An experimental survey of Queensland wisdom / idiocy with a focus on the crossovers between noise music and contemporary art practices, PsychoSubtropics 2012 will take place in Sydney at Serial Space from June 7-10 2012.
organised by OTHERFILM
++++++++++++++
PROGRAM
THURSDAY 7 JUNE 2012 6PM-9PM
EXHIBITION OPENING WITH INSTALLATIONS, OBJECTS, PROJECTION, PERFORMANCES featuring all artists. Exhibition continues all weekend.
FRIDAY 8 JUNE 2012 7PM – 1030PM
SKY NEEDLE (launching RAVE CAVE LP and ACID PERM tape)
PRIMITIVE MOTION (syd debut)
CURED PINK
SATURDAY 9 JUNE 7PM – 1030PM
solo performances with sound, images, objects by
ROSS MANNING
LEIGHTON CRAIG
GERALD KEANEY
ALEX CUFFE
SUNDAY 10 JUNE 2PM-4PM
video screening program featuring works by all present artists
++++++++++++++
PARTICIPANTS
SKY NEEDLE play with homemade junk instruments in a primitive rock mode. They recently released their debut LP Rave Cave on Negative Guest List and have been described by Volcanic Tongue’s David Keenan as “one of the most radically original and self-sufficient performance units in the worldâ€?. This is Sky Needle’s Sydney launch party for the Rave Cave LP and the Acid Perm cassette on Nihilistic Orbs.
PRIMITIVE MOTION are Brisbane adults performing sublimely tranced, minimal pop music with keyboards, rhythm machines, saxophone, flute, voices and healthy doses of echo. This is their first show outside of our town.
CURED PINK is an evolving performance experiment that pits head against body in a ridiculous race towards an abject bottom. Laugh, cry, wince, duck, lose interest. Everything is possible. The Sydney iteration features three members of lots of other bands. Cured Pink were recently arrested for trespass and will be selling a tape recording of the incident.
SARAH BYRNE catalogs, cuts and collages videos of the most nauseating, embarrassingly shithouse, insultingly stupid pop-cultural ephemera she can find, then somehow performs the magic trick of making these dregs speak in profound tongues about everyday life.
MICHAEL CANDY uses his frankly baffling engineering nous to create complex and bizarre situations that often co-opt an unwitting public. His recent work ‘Bitter Brisbane’ involved impersonating a council worker and installing a public bench that tilts to eject the sitter, in a protest against council moves to force vagrants from newly gentrified areas. The project generated a bemusing media shitstorm with accusations flying between politicians, police threats, and an eventual burying of the story as the council sought to douse attention on the issues raised by the work (the dismissal of the homeless; the stultifying blandness of gentrification). This is Michael’s first Sydney show.
LEIGHTON CRAIG’s music and visual art convenes an unholy alliance of geometric abstraction, electronic minimalism and nature worship. He is one half of Primitive Motion, and he bears responsibility for the Kindling house imprint.
ALEX CUFFE’s recent work involves the presentation of fake rocks covered in glitter, ice cream cone objects, hacked CCTV footage and his own beard clippings collected over a one year period. Some of the pieces for his last exhibition were eaten by an unknown animal before they could be shown. He also has a sideline in experimental home-brew.
BEC CUNNINGHAM talks with people, in galleries and in public spaces, in situations she frames through subtle social, political and sometimes intimately personal dynamics. Her ongoing durational work ONE seeks to involve 1 million participants in a DNA exchange, leading to a mammoth human composite that ultimately reduces to ONE. Bec anticipates performing this work for the foreseeable future.
MICHAEL DONNELLY emerged out of the isolation of his Green Pigeon (population 5?) shack some time in the mid 00′s becoming an online cult phenomenon and helping to usher in a fucked folk sensibility equal parts authentic and obfuscated. His label musicyoumindwillloveyou and loose band-network-sect, brothers of the occult sisterhood signalled a rekindling of harsh hippie experiments unheard in years.
Starting in early 90′s Canberra as part of aktion surreal before relocating to our sad city GERALD KEANEY (with his group the Gerald Keaneys) has performed a 20+ year intervention into Brisbane culture by staging underground political actions, urban space experiments, poetry attacks, spasms of philosophy, DIY publishing and conceptual punk rock.
ROSS MANNING’s kinetic sculptures and energized environments are spinning around a bunch of major art institutions these days as the rest of Australia cottons on to his brilliance. In parallel to the visual stuff over many years, Ross has been cutting found sounds and crude recordings and audio assemblages that mix concrete music formalism with intuitive noise pleasure seeking. He’ll be performing that stuff in Sydney.
JOEL STERN has an obsession with coercing sounds into compulsive patterns that collapse in on themselves. He is a virtuoso of instruments no one else has or will ever play. These concerns have now taken up half of Joel’s life. In Sydney, he will be performing with Sky Needle and collecting flashing light devices that trigger homemade synths. Joel is one third of OtherFilm.
ANDREW MCLELLAN should be familiar to Sydney audiences due to his track record of dangerous stunts, industrial culture sensibility, and nice guy shtick. His work seems to embrace pre-verbal buffoonery and post-industrial futurism simultaneously.
NICOLA MORTON makes works informed by critical theory, intuition and personal experience. It’s often hard to understand what she’s on about, but trying is very satisfying. She’s not afraid of looking foolish, since her main material is the encounter with the audience.
GLEN SCHENAU plays music in a bunch of top underground bands, makes confounding weird noise with that primary school instrument, the recorder, has been taking amazing analogue snaps of bands (playing) for his blog Blanket Canvassing and has become the go-to-guy for handmade poster assemblages that are beautiful (if a bit hard to read).
SANDRA SELIG likes to create delicate assemblages whose fragility, like the spider webs she uses, is belied by the strength of substance. Sandra makes installations, collages, videos and amazing posters, and also sweet music as one half of Primitive Motion.
DANNI ZUVELA likes to create situations where people can experience the confounding effects of light, sound, and space. She is also into the emotional economy of the natural world. Danni is one third of OtherFilm.
THE MAXIMILIAN are a curatorial and publishing duo who are thinking long and hard for important and vital things to say about contemporary art-making. They’ve been working towards the launch of an online platform with a bunch of handpicked contributors.
INDEPENDENT PRESS is a curatorial, publishing and commissioning project led by Anna Zammit with a bunch of excellent heads in tow. Career highlights include an artist newspaper, and sweet magazine, a temporary arcade gallery and a forum on critical risk. At PsychoSubtropics 2012 IP will be represented by Sarah Werkmeister and Danny Ford.
OTHERFILM are an artists’ collective based in Brisbane, Australia and London, England. Since 2004, they have explored the creative possibilities of experimental film, video, music and live performance by curating numerous festivals, international screening programs, and exhibitions. OtherFilm are driven by a central curiosity about the limits of the moving image, and its capacity to reorganise human perception. OtherFilm is co-directed by Sally Golding, Joel Stern and Danni Zuvela.
++++++++++++++
This project has received financial assistance from the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.
