#practiceledresearch

Just recently I went to see the Ghostbusters movie. I was a big fan of the original. Seemed like an ideal job, investigating the paranormal, by making technological contraptions and going out into the world to capture these unknown phenomena in order to study it more closely. Not to mention ectoplasm! I could have really used a role model like Jillian Holtzmann when I was a kid! The lack of female role models, don’t get me started there. In any case. I think you’ll some interesting connections if you dig into your own coveted pop culture influences. 

(Jillian Holzmann in the lab, Ghostbusters, 2016)

There are so many unknowns to explore in the universe. My practice involves investigating unknowns through a combination of research and experimentation, which both feed into each other, back and forth, again and again. Some questions I think about... How do we understand energy? How can we communicate with nature? How can nature communicate with us?

(My electronics workbench in my studio, 2016)

I wanted to talk about my practice led research through a particular project, and with a particular focus on fieldwork methodologies of research. 

In 2014 I was a part of this project with a collective of artists from Indonesia and Australia who make instruments. Lintang Raditya, Andreas Siagian and Michael Candy and myself walked up Mount Feathertop, in Victoria, carrying a bunch of instruments we had made to observe the natural behaviours of the mountain, including soil conductivity, wind, sun, plant and rock conductivity, electromagnetic behaviours. It was kind of like a performance by the mountain, which we were facilitating through our instruments. We called it Noble Wave. 

(Writer Sarah Werkmeister and Andreas Siagain catching some wind next to the last remaining snow on Feathertop)

Having very little time to prepare, we were only able to make one visit to the site, we had to research the site remotely to develop the instruments, and speculate about the different phenomena we might harness to create interesting sounds. Some of this was done through online research as well as regular visits to the local hiking shops and consulting with mountaineering societies and local artists who had been there. We made lots of propellers for wind driven instruments, lots of synths with different controllers, to connect to the ground, to wrap around plants, to connect to kinetic parts which would make rhythms (that one in particular fell apart on the way). So some of these instruments didn’t work when we got there, or they behaved unexpectedly. So we had to improvise. And what was left of these experiments was only documentation, a collection of weird and amazing recordings and beautiful footage (by Marcus Salvagno) to look back at and make sense of. These were, in a sense, like results, from our experiments. And what we edited together ended up being a kind of behavioural study of the mountain, like a composition.

What we presented for the exhibition were the instruments, and an edited video, which you can watch an excerpt from here.

My practice is very much process-led, and examines the labour in what it is to make, to place and to see. Thus the work questions the notion of value in art and where it is found. 

The studio is where I draft my inventory. Objects drop-in and drop-out of arrangements, morph into new works, become springboards for entire new bodies of work. I am interested in the becoming of objects as the work, less so than the work as a finalised object or arrangement.  Furthermore I am interested in how these objects ‘perform’ in this way, performativity which is inherent in sculpture, and how artists play/have played historically a part of that. I am particularly interested in reading this through a feminist lens. 

Having said this - there is little ‘making’ in my work without doing. I find my way by improvising, moving, placing, leaning, resting, folding, joining, melting, sticking etc to discover new iterations of form, new relationships between ideas and entities and the implications of these relationships to broader contexts - socially, politically and historically. But it’s in this doing that I point and shape the work towards texts and conceptual threads, not the other way around. 

ME. My work is grounded in a deep concern for humanity. It draws on post-modern philosophy and the social context connected to identities in a diasporic state of being  - specifically the analysis of the abnormal and the hyper-real and the effects on humanities perceptions. Commenting on structuralism, my installations are part performance, focusing on the practice of making itself as the foundation of the aesthetic. In doing so I reject what I see as the contrived legacy of art practice (tradition) and the decorative by-product.

I have been practicing since the mid 90's and have exhibited extensively, including shows in London (UK), Beijing (China), Rome (Italy) and Australia. Since 2000 at which time I founded Sydney's infamous Space3 Gallery, running until it's untimely closure in 2006. Presently I'm a collaborating with many peers to produce work that involves dialogue concerning the frenzied state of affairs that have encompassed the conservative identity of the contemporary epoch.

Thrills and spills’ 2006

TWENTY FIRST CENTURY FOR ART KIDS (2016)

TWENTY FIRST CENTURY FOR ART KIDS (2016)

Found furniture, electronics with sound, streamers, champagne bottle,

165 x 50 x 100 cm

In the gallery, we see a wardrobe. It omits the bass notes of muffled music and the indecipherable chatter of an enclosed party as if this wardrobe could transport us to some kind of adult Narnia or contains a rave for smurfs.

Yet when the viewer opens this door, the sound and vibrations stop and one is left pouring over the aftermath of a party that might have been. Once the door is closed again, the rumbles of the party recommence.

Adopting live recordings from a party at Space 3, a Sydney Artist Run Space of which Kyriakidis was director 2000 - 2006, the work points to the complex strata of art interactions and networks. Perhaps now more than ever, the aesthetics of the contemporary artist experience is foremost one of being a node in a network. Whilst this work could be construed as a critique of art’s exclusionary circles and rubbernecking, it also perhaps points to the agency that comes with this - no, corporate fat cats and socialites, you can’t come to our squat party, despite your FOMA (Fear of Missing Out) motto adopted by squeamish silicon valley life hacking entrepreneurs.

There is also something quite comforting in the artist’s emulation of a wrung-out dancefloor. The sticky streamers and footprints of walls and floors that have been worked over in cheap spirits and reverb, reminding us of the micro-political act of getting lost in the sound and a sea of bodies.

Projection.

In the last 8 years, I've been working as a projection artist, working alongside and collaborating with artists like Reko Rennie to produce politically motivated decorative work illuminated on Federation square (2016) 'white nights Melbourne'

Below are just a few examples of the scale of the work I have produced.

Chinese new year 2013. Sydney town hall.

vivid 2015. 

enlighten Canberra 2016

MOAD Canberra 2015 

St Marys Cathedral’ Sydney 2014.

white nights 2016 Melbourne

winter Olympics 2010

Melbourne 2014

Melbourne 2015

mock up a screenshot. for Melbourne 2014

My research is always inside my practice. I don’t see research as something that happens outside of making or as a support for making -  it is in the making. 

I am interested in process-based installation and painting and I tend to use everything around me as material. I collect text from a range of sources that I use later in work. My research includes visiting museums and galleries locally and internationally, attending performances and reading relevant texts; making, thinking and procrastinating in the studio; collaborating with other artists (sound artists in particular); curatorial projects; ongoing conversations with other artists and writers and general investigations into artists who I am interested in. My practice is like a lens through which I look at the world, to the point that many aspects of my life become part of this research activity.

For example, in the last few months while I was using Tinder I started to collect text from mens profiles and to create an ongoing list. I used this text on the front window of the UTS gallery as part of the group exhibition The Mnemonic Mirror (image below), http://art.uts.edu.au/index.php/exhibitions/the-mnemonic-mirror/

I created a version recently in Melbourne at Blindside gallery again, using Tinder text but this time painting onto the wall. I invited an artists who works in sound to collaborate and he made a performance at the opening night using my text as lyrics.

Self-Reflexive Critique: Alpha Mu, 2016, installation view, acrylic on glass, dimensions variable, photography by David Lawrey

Self-Reflexive Critique (Melb), 2016, installation view,  acrylic on wall, approx. 870 x 300 cm, Blindside gallery