Sunday, July 22, 2007

Guy Benfield: MAXIMUM COMMUNE

Maximum Commune (Ugly Business... on the basis of disbelief.) Talking with Australian New York based artist Guy Benfield, about his performance/installation work Maximum Commune, part of the Aftermath: Performance Installation series curated by Blair French at Sydney's ART SPACE gallery, right next to the harbour. With the USS Kitty Hawk moored across the street, Guy walked and talked us through his unique work and world.

"Maximum Commune... utilises the cultural model of the 'pavilion' juxtaposed with tropes of modernist architecture, examples of hand-built alternative Zome housing originating from Southern California in the 1960s and collectives such as Drop City. Within these structures, Guy Benfield performs a series of actions, 'droppings' or situational episodes that re-animate tropes that were once declared obsolete, such as ritual, live action painting in the genre of george mathieu, the 'Art informal' movement in France, and the Japanese actionist painting movement - Gutai group. In these performance scenarios Benfield investigates the West Coast Funk Ceramic movement of the late sixties, pottery as an expressionist dialogue and the bourgeois bohemian lifestyle he experienced while growing up insuburban Sydney."


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Monday, July 9, 2007

Roderick Hietbrink: VIVARIUM

"Roderick Hietbrink is a Rotterdam-based artist working with sound and video installation. His work is grounded in the study of urban architecture, resulting in experiential, transformative environments developed in response to specific urban landscapes. Vivarium is a new work produced in the period of Hietbrink’s three-month Artspace Studio Residency and featuresl andscapes near and around Sydney. As in previous works, Vivarium continues to explore issues around nature and the built environment, providing a subtle commentary on the processes of negotiation and navigation that underlie the human condition." I spoke with Roderick in his studio at Artspace.