riley O’Keeffe has invited three artists to respond to his concept of the nothing-object, a liminal state of the object’s transformation into art.

Artist Bio: Nathan Farrant graduated from the Honours program of the Bachelor of Visual Arts Degree at the South Australian School of Art, Architecture and Design in 2011. He is a Format Space committee member and has shown at Magazine, SASA Gallery, Format, Fontanelle, Seedling and FELTspace in the past 13 months.

Curator Bio: Riley O’Keeffe is a an artist, musician, writer and curator based in Adelaide. He is currently undertaking a Master of Arts degree by Research at the South Australian School of Art, Architecture and Design as welll as Co-Directing the artist-run initiative, FELTSpace. Riley has exhibited and performed widely in Adelaide, including at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, The Experimental Art Foundation, FELTSpace and Format. In addition to this O’Keeffe has exhibited at Bocxopy in Brisbane and Inflight ARI in Tasmania. His multidisciplinary work focuses on notions of mortality, time and the infinite.

Purpose-made Nothing-object, Katie Barber
curator: Riley O’Keeffe

 

In his suite of three odradekaeaf exhibitions, curator Riley O’Keeffe has invited three artists to respond to his concept of the nothing-object, a liminal state of the object’s transformation into art.

Artist Bio: Katie Barber is an Adelaide-based visual artist and curator. Katie is a founding member of the TwoPercent Collective and has co-directed the Artist-Run Initiative from 2007 to present. Katie graduated a Bachelor of Visual Arts with Honours from the South Australia School of Art in 2010. Currently holding the postion of curator for Australian Experimental Art Foundation's Odradek Project Space, Katie is also dedicated to her professional practice, exhibiting regularly in solo and group exhibitions with local Artist-Run Initiatives.

Curator Bio: Riley O’Keeffe is a an artist, musician, writer and curator based in Adelaide. He is currently undertaking a Master of Arts degree by Research at the South Australian School of Art, Architecture and Design as welll as Co-Directing the artist-run initiative, FELTSpace. Riley has exhibited and performed widely in Adelaide, including at the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, The Experimental Art Foundation, FELTSpace and Format. In addition to this O’Keeffe has exhibited at Bocxopy in Brisbane and Inflight ARI in Tasmania. His multidisciplinary work focuses on notions of mortality, time and the infinite.

odradekaeaf

 

Incubator Alligator, Patrick Rees

 

Patrick Rees is an interdisciplinary artist who explores the intersection between video, performance and installation in order to question notions of the ‘refined’ and ‘rarefied’.

Bio: After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree with Honours, in Performing Arts and Screen Studies from Flinders University, Patrick Rees was involved in the film industry in Sydney as a performer and film maker before returning to study Visual Arts at the College of Fine Arts at the University of NSW. Rees completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts degree with Honours, at the University of South Australia in 2011.

Rees has exhibited in group exhibitions at Magazine Gallery (SA), Format Gallery (SA), Next Wave Festival (VIC), Boxcopy (QLD) and the Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia. In 2012 he became a co-director of FELTspace; has had solo exhibitions at FELTspace and CACSA's Project Space; and will travel to the United States to undertake a 3 month artist residency at RAID Projects, Los Angeles and exhibit at Co/Lab Art Fair also in L.A.

 

Katie Barber: Curator

Katie Barber is an Adelaide-based visual artist and curator. Katie is a founding member of the TwoPercent Collective and has co-directed the Artist-Run Initiative from 2007 to present. Katie graduated a Bachelor of Visual Arts with Honours from the South Australia School of Art in 2010. Currently holding the postion of curator for Australian Experimental Art Foundation's Odradek Project Space, Katie is also dedicated to her professional practice, exhibiting regularly in solo and group exhibitions with local Artist-Run Initiatives.

 

Julia McInerney & Tom Squires: Pome

Katie Barber: Curator

 

I
The story begins with the Apple: at the beginning of everything, there is an apple, and this apple, when spoken of, is spoken as a fruit-not-to.1

Biting into an apple is like forming a corner in its surface, an edge made, a point of no possible return to a state of never been, never happened, as like the coming of life, the coming of its awareness, the bead of light that is its seed, its tasted corner negative, remained, now here in its absence.

Each time that we come to know something, in reality it is a step. Then we have to strike out for the un-known, to make our way along in the dark, with an “apple in our hand” like a candle.2

II
The moth has forgotten the bead of light that sits inside itself, she is only aware of the absence where which she would seem to remember something at some time had been.

The night sky is an all-encompassing black, there is no moon, and no stars to be seen.

There is nothing amongst to allow her to navigate through this dark.

She is left to zigzag aimlessly, without a trace of direction or sense of place.

In the state of a hopeless impossibility, she imagines, invents, and projects, a character, a body, an other, that would be herself before and outside of this flight, who is, a hungry caterpillar.

She selects and maps out a section of the blank black sky, that where which is presently at hand.

She places the caterpillar behind this section, and says to it, this is a leaf.

The caterpillar begins to eat, and, as it happens, where through the negative that it leaves behind, a light is left to shine.

As more of this light is come about, she finds herself drawn in to it, until she is left zigzagging aimlessly, over and across its surface.

Julia McInerney & Tom Squires

Bio

Julia McInerney is an Adelaide-based artist. She completed a Bachelor of Visual Art (Honours) degree at the Adelaide Central School of Art in 2011. In July 2012 she will travel to Reykjavik, Iceland to take up a residency as part of the SIM (Association of Icelandic Visual Artists) program.

Tom Squires is an Adelaide-based artist. He is currently undertaking a Master of Visual Arts degree by research (History and Theory) at the University of South Australia. His solo exhibition THERE/TRANSPARENT/NOT THERE/MIRROR took place at FELTspace, Adelaide, in April 2012.

 

Riley O'Keeffe : Map#3 (fluorescence)

Katie Barber : Curator

In/finite
I've spent a long time thinking about things ending - habits, relationships, infatuatons, and of course, life. Dependent on belief systems, it can be argued that death is the ultimate end to any living organism, be it plant, amoeba or human being. It can often be quite easy to fixate on absence. And while life is consuming, its absence is permanent. While life's timeline is uncertain, its plateau into a physical non-existence is unavoidable. Gregory Bateson describes the plateau as 'a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culminating point or external end.' Bateson's idea of the plateau alludes to a perpetual, eternal loop, without conclusion.

Driven by the apparent impossibility for paint to achieve any idea of the infinite, my work has shifted from a focus on completion and infiniteness to abstracted landscapes that begin and end somewhere outside the limited frame of the image. Map#3 is an attempt at escaping personal and universal constraints – space, dimension, perception – and an experiment in representing Bateson’s plateau, through ideas of continuation and the infinite. The more I have tried to understand this term, the more profoundly confusing the subject becomes. These materials are defined by parameters yet the very paradoxical nature of trying to create something immeasurable and limitless has been the motivation for this work.
Riley O'Keeffe, Artist Statement, 2012

 

Bio

Riley O’Keeffe is an artist and curator, currently undertaking a Masters by Research at the South Australian School of Art, University of SA. His work was selected for the 2011 Helpmann Academy Graduate Exhibition. He is a founding member of TwoPercent collective , is currently a co-director at FELTspace and was the 2011 curator of the Carclew Foyer, North Adelaide. Focusing on ideas of morality, time and eternity, his multidisciplinary work has been exhibited in Adelaide at Magazine gallery, FELTspace & Format, and also at Inflight ARI in Hobart.

 

Timothy Hodge : An Ancient Burial

Katie Barber : Curator