Firstdraft in July

Emerging artists create a micro honey farm, reflect on the “collective hallucination of cinema”, teach visitors how to draw “the Luke Thurgate way” and test the potential of First-Person Shooter games in 4 new exhibitions at Firstdraft in July.

Exhibition opens: Wednesday 7 July 2010, 6-8pm
?Exhibition continues: to 25 July 2010 ?
Artist talks: Sunday 25 July 2010 at 4pm

Colony Collapse continues Zettel and Khoe’s ongoing collaborative project to micro-farm pockets of the city, setting up temporary site offices from which to launch sensible and/or absurd experiments in urban self-sufficiency. At Firstdraft the artists will be investigating the possibilities for small-scale mobile honey production, as they research and construct a hybrid beehive-food cart destined for Sydney’s Circular Quay. With food crisis, suburban sprawl and the colony’s precarious histories (and futures) on their minds, Zettel and Khoe invite audiences in to smell the flowers and talk to the bees.

As part of the Firstdraft Emerging Artists Studio Program supported by Australia Council for the Arts

Carter began this work with a specific question; what can Painting say as distinct from other media? The artist posits that the whole process of making a painting cannot be separated from image generating technologies that began with the invention of photography and continues with digital media. The paintings reflect, as well as critique, something about the sea of images which surround us, and specifically the collective hallucination of cinema. The source imagery is film stills /photography. In the artist’s palette there is a colour heightening and saturation, a drama of light and dark, and the paint is kept present; it is sometimes visceral, sometimes controlled; which draws attention to its use.

How to draw sex, violence and death the Luke Thurgate way is about public collaboration, interactivity, drawing and the nature of authenticity, reproduction and the graphic signature. The work invites the viewer to physically experience the production one of Thurgate’s drawings. Over the course of the exhibition it is hoped that viewers will collaboratively fill the blank surfaces over which the filmed drawings have been projected as a guide. The images themselves explore notions of masculinity, trauma and love. The drawings form part of an ongoing series of self-portraits in which exaggerated notions of masculine expression are played out. The participant becomes the means through which these notions find a permanent physical form.

Twist furthers Pailthorpe’s interest in video games as a subject matter. The video work explores the aesthetic anomalies in First-Person Shooter games (FPS) that are activated through glitches and by using cheats. Resisting the narrative drive of these games (where the player is the protagonist) through inaction, Pailthorpe found that the game falls into a state of perpetual regeneration. The graphics engines endlessly repeat their cinematic loops. Through this political act of stasis, resisting the game’s violent narrative pull reveals the subtle beauty of the game’s virtual architecture. Perpetual action is activated by inaction. Whereas the insatiable desire to continue killing leaves a true gamer in a carrot and stick scenario of always wanting more, the true path to satisfaction perhaps lies in resistance. In stopping to smell the proverbial, virtual roses, the performative potential of these virtual spaces emerges.