More Fomo, cementa friendship, all stories, farewell Edmund + more!

Friday degustation: allow to rest before serving

Feeding FOMO

It turns out that generational attitudes to social media – and to socialising – are having a knock-on effect when it comes to art museum visitation. How do institutions attract Generation Z visitors to their galleries? According to Carly Straughan at MuseumNext.com it’s all about recognising that Gen Zs are concerned with how they spend their leisure time and the physical spaces they inhabit… “They are looking for physical spaces they can invest in, communities they can engage with and tribes to belong to, and Museums have a huge opportunity to be the recipient of their time and money.” The solution: create experiences! [>] “Using social media to show off the experiences you offer and how they affect people is the key here, you may be able to watch a video of the Boston Science Museum’s lightening show in 360 degree’s virtual reality but it’s a pale comparison to being in the room with the huge Van Der Graaff generator in real life. For many people the reason for visiting may be a video they see online completely unrelated to your museum, online photos from an exhibition a friend visited or a celebrity visit. By making sure your online presence is available to everyone with interesting and relevant content you reach out to new museum visitors across the world and give them reasons to visit you in person.” There’s more, and they’re equally good: put collections online, open late, and cater to wide range of audiences.

Cement a friendship

Cementa, the art organisation with a can-do attitude that stages its titular event every two or so years in Kandos, NSW, operates on the smell of the proverbial oily rag. They run events, exhibitions, gastronomic tours, and now they have a brand new building for their residency program. [Full disclosure: Art Life editor Andrew Frost went on a residency last year to curate a show-within-a-show for Cementa 19]. As is the way with ambitious programs, they need your money to help expand their operations: “We have recently signed the lease on “Angus Hall” the original community hall for Kandos. We are fixing it up to house our artist residency and offices. From this incredible space, we will launch WAYOUT, an artist run exhibition and community initiative. This project will give us a central and visible location to build on the art and community-engagement we bring to Kandos and to our art community into a year-round concern.  We already host up to 25 artists in our residency each year. This represents a huge influx of talent, creativity and good looks, most of which goes unseen as artists occupy themselves quietly with making work for the festival. Our expanded program and new visibility will enable us to take advantage of this creative resource and use it as a foundation to make Kandos into a living, vibrant locus of regional contemporary culture year-round. For the first time since we started, we’re asking our friends and supporters to give towards a Cementa-themed donor program – which includes all the necessary ingredients for a firm, concrete foundation.”

Do the right thing and feel good about yourself: donate! Cementa are working with the Australian Cultural Fund to make sure that your donations are TAX DEDUCTIBLE! [>] CLICK HERE

Radical Houses

As part of Architecture and Art week at the Museum of Brisbane, the forum Radical Houses: identity and public life in the Queensland House 1975-1989 will be staged including speakers who were there, man, such as artists Ursula Collie and Jeanelle Hurst, Anne Jones, co-editor The Cane Toad Times, and musicians Vicki Gordon, [SPIT, Pink Palace and Women’s House], Alan Rielly, former member of The Riptides and now principal of Architectus, Brisbane, and John Willsteed, [XERO and The Go-Betweens]. [>] “A distinctive aspect of the Queensland house emerges in Brisbane in the 1970s and 1980s when the image of the house is transformed by new social and cultural uses. During this period, ‘Queenslanders’ in the inner city became associated with communal living, radical politics and alternative cultures, which came in contact with a burgeoning local music scene – all set against a background of social and institutional conservatism. The forum will invite discussion of the Queenslander as a site of public action and the making of social and cultural identity from those who had direct involvement.”

Freaky, really freaky

Further to our recent posts on the uncanny ability of machine learning algorithms that can produce credible portraits and landscape images, we present a short piece on an emerging technique of producing an approximation of a person’s face, based on their voice [>] “In a paper titled Speech 2Face Learning the Face Behind A Voice, a team of researchers examines an approach that could allow defining facial attributes using audio recordings. “How much can we infer about a person’s looks from the way they speak? In this paper, we study the task of reconstructing a facial image of a person from a short audio recording of that person speaking”, states the description. The team behind the paper designed and trained a deep neural network that perform this task using millions of natural Internet/YouTube videos of people speaking. During training, their model learned voice-face correlations that lets it produce images that “capture various physical attributes of the speakers such as age, gender and ethnicity”. This is said to be done in a self-supervised manner, utilizing the natural co-occurrence of faces and speech in Internet videos, without the need to model attributes explicitly.”

Light photographs, ghosts of the past…

“In 2016 Peter Solness participated in the Hill End Artists in Residence Program. Captivated by the history and inhabitants of this remote gold mining town, Solness has continued to return to Hill End to produce a series of ‘light photographs’ of the artists who live there, and the ghosts of its past.” [>] Bathurst Regional Gallery, June 7 to July 28, 2019.

All stories, all the time…

Wickham is the inner city suburb of Newcastle that’s about to be graced by the opening The All Story, a brand new artist run gallery. To launch the new space, and as tradition demands, is a multi-artist group show, but rather than the customary collection of disparate works by artists associated with the space, the new gallery begins with the ambitious themed show Southerns. The exhibition [>] “draws our mythic past into our present day. Over 30 local and international artists have been invited to reimagine a fictional Australian character or story. While some artists celebrate the cultural impact of films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock and television shows such as Round The Twist, others reflect on changing social views with modern readings of the work of May Gibbs and other canonised authors. This show aims to entertain, provoke, and provide new ways of seeing your old favourites: from film and literature to urban legends.” Opening 6pm, 7 June and on show until 30 June at The All Story, 7 Robert Street Wickham.

Like teacher like student?

The 2019 TAFE NSW Art Prize sets out not just to show off the best art works made by students at TAFE, bit also to refute the age old wisdom that he best students simply copy their teachers. According to the Prize press release “There is a theory that work produced at TAFE NSW slavishly follows the style and taste of the teacher. This exhibition counteracts that theory. The range of style is eclectic and diverse. It ranges from Bronwyn Becker’s Old Junction Mine – Broken Hill, a charming polyptych that makes the viewer feel that they have entered an industrial space that has structure and elegance in a few brushstrokes. By contrast, Khuan Ping Leow’s Banksia From Afar is a cacophony of colour. The Bush is alive with gestural lines and sensitive daubs of tertiary colour. Moving from the bush to the ocean, we are caught up in Chris Smith’s Breaking Wave where you can be transfixed in that moment of wave energy, frozen in time. Finally Wohlfahrt’s Bella Vista is a tangerine tangle of metal and wood that looks as if it has enough force to take off from its floating plinth.” The prize is judged by Wendy Sharpe and opens tonite at 7pm, and runs until June 14 at See Street Gallery, Meadowbank, opening Friday 7th June at 1pm.

For your diary: A celebration of life: Edmund Capon AM, OBE

All welcome to attend: Tuesday June 11, 6.30pm

A celebration of life will be held as a tribute to Edmund George Capon AM, OBE (11 June 1940 – 13 March 2019), who was director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales from 1978 to 2011.

Edmund made an indelible impact on the cultural life of Australia. His legacy is an enduring one.

This event will recognise Edmund’s dedicated service to the Gallery, which he transformed during his tenure into one of the country’s most significant and most loved cultural institutions.

Edmund was a tireless and enthusiastic advocate for art and artists, and will be deeply missed by the Australian and international arts community.[

Official proceedings

Start in the entrance court on the ground level at 6.30pm sharp and run for approximately 1 hour.

Art Gallery of NSW director Dr Michael Brand will be master of ceremonies for the event, which will include a number of guest speakers and a musical performance.

As much seating as possible will be provided in the entrance court.

The event will also be live-streamed to screens in other areas of the Gallery, including the Domain Theatre on lower level 3, and via the Gallery’s YouTube channel for those unable to attend and to view after the event.

[>] More details here

Assorted Links

The New York Times’ letter from Australia: [>] Seeing China Through Art, Not Politics

Before ‘Cat in the Hat,’ Dr. Seuss [>] drew cartoons to fight America First, racism, fascism

[>]Artist Hubert Duprat Collaborates with Caddisfly Larvae as They Build Aquatic Cocoons from Gold and Pearls

‘You can’t reason with him but you can ridicule him’ – lightweight as it is, Trump Baby is a win for art as a legitimate form of protest [>] A Brief History of Inflatable Protest Art

[>] Watch the Opening Credits of an Imaginary 70s Cop Show Starring Samuel Beckett

“Equatorial orbit nailed” [>] the story behind the computer animations of ‘Alien’.

Aganetha Dyck latest collaboration with bees teaches us about natural design [>] Artist Fixes Damaged Objects By Placing Them in Beehives

‘I Hate Him, But He’s a Genius’ [>] How Mega-Dealers Really Feel About Their Colleagues, Artists, and the Cutthroat Game of the Art Market

[>] Moebius Gives 18 Wisdom-Filled Tips to Aspiring Artists