Current exercises in productivity #2: A trip to Melbourne

After all the trials of the aforementioned trip to Luna Park, the end result of sitting on a ferris wheel and contemplating one's existence was The Duration Of The Ride Will Be Approximately Eight Minutes. This new work was completed for the group exhbition "Raise High The Roofbeams," which ran at Bus Gallery in Melbourne between the 8th and the 25th of May. The exhibition served as an exchange between Bus and Firstdraft Gallery in Sydney, as well as being part of a larger project called Making Space, which celebrates Melbourne's various [and many] artist-run-initiatives.

After being initally quite unsure as to how the work would turn out in the realm outside of my brain, I was very happy with its final state. It looked great, sounded fine [despite my various attempts to destroy my speaker cables during installation], and was suitably painful to watch. Have to be happy with that. The work isn't hard to imagine; it's eight minutes of me sitting in a carriage on a ferris wheel, filming outwards towards Sydney harbour. The video starts when the ride does, and finishes when it ends. Like most of my work of late, you get the point pretty quick. Yet it never ceases to fascinate me that people will stick with it until it ends, like something truly exciting will happen, and then complain that it doesn't. Admittedly, this is part of the point of undertaking such things, but it makes me laugh nonetheless. I think this is one of the better realised versions of this theme that I've done, but I do wonder how long I can push it for. It's one thing to be repetitive about being obvious, but that all changes when the reverse becomes the norm.

The trip to Melbourne itself was great, as any stretch of being somewhere else tends to be. It's the closest thing I've had to a holiday in a very long time, and it was nice to come back feeling energised about what one does. So much to see there is, and simply not enough time to get through it all.

Might have to go back methinks.

Current exercises in productivity #1: A trip to Luna Park

On the 29th of April myself and a comrade took a trip to Luna Park in Milson's Point with the noble intention of standing in a queue for the dodgem cars and filming the experience [well, at least I was going to stand in the queue for the dodgem cars and film the experience, said friend needed the distraction on a Sunday afternoon]. This was all in aid of a video work I've been planning on doing for quite some time, which surprisingly was to feature footage of myself standing in the queue for the dodgem cars at Luna Park, shot from my perspecitve. This was all well and good until I realised that going to a theme park at 4pm on a Sunday afternoon isn't exactly the optimum point of the day, and that subsequently there might not be as many people standing in queues as one might hope. When this turned out to be the reality of the situation, it seemed my own folly had cost me the opportunity to do the work. At least for this particular weekend anyway. Pacing through the fun fair, all seemed very lost. Then my counterpart brought the ferrris wheel to my attention. A great, hulking, steel testament to life in stasis. Better than a queue, and far less exciting than the dodgem cars, it all seemed a little too perfect really.

And so children of the modern world, contemporary art lives to fight another day. May this be a timely lesson for us all; when there is no hope, there is always a ferris wheel.