Citylights Projects

Wednesday, 8 July 2009

Nairm Djambana in RED Magazine #24

Thursday, 4 June 2009

Saturday, 30 May 2009

Tuesday 2nd June – Sunday 28th June 2009
City Library Gallery
253 Flinders Lane, Melbourne 3000

In a year when Reconciliation Australia, in its theme for Reconciliation Week, has challenged the Australian community to see beyond the stereotype, a diverse group of Indigenous Artists from the Mornington Peninsula present a significant and dynamic exhibition that celebrates the journey of Indigenous connection to community, culture and place in contemporary Australia.

The Mornington Peninsula is home to the Boon wurrung people, who enjoy a unique relationship with the land and sea and whose eyes have watched the bay fill and drain and fill again, over thousands of years. However, this work brings together people of diverse indigenous backgrounds, galvanised by a raw, shared need to make sense of their culture in a contemporary world and the desire to explore a new way of expressing place and identity.

The Artwork is a unique and complex work that reflects the deeply complex connection between aboriginal heritage and culture. It consists of five large panels created collaboratively during workshops facilitated by Andy Mac of Citylights Projects and held in Frankston and Rosebud over two weeks. Various cultural elements of Frankston, Mornington, Mt Martha Nungallin, Arthur’s Seat Wonga, Rosebud, Rye and Point Nepean Mon Mare occupy an exuberant backdrop where symbols, colours and marks that are meaningful to the artists’ cultural identities have been integrated with an extreme sense of joy and light.

The work respects the cultural heritage of both the place and the people in a country where many Indigenous nations now live and gather. It is a fresh and exciting work that reveals and informs, being both an expression as well as a tool for cultural growth, in a modern society. The work and the process are dynamic, confirming and encouraging a sense of identity which is a necessity for indigenous community, anywhere.

The project also provided generational diversity, bringing together people aged from 10 to 60, reflecting the range within an ordinary community. This allowed a culturally significant, organic and extremely deep mentoring process across the generations. The artists enjoyed the opportunity of experiencing cultural roles where the youth gained great insights from the older members and the older artists were buoyed by the youthful enthusiasm of the younger ones.

The Boon wurrung were hunter-gatherers, living on the natural produce existing in the area. The landscape of their country included swamps, lagoons, rivers, open grassy country and thinly timbered country. The wildlife abounded in this area. Men hunted, while women gathered plants and they ate local animals, plants, fish and shellfish. The environment between the mountains and the sea provided a rich and diverse diet. Point Nepean was also an important part of the journey cycles for all the Boon wurrung as the area was rich in natural resources.

The Boon wurrung believe that all things live in unity, and that relationship to the land is based upon respect, obligation and interdependence. In contrast, though, familiarity with the Stolen Generation experiences, often precludes the same strong connections with land and cultural identity for many of the artists for whom the Peninsula is now home.

Through the sharing of stories, knowledge, skills and passion, artists have explored their background and identity within this cultural context, bringing about a newfound cultural status and reclaiming and strengthening Indigenous community and culture within the Frankston and the Mornington Peninsula region.

This ritualistic experience is then expressed in a purely contemporary way and incorporates ancient traditions of marking identity or mapping specific sites or stories. This expression acknowledges and incorporates the dynamic relationship between the past, the present and the future, creating a work of great vibrancy that celebrates aboriginal life as it has been and as it is now.

The work is humble yet progressive. There is much bravery in expression with everyone involved committing to the task, while embracing a new technique. Their investigations of their identity as an aboriginal person eventuate with the artists presence in the work in the final layer of portraits, thereby reclaiming their individual cultural history and identity and placing themselves clearly within the place and the culture where we now gather.

Because of the implicit nature of cultural understanding, words remain inadequate in describing the place where the artists have arrived and continue to journey. It celebrates the survival and thriving of culture and verifies the reality that no matter how light or dark the colour of skin, and no matter how dispossessed people may become, culture resides within the spirit within.

This workshop has been one of many presented by the Stepping Stones Indigenous Art Project, in the last 18 months. The Art Project encourages health and wellbeing, youth leadership, community development and Indigenous governance. It is initiated and driven by aboriginal community members, closely connected with local community and endeavours to strengthen community, in return. Its success has led to the formation of the Aboriginal Corporation for Frankston and Mornington Peninsula Indigenous Artists (ACFAMPIA), to be launched during NAIDOC week in Frankston.

ACFAMPIA aims to maintain culture, support artists in producing high quality artwork and to generate income and employment opportunities for Indigenous artists of the region.

Writer: Pauline Mackinnon

Monday, 4 May 2009

SPOOKY ACTION at a DISTANCE

Spooky Action at a Distance - Band by Anat Ben David / 2008-9, Cowboy Style by Martin Bell / 2008-9 Mixed media installation, Dimensions variable

Anat Ben-David London/Jerusalem and Martin Bell Melbourne
Curated by Adi Nachman Tel Aviv/Berlin and Andy Mac Melbourne
In collaboration with Nectar Efkarpidis - NewActon

NEWACTON HERITAGE LINK
21-23 Marcus Clarke Street Canberra Australia
April 29 - August 31, 2009
www.spookyaction.com.au

Spooky Acton at a Distance is a site-specific temporary video/sculptural installation which has been created at NewActon in Canberra during April 2009 by artists Anat Ben-David and Martin Bell, with collaboration from curators Andy Mac and Adi Nachman. The project has been initiated and formed by Nectar Efkarpidis of NewActon.

During Early discussions about the collaborative basis for the project, curator Andy Mac was reminded of Einsteins's exasperated quote regarding quantum mechanics, which he derided as 'spukhafte Fernwirkung' or 'Spooky Action at a Distance'. Quantum Mechanics, specifically entanglement, suggest that particles which interact in some way become entangled, in a loose sense meaning that their properties become correlated. This is not an ordinary correlation in any sense of the word. It implies that there exists a strange connection between the particles that persists even when they are separated by great distances. In some sense, this connection is instantaneous, putting it in direct conflict with the special theory of Relativity. It was this strange connection that led Einstein to the phrase 'Spooky Action at a Distance'.

Multi-disciplinary artist Anat Ben-David presents Band, a new video works series, based on seven different musical group scenes constructed from video and digital fragments, cloning and multiplying the artist's image in such a way that all different members of each band are performed by the artist, who also composed and recorded the original music soundtrack. Band represents an ultimate virtual experience in terms of the construction of an invented reality. The installation aims not only to show the finished results - the completed clips - but to reveal the artistic process of creating a fictional world integrating digital technology and the body.

The members of Band are multicultural, multinational , multilingual and fictional. The characters serve as vessels that absorb culture and regurgitate a new language. Different national identities and cultures are mixed up. The intended effect is that of a parallel universe, where things seem familiar, but are nevertheless strangely and slightly rearranged.

Martin Bell's installation Cowboy Style is a cut-up sculptural collage that references and connects with a wide array of pop cultural and art historical moments, narrating a Western revenge adventure not unlike the 70's film West World, wherein a cowboy robot in a theme park goes crazy and starts killing visitors to the park.

Constructed of inkjet prints and mixed media, including live domestic plans, and supported by a timber 3d armature structure, Cowboy Style has a humorous relationship to Tatlin's unrealized and utopian revolutionary model for the Monument to the Third International, and Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2. Like any good Western, there are heroes and villains, heroines and rattlesnakes lurking. Unashamedly nostalgic, Bell is something of a hardcore romantic. Cowboy Style is a dangerous and deadly ride.

The collaborative installation of the two bodies of work, experiments with the amplification of the chance, random elements shared by the artists, and the distinct world of visual superpositions unique to each one. Much of the understated, hidden contexts of each of the artworks surfaced during the intriguing process of discussion and installation, voicing a strong statement on the creative process amongst the artists and curators. This sorcery could most aptly be described as Spooky Action at a Distance.

NewActon Heritage Link
21-23 Marcus Clarke Street
Canberra, Australia
info@spookyaction.com.au
Tel: +61-2-61 26 1300

Tuesday, 3 February 2009

Circus OZ in Hosier Lane

Cool picture from the Circus OZ website, featuring Ash Nolan's exhibition here at Citylights Hosier Lane. More here

Wednesday, 7 January 2009

LA TIMES ARTICLE - Melbourne Street Art

Article from the LA Times about Melbourne alleyways and street art, 30.12.08 - Citylights, meggs, Phibs and Ash Nolan get up...

"The best-known of the artist-run spaces is Citylights, a pair of "galleries" co-founded in 1996 by artist Andy Mac. The galleries consist of a series of printed artworks in illuminated boxes that light up two alleyways downtown. More than 400 works have been featured over the years, and the site is one of the most popular cultural destinations in Melbourne.

Alibrando guides her group to Hosier Lane, where a new series has been installed by Ash Nolan, a Melbourne artist whose work is a series of scenes from alleys around town. Underneath the boxes are several sprayed and stenciled paintings by some of Melbourne's best-known artists, including Phibs and Meggs."

You can read the full article here

Friday, 5 September 2008

Somewhere in Eastern Europe

RAD!

TIGER AIRWAYS ARTICLE : Life in the Fab Lanes

From the current Tiger Airways mag, an article on Melbourne laneway culture - Citylights and Until Never gets Up:

"An art ambush might be the right term to describe the Citylights Projects. There you are, strolling down a laneway, when you suddenly find yourself up close and personal with colour and light, graffiti and stencil art.

Wall-mounted lightboxes in Hosier Lane and Centre Place present art to more than 200,000 people a week, and the public nature of the exhibitions has encouraged masses of street artists to add their own works to the mix. Graffiti and street art by both local and international artists now cover the walls of these laneways, creating a giant outdoor gallery. For those who prefer the white walls of a more traditional art space, Citylights also runs Until Never Gallery."

See the full article here