This Little Teapot Exhibition: Pic's and Video

This Little Teapot was exhibited at Paper Plane Gallery in Rozelle and opened on April 13.

Above is an installation shot of the exhibition of one part of the show which features my work Impression, 2011 appearing on the right side of the photo.  The work is made from tea on canvas.

Impression, 2011.  Loose-leaf black tea on unprimed canvas.

By Tony Curran

Reading tea leaves has been a source for uncovering untold fortunes of the future.  Whether it's reading tea leaves, coffee, star constellations, knowledge and inspiration have been developed from uncertain accidental or coincidental appearances.  This is why Da Vinci encouraged young artists to find inspiration in bits of dirt on a wall or patches of damp.  The process of finding an image in something vague like a cloud can be considered divine intervention, an omen or a message from the heavens.  Or they could just be psychological constructions which we project onto the form to make it meaningful.

Impression is a self portrait of a teapot in loose leaf tea painted by the teapot, assisted by the artist.  It's a visually vague tea painting, left open to interpretation much like how we see the world, art and ourselves, how we tell stories about phenomena, and how difficult it can be to say anything meaningful about our own selves.  Its visual vagueries are a result of a lack of ability on behalf of the teapot to perform an action it was not designed to do - depict itself, nevertheless once the teapot is seen, it cannot be hidden.

What is the difference between what we see depicted in nature and what we see depicted in art?  In this work the artist's has worked with the the object of the drawing while using it as the drawing tool to intentionally depict a teapot.  Attempting to articulate the form of the teapot the cumbersome nature of the teapot was an obstacle for rendering a descriptive picture of the teapot.  As a result the picture is a stain which slightly resembles teapotness.  The sepia colour makes this impression aged, like an old photographic print.  It visually reminds one of a relic such as Shroud of Turin which is itself a vague impression and its vagueness makes it more authentic as a sacred artifact.  The face of Christ in toast or on a public wall seems to pop up every now and again sometimes making front page news.

Intentionality sets it apart from accidental phenomena, fluke or mistake.  Intentionality alone makes the work a representation of the teapot whether or not it looks like one.  The context of the exhibition further helps the viewer to see the teapot in the image, and it is through these associations and the intentionality of the artist (teapot) that an engagement with the work is possible.  

You might be looking at it upside down.

this little teapot @ paper plane gallery from qwux on Vimeo.

INTERVIEW BY NICK HOSE FOR CANVAS on FBi

Nick Hose ran a piece on Central Park and Fraser Property for a segment on Canvas that ran last Sunday July 18.

MEMIUM: VINYL

150 artists have been recruited in what appears will be a phenomenal exhibition featuring some great talent from me, Rebecca Murphy, Little Gonzalez, Georgie Pollard, Dominic Proust, and much much more. There will be a vinyl market also. I'm expecting the attendence would be about 6 x the number of artists + 50.

Comb Filtered, 2010.

Comb Filtered is a product of ongoing research into the individual differences of sense organs. Having worked on comparative anatomy of ears in Sydney for the last few months I have noticed a broad range of ear shapes, sizes and contours. Comb Filtered is named after a process of equalisation that recording producers use to shape the overall colour of a musical recording – highlighting certain frequency ranges and dulling others. Similarly that is the role of the outer ear. The differences in ear shape result in different types of comb filtering. Our bodies, from the outside, are shaping how we observe the world around us from sense to sense.

Medium Vinyl is an upcoming exhibition at Hardware Gallery opening on May 21 from 6-8pm

Studio Update

This Little Piggy is a group exhibition coming up in February at China Heights. This work is to be included in this show and it is a work in progress. The work involves a melting down of a piggy bank which was given to me by the curator, Rebecca Murphy. I intend to present a sculpture that has melted its way into a painting. This work will serve as an example of how we construct composed visual narratives from real objects. Involved in the translation from the real and the communicative is a process of disintegration of the physical thing. This work is not intended to convey a notion of the physical piggy bank but to explore the experience of articulating.

THE YELLOW LINE CONTINUES

I am of course still in pursuit of demonstrating The Yellow Line. That border between healthy sanity and and the exploration of the existenital or the subjective. The below image is a painting that is in my studio and may or may not ever leave my studio. This artifact is intrinsic into my exploration of The Yellow Line

SOME MUSINGS ON SUSTAINABILITY

It seems that a lot of opportunities lay ahead for those pursuing the burgeoning industry of sustainability. Much of the sustainability opportunities tackle things like environmental sustainability, corporate sustainability, individual and psychological sustainability and social sustainability. Isn’t this just another word for immortality? Staying alive for longer , staying relevant, living reasonably. Isn’t this the same thing that all religions and political ideologies have ever come up with throughout history? Haven’t we been looking for sustainability all our lives and all of our ancestors lives and their ancestors before them? Hasn’t war, diplomacy and trade been the recurring tragedy of the pursuit of sustainability and isn’t it true that war, diplomacy and trade are still is the result of national sustainability. Law and governance is about the perusal of social sustainability and that bureaucracy is the method (popularized by Nazi Germany) which enforces sustainability. So if sustainability is everything then it can’t be distinguished from anything and the result is that it is nothing.

I noticed that more and more artists are invited to send in proposals for projects that explore sustainability as a subject. One project was to be fixed at the sustainable learning centre in Tasmania. There are a number of problems with this for example sustainability is the kind of thing that very few artists explore because it’s a corporate fad only developed recently and because artists are concerned with arts issues which so often have their integrity polluted by interacting with business discourse not to mention jargon that dilutes the many political issues such as climate change and human rights that many artists engage in.

Sustainability really is just another word, which means the same thing as survival, responsibility, ethics and economics all in one. The word sustainability entwines all of these socio-political considerations with a prescriptive morality and ethics that is as universally interpretable and malleable as any of the big five world religions and implies that the appointed judgment of sustainable practice can be granted and withheld.

Corporate Social Responsibility, community consideration, business health, national security, pale in comparison to the righteousness of this new practice which extends beyond the realms of the individual, the family, community, the national and the global. Sustainability is another way of saying “the greater good and it’s a clouded throwback to the modernist ideologies which encourage passive submission on the part of the individual for the goal of the higher power – or should I say authority in the name of progress.

I had better not include this in my proposal at the sustainable learning centre in Tasmania.

PHILOSOPHY WITH TONY

I'm working on a project called This Little Piggy which is a group exhibition. I'm having to plunge the depths of my relationships to pigs. I suppose the strongest relationship to pigs is my love for bacon, pork and ham but beyond that I draw a blank.

I am to make a work somehow drawing inspiration to a ceramic piggy bank. I have tendencies to make a gory scene with the piggy as some kind of reference to manufactured animals but it would all be coming from a John Berger book that I've been reading. I also thought about putting $5,000 in it and seeing if anyone would steal it. I'd sell the artwork for $5,025 + commission. But where would I get $5,000 from?

Other associations with pigs are that they're greey. Piggy + bank = money greedy? Money greedy translates in this day and age as the cause of the global recession or GFC, the cause of international slavery, the cause of climate change, the cause of wars and conflicts and probably a lot more. In World War Two Nazis were referred to as pigs. The term pig is also used to refer to Police and also chauvinists.

But piggy banks always look friendly. The funny thing is pigs actually have very little to do with the evolution of the piggy bank. The term piggy bank actually refers to the type of clay that they were initially made from "pygg".

This inquiry into piggy banks is like Plato's world of ideas. He believed that the essenses of everything lived in a seperate world from ours. In our world, objects exist as an approximation of what they are in the world of ideas. For example if you ask yourself what a table is the answer might be something with four legs and a flat bit you can put things on. But really that could be a chair or a bed or a dog depending on how you argue it. Also you might find that some tables only have three legs and aren't necessarily like every other tables. You might notice that piggy banks are the same.

Majapahit Piggy Bank

But it would be a little boring of me to try and transform the piggy bank and make it "different". The correct thing to do is to make it "better". What makes a piggy bank special is its mystery. The most interesting thing about any piggy bank is trying to detect the full value of the jingle jangle.

Will someone lend me $5,000?

Click here to download the magic and mystery of the Piggy Bank