Sanity Clause 2007

For our Deck Christmas fundraiser what we would like you to do is drop in a work to the gallery any day that the gallery is open: Thursday to Saturday 1-6 pm or Sunday or Monday 1 -5 pm, and no later than Sunday 9 December. All works need to be labeled and no larger then A4 in any medium 2D or 3D. All works will be hung, they will be sold anonymously on the opening night Thursday 13th December, look forward to receiving your work. MOP Projects.

Don’t Look Gallery’s new exhibition is by fourteen-year old Dulwich Hill Visual Arts High School student, Liam Frost. His first exhibition, ‘Goatman and Friends’, explores a surreal character known as ‘Goatman‘ and his daily life. Goatman is just a regular Joe, the epitome of mundanity, living in an surreal world; an Earth destroyed and taken over by the animals.

But he is also the saviour and lord of the world. A following of mysterious rigid cubes that grate against organic earthly remains are his disciples. Together he and the cubes ‘cure’ the world from a dystopia all too realistic for the animals of earth. Hundreds of thousands of years after human civilisation, this exhibition adventures through a world of carnage and death juxtaposed with the beauty of nature and life.

Frost combines his skilful illustrations with poetry, animation, sound and mechanics to produce a spellbinding show.

A daily routine for Goatman

Goatman wakes in the morning,
He makes his bacon and eggs,
He eats his bacon and eggs.

Goes to work,
He’s an accountant in some treetop.
On the weekends he likes to blow up buildings
And play marbles with the world.

A trail of floating cubes follow him
Transform coal into diamond.
Down the red carpet
Of some Melbourne alley,
Through the beating heart of illegality
And morality.

Goatman makes his dinner in the night,
He eats his dinner in the night,
Trades a suit for PJ’s
Then goes to sleep.

After 18 months of trying to buy a billboard space in inner Sydney, artist Deborah Kelly‘s antinuclear work finally went up in Chippendale on Wednesday 14 November, 2007.

The artwork (attached) was originally made for the 2003 Venice Biennale, and shown there as part of a collaborative project between Kelly and US artist Martha Rosler.

But in Sydney, no billboard company in the city would accept the work, funded by musician John Butler, citing mysterious “commercial conflicts”, if they responded at all.

Company after company were very keen to take Ms Kelly’s grant money- until, that is, they saw the artwork. Then , silence.

In desperation she approached her local council, and local politicians, who “became involved when the free speech issue highlighted the flimsiness of our democracy”, she says.

With the help of questions asked in high places, Kelly has finally secured a billboard in Abercrombie St, Chippendale, between Cleveland and Broadway.

The billboard will remain in place until December.

Deborah Kelly can be contacted on dkellysocialchange[at]yahoo.com