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outtakes from bwbb tv spot for the nsw gov live music task force

DEL IN THE MEN’S ROOM, CHINATOWN, 2013.

When Karel Martens began studying art in Holland in the late 1950s, “graphic design” did not even exist as its own course of study. Today he is widely recognized as one of the most important practitioners of that very discipline, with an esteemed client list that includes major publishers,...

@b0neface

The ground underneath our feet is marked by the lines of shapes, squares, and circles that have carved it up into maps, zones and property lines. These are the invisible traces of land management; worked from the early days of colonisation to the current council divisions that determine who gets our taxes. There are many lines beneath our feet. They are the borders and boundaries that we traverse everyday and define who are placed and displaced. Siân McIntyre’s video and turf installation, Exile’s Lament will be staking claim to Kudos Gallery at the end of October. Instead of a flag or picket fence, she has claimed her patch of Sydney with a turf installation that occupies roughly 138sq meters. This piece of land in Paddington is probably worth a fortune as a Strata title, and as McIntyre, a young female visual artist readily admits, this installation might be the closest that she ever gets to owning a piece of property. Gesturing to the early days of colonisation, where land was handed out along the Hawkesbury to be cleared and thoroughly claimed for a mad King and a different country, McIntyre’s patch also evokes the evolution of these parcels from colonial settlement to suburban backyard. This grassy knoll, a symbol of the domestic homeland that turns public into private space, is refused its usual pretense to permanence. It lies bereft, wanting to be planted, to set down roots, but is prevented from doing so by the sheet of plastic, the wooden floorboards and layers of foundation that separates its shoots from the soil below. McIntyre is engaging with the troubling particularities of Australia’s relationship with place by claiming and questioning a site in the tradition of Richard Long and Robert Smithson. Her small verdant island is accompanied by three video works that provide an infinitely varied soundtrack made from convict songs that speak of a place left behind. As these performances were filmed in 1969 for an ABC special The Restless Years, long after the initial impact of 1788, it seems Australia is still longing for this lost land. There is a deep and unsettling irony that runs through McIntyre’s work. The losses expressed by these women speak of something that pervades this country, an exile’s lament in the heart of every new arrival. However, it is perhaps truest to those who still inhabit and claim the country of their ancestors, although they continue to do so from the outside of a circle drawn in the sand on 22 January 1788 by and around the men that came by boat. Wilna Fourie, September 2012.

Mob the square, sydney 13/10/2012