Relative Constructions

Relative Constructions: The Poetic Lens

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Looking through the Poetic Lens

Four different stories that come together through the poetry of the lens

The Relative Constructions team are delighted with how The Poetic Lens looks in the Tamworth Regional Gallery. Have a listen to our interview with Kelly Fuller on ABC radio to hear all about it.

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The Poetic Lens at Tamworth

The Relative Constructions team are thrilled to be installing our show The Poetic Lens at Tamworth Regional Gallery this week. The fabulous Tamworth staff have made us feel very welcome and given us great professional support for the exhibition install. We’re enjoying installing in a beautiful, big gallery space.

We arrived on Monday morning and got the van unloaded. The excellent Pam Brown gave us an induction to the space and sorted out all the paperwork. We had a quick meeting to work out where the walls would go and adjusted our exhibition plan from our original design. We had a rough idea of where everything would go, but once in the space we worked out some adjustments to really make the most of the gallery space.

Our fourth member, Genevieve is away working on another project this week, so Blaide and Caroline carefully unpacked and checked her work. Genevieve is down the south coast working on an exciting collaboration - we’ll get her to post her own update some time soon!

Once the works were unpacked, we were able to get them up on the walls. It’s so exciting seeing the show coming together again in a new gallery! In the foreground Blaide is working on the layout of her Walkin’ the streets: New York series and our fantastic exhibition installer Brian is up the scissor lift doing some adjustments to the lights.

We’re looking forward to seeing everything up and having a chat about the work at the opening tomorrow.

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Last Sunday we loaded up the hire van with the Poetic Lens exhibition and prepared for a 700km drive to Tamworth. Ellis, Blaide and Caroline are travelling with the show for this leg, making sure to keep our work safe and fuelling up on regular coffees.

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Wrapping up 2014

It’s hard to believe it has been a whole year since the Relative Constructions crew ran our first crowd funding campaign for our Poetic Lens exhibition. What a year it has been!

Relative Constructions team selfie, from left: Ellis Hutch, Blaide Lallemand, Caroline Huf and Genevieve Swifte 

The funds from our Indiegogo campaign enabled us to produce a printed publication to accompany the exhibition the Poetic Lens, held at M16 Artspace in May. The exhibition itself was well received and was an excellent first project for our collective. As the year has progressed we’ve been working on the next phase and have received confirmation that the Poetic Lens will be shown at Tamworth Regional Gallery in 2015, and we’re working on expanding the tour further.

We are thrilled to have received an award for the exhibition from The Canberra Critics Circle – commenting that our exhibition and publication presented ‘an innovative alternative perspective on lens-based media as an emotive, embodied poetic form. Receiving acknowledgement from our community, and especially the people who make an effort to get out and see the huge variety of work on show in Canberra gave us all a real boost at the end of an incredibly busy year.

While the collective has been humming along dreaming up future projects, we have all been busy in our individual practices. Here’s an overview of this year’s highlights:

  Caroline Huf, Stone piece 2014 still from animation. This image comes from Girona Cathedral, Spain. The courtyard paved with many different stone carvings all worn and chipped, have been walked over for hundreds of years.

Caroline Huf exhibited an installation of her work at M16 Artspace early in the year, and a video in the I heart video art exhibition at ANCA Gallery in the middle of the year. She also took a very exciting research trip to Europe visiting Barcelona, Granada, Madrid, Paris, Prague, Vilnius in Lithuania and then back to Paris for the Festival of Experimental and different cinema. Caroline said “I was so lucky to have this trip, and see some amazing exhibitions, the highlight was an Exhibition of Ana Mendieta's work called Traces, that I saw in Prague, and the Turner prize at the Tate Modern in London, so many wonderful exhibitions.’ 

Now back home in Canberra she is focussing on writing her PhD exegesis and will be spending Christmas at her desk!

  Blaide Lallemand and Michael Norris, Where do we stand? 2014 sound installation exhibited in Embracing innovations 4 at Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre

Blaide Lallemand has continued to work on a fascinating project called Where do we stand? with Michael Norris which was exhibited at Embracing Innovations 4 at Craft ACT. They received an Arts ACT grant in 2013 to research and develop this project, which involves creating an immersive interactive sound installation. Blaide’s had a really busy year exhibiting, her work was shown in I heart video art at ANCA gallery; her Walkin’ the streets: New York was shown at Kaori Gallery in Civic and she exhibited in Morphos: Sustainable Empires, international architecture, video-art, photography, installation and performing art festival in Venice, Italy. Blaide also squeezed in some travel in September, as she was invited to exhibit with the American Australian Association in New York.

  Ellis Hutch and Lucy Quinn, Team training exercise 2014 performance for Zonk Vision, Pocket Holiday at Canberra Contemporary Art Space

Ellis Hutch has had a full year juggling teaching work with her own study and working on a large installation project to be launched next year. Ellis also exhibited in I heart video art at ANCA, gave a conference paper about her work at Queensland Festival of Photography in Brisbane and performed Team training exercise with Lucy Quinn as part of the Zonk Vision’s Pocket Holiday event at Canberra Contemporary Art Space. Ellis was thrilled to receive an Arts ACT Grant that will enable her to travel to Finland in 2015 to undertake a second residency at the Arteles Creative Centre.

  Genevieve Swifte, Breast  2014, pigment print from black and white negative on hahnemuhle photo rag

In September, Genevieve Swifte held a solo show of her photography Trespass at the Front in Lyneham, a body of work that she will be taking to Paddington’s Barometer Gallery in May as a part of the Head On Photography Festival in Sydney, 2015. She also has plans to further her international collaboration with US composer Cheryl E Leonard with whom she has an exhibition planed for September 2015 at the ANU School of Art Foyer Gallery and a planed release with the American sound art non-profit, 23Five Incorporated featuring Leonard’s compositions and Swifte’s photography and drawings.

  We’ll be back in the new year with news of our next projects!

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Artist talks this weekend

Join us this weekend for the final days of the exhibition and to hear Blaide Lallemand and Caroline Huf talk about their work.

The Poetic Lens will be on show until Sunday 25 May at 5pm - the gallery is open Wednesday to Sunday, so pop in this week to catch the show before it ends!

Artist talks by Blaide and Caroline will be held at 2pm on Saturday 24th. The event is free and open to the public. We'll be providing afternoon tea, and all the artists in the show will be available for an informal chat after the talks.

Where: M16 Artspace 21 Blaxland St Griffith ACT

http://www.m16artspace.com/

The Poetic Lens, Installation view of Blaide's work on the left and Caroline's work on the right. Photo: Genevieve Swifte

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Walking and talking

This week the while the show continues at M16 Artspace, Ellis will be talking at a symposium on walking. It should be a fantastic event and is FREE to attend - come along!

Walking the talk

I’m speaking at this event next week - should be a good couple of days:

http://soa.anu.edu.au/event/talking-walk-walking-talk

A TWO DAY SYMPOSIUM HOSTED BY THE SCHOOL OF ART, ANU

Wednesday 21 May from 6pm: ANU School of Art Lecture Theatre and Foyer Gallery Thursday 22 May 9am to 5pm: ANU School of Art

How does walking facilitate emergent perspectives and embodied practices that activate relations between art, practice, environment and politics?

Talking the Walk/Walking the Talk is a snapshot of contemporary Australia art practice where the common ground is perambulation. Artists use walking as a means of engaging with the environment and landscape, providing a physical and meditative way of connecting with people and place, while activating the diverse and layered histories present in the land and landscape.

Water and walking is an emerging theme; Keynote speaker, Nici Cumpston will discuss her practice of photographing the Murray-Darling Basin, Vic McEwan and George Main will present on their forthcoming project, Walking the Murrumbidgee River, and Rebecca Mayo’s paper engages with her recent 7 day walk along a peri-urban/urban waterway in Melbourne. Ellis Hutch walks in the dark and Anne-Marie Jean walks in the footsteps of artist/gardeners while other papers address urban expeditions and Ryan Johnston (Head of art, Australian War Memorial) takes us through Tom Nicholson’s Palestine Memorials.

The symposium commences with a Feldenkrais class designed to bring participants’ attention to the organisation of their moving body in space.

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The Poetic Lens opening speech – Kim Mahood

Installation shot of Poetic Lens exhibition featuring the work of Genevieve Swifte in the foreground

Opening words

We were most fortunate to have artist and writer Kim Mahood open our exhibition and kindly share her speaker's notes with us. Below is a transcript of what she said:

THE POETIC LENS 

I’m delighted and honoured to be asked to open this exhibition. Having known most of the artists since their student days, it’s immensely satisfying to see their work and their practice develop in such exciting directions. They belong to a constellation of fantastic Canberra artists who are making work and building careers  under the umbrella of a local art scene that is both supportive and critically challenging.

It’s also great to see the model they are developing as a group, to share skills and resources, to support each other and maintain a professional collegiate relationship. It’s easy to become isolated once you cut the umbilical cord with art school, and isolation can lead to loss of momentum.

But loss of momentum is not a problem for these artists. Between them they have an astonishing list of achievements –exhibitions, residencies, awards.

The Poetic Lens. What a great title.  I believe it was coined by Genevieve. It perfectly describes the way in which the four artists have used the camera as the poet’s eye, to capture that shimmering ambiguity that is contained in all good poetry. 

What is interesting is how differently that ambiguity is reflected in the work of each of the artists.

At first glance Genevieve Swifte’s work is striking in its formal restraint, until you realise how tactile the images are, like embossed velvet, and that there’s an almost baroque sensibility embedded in them. Can you have baroque restraint – restrained baroque?

Ellis Hutch’s luminous spaces have a saturated emptiness, a lush minimalism. To see the northern lights in the green flare on a kitchen ceiling in Queanbeyan is the mark of a poetic imagination.

The sensory overload of Blaide Lallemand’s New York is punctuated with intervals of contemplative stillness, a soft focus, meditative hum that counterpoints the claustrophobic urban noise.

Caroline Huf’s videos manage an astonishing balance between intimacy and alienation. 

Like a good poem, or any successful work of art, the meanings hover and shift, depending on who’s looking, and where you’re looking from.

What the poetic lens has observed and recorded in all these works is an embodied, sensory quality of place. They are as much about sensation as they are about seeing, whether the place is somewhere exotic and new, or as familiar and domestic as a suburban bedroom. The strange is made familiar and the familiar is made strange. 

I’ll leave the last word on that to the artists, who have made a pretty fair hand of poetic text as well –

Or a thought

that I knew

so well

like the back of my hand

may

become

shockingly

unfamiliar

again

  Or a thought

may return

after an absence

noticed only when it returns

sometimes its presence before the absence

only becomes apparent on its return

  Or this thought

when turned over

in my hand

is not what I remeber

it was

  (Quoted poetry by Caroline Huf)

For more on Kim Mahood there's a lovely interview with Irma Gold here  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds-EaTZ3zH4

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The show is up and the doors are open!

The Poetic Lens was installed last week, and after many late nights we have a beautiful show! We gave two artist talks yesterday - with Ellis and Genevieve discussing their work. Blaide and Caroline will give talks about their work on Saturday 24 May at 2pm, M16 Artspace, 21 Blaxland St Griffith ACT

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It's been a while!

It has been quite some time since any of the Relative Constructions team has posted here. We've been working very hard over the last few months and we're about to celebrate soon!

Last week Genevieve and Ellis gave papers at QFP5 - the Queensland Festival of Photography. We had a lovely time once we got over the terror of presenting our papers, and saw much to be inspired by.

Today Blaide and Ellis took a trip up the highway to Goulburn to collect some of our printing

It was a truly stunning day for a road trip.

We'll be installing our work early next week and the opening atwill be on Thursday 8 May at 6pm. A copy of the exhibition invitation will appear here soon!

Here's a view of the beautiful weather we enjoyed while driving home:

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Sinking into snow

Hello from frozen Finland!

It’s Ellis here with another update as I settle into a residency at Arteles. This artist residency organisation is situated about 40kms from the city of Tampere and a 2-hour train ride from Helsinki. Occupying an old school house, Arteles plays host to up to 10 artists at any one time.

For the month of December myself and the other artists here are undertaking a themed residency focussing on Silence, Existence, Awareness. As December is the darkest month of the year, it provides an opportunity to reflect, be immersed in the local landscape and spend some quiet time on our various projects.

While the days are short, we have had some stunning blue skies in the first week. The sun makes its way up just above the forest and scoots along the tops of the trees before disappearing again. It never feels like the middle of the day – the long shadows of morning shift into the long shadows of afternoon and the slow descent into darkness starts about 3pm.

I’ve been looking for an opportunity to spend time in an environment that is foreign to me, and to respond to the experience of the light and atmosphere of this place. Having been here almost a week I’m still finding my feet in this environment, but I’ve spent every day walking as a way of immersing myself in the here and now.

It has been snowing steadily for the last three days which means no sight of the sun at all and a mostly monochrome landscape. The quiet that comes with the falling snow gives me the feeling of being in another world and makes it easy to lose track of time. I find myself sitting up at 2am writing, sleeping late and walking in the afternoons, finding my way down snowy roads as the light disappears. I’ve been noticing the different qualities of the snow as I walk on icy roads, traverse fields and feel the crunch of a crust of ice giving way as I slip into the drift below.

Now, as it’s 2am again, I’m off to bed – I’ll post another update next week!

For posts on my recent gallery visits in Helsinki visit http://ellishutch.tumblr.com/

And if you haven’t already, please visit the Relative Constructions indiegogo page and share it with your communities!

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Cab short from Relative Constructions on Vimeo.

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blaide short from Relative Constructions on Vimeo.

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Genevieve short from Relative Constructions on Vimeo.

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ellis short from Relative Constructions on Vimeo.

relative constructions; check out our campaign at Indiegogo igg.me/at/relativeconstructions/x/5173423

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A feast of the senses!

Relative Constructions invite you to join us for a night of feasting, imagery and sound at M16 gallery during the exhibition The Poetic Lens in May 2014

After an intimate tour of the exhibition with live performances by the artists, the candlelit meal will begin with a selection of fresh dips, gourmet cheeses, roe and smoked salmon followed by soup with seasonal vegetables and home baked bread.

The main course will feature spiced aubergine with fresh ginger & tomato accompanied by dhal, raita & saffron rice with your choice of pomegranate, rose petal and marinated goats cheese, or walk on the wild side Waldorf salad.

Then, your hosts will let their creative culinary imaginations run wild with a dessert menu to rival the exhibition: edible photographs, shadow cake with star anise, creamy white noise red velvet underground speaker sponge, chocolate poetry & sweet philosophy, all of which will make an immersive installation of our banquette table.

Be serenaded with the loud and beloved music of Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed as you indulge in the evening’s sensory overload, sipping spiced wine to warm the heart and mixing your own arctic ice explorer cocktails.

All the while, silent & surreal, the cinema of Maya Deren will flicker across the gallery space. This will be a night to remember!

If you are intrigued and want attend this unique event visit our indiegogo page and snap it up!

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/relative-constructions-exhibition/x/5173423

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Where's Ellis?

While the rest of the Relative Constructions team have been flat out in Canberra attending openings, supporting the Capital Arts Patrons Organisation, and cooking up fabulous plans for our 2014 activities, Ellis has been having art adventures interstate and overseas.

Yep it's been a busy couple of weeks!

A couple of weekends ago I attended SEAM, a fantastic conference run by Critical Path in Sydney.

One of the highlights for me was David Pledger's keynote on the opening night. He asked if it is possible to curate society - and discussed the possibility of artists taking on this role. He talked about his own history as a footballer and asked if he would have more of a voice in society if he chose the role of a sportsperson or politician - rather than taking the path of the artist. I found his paper timely and compelling - a call to artists to critically assess their situation and to find ways to create a voice for themselves in the national conversation.

Deborah Ascher Barnstone's discussion of the notion of fakes, forgeries and the concept of the original in works of art was lively and really engaging. She drew examples from different artistic modes of production to play with the idea of what could be considered original in ballet, theatre and visual art - opening up the question of what is authenticity anyway?

There was so much great material presented over the weekend I can't possibly do it justice here - and I'm writing from Helsinki having left my notebook in Canberra ...

What I enjoyed most about this event was the combination of presentations in different formats: conference papers, performances, combinations of performances and demonstrations, round-table discussions... The organisers reconfigured the presentation spaces to accommodate the range of work shown, and this made for a dynamic atmosphere over the course of the weekend.

Highlights for me included Erin Brannigan talking about Cage, Rainer and Contemporary Dance Authorship; Siegmar Zacharias and Kate McIntosh performing Invasive Hospitality and James Cunningham's performance Antennae.

After a weekend of art overload I then attended Kate McIntosh's workshop Misuse/Displace - run as one of the SEAM events. I'll write a brief report about that in my next post.

In the meantime here are some pics of James Cunningham's Antennae from the weekend:

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In the air and on my way

Hi it's Ellis Here

I'm sitting in Singapore airport right now loving how quiet it is here - definitely my fave international transit place.

Why am I here? Because I'm jetting off to Finland to do a residency at http://www.arteles.org/

I'm looking forward to experiencing Finland's darkest month of the year and immersing myself in the cold, snowy, silence. I'll write a more detailed post about why I'm going and what I'm expecting when I'm no longer suffering from tranist-brain.