Fish-cake

Fish cake. Deliberated over tuna and chocolate but went with straight chocolate. Ocean cupcakes orange flavoured. You can eat this under-the-sea scene that took me considerable time to cook.


Bake Sale for Art giving our love to firstdraft for their studios grand opening tomorrow (see previous post).

News flash

Hi Hello. We are still here. A little dispersed yes, but the dream lives on. A little bit of news to tide you by:

Natalie and Georgie have both been doing residencies and mentorships at PACT and Bundanon through the PACT Vacant Room program. Nat is working on an exciting new work Pink Piece in collaboration with Kate Blackmore, Frances Barrett, Emma Ramsay, and Brian Fuata. Georgie is working on Kansas with Malcolm Whittaker to be presented at the (holy moley!) Anti Festival in Finland later this year. They are doing showings at PACT this Friday.

Pink Piece at Bundanon

Mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore will be opening firstdraft gallery's new 'Depot' artist studios this Saturday, 24th, see flyer below. There will be performances, art, BBQ and Bake Sale are doing tea and cakes. So come! Celebrate! Say hi to the elected representative of your city!


Speaking of new spaces, Plump gallery, an intitiative from past Monthly Friend artist Willurie Kirkbright, has opened on Enmore Rd, Enmore, with the group exhibition Kindling. It was less than a month ago that I bumped into Willurei she told me she was about to sign the lease on a new building. It's this no nonsense, action over hype approach I'm sure will see this space as a valubale addition to Sydney's artistic landscape. If that wasn't enough, our friends Penguin Plays Rough are getting their new warehouse ready for the new and improved version of you favourite monthly literary event. We are excited, you should be too.

Thanks for checking in.

Love BSA.

Fashion Hazard Ahead

Dear the guy from film that ends in death, thank you for the ANZAC cookie. I must admit, at first I was apprehensive, I had had a bad experience with an ANZAC cookie before, but yours was delicious on the train on the way home and I could tell that people around me were jealous. So caramelly, golden delicious. Tonight being the first night I succeeded in being in the city and catching the train back to Hawthorne East, thus sparing me the $30-20 cab ride home, depending if we go via Carlton because we think it is on the way and we can share a cab. I was at the second / last Next Wave presents the Last Tuesday Society present Comfort Zone. See my comments on last week's Comfort Zone if you want, this week was the same deal, different performers.

I make this look good - Matthew Kneale and High Vis Dandy, photo - Sally Lewis.

So, High Vis Dandy is this absolutely fabulous performance/ installation work, not to mention playful and outrageous intervention in to public space (speaking of taking it to the streets). Their setup comprises of a trady’s ute, industrial sewing machine, workbench/ runway, some pretty serious traffic barriers and a variable message board (you know, big screen, ‘road works ahead’ / ‘40km speed limit’). They have set themselves the unenviable task of making orange and reflector panels look good. I have nothing against orange per se, it’s just if you overdo it you can look like a prison inmate, carrot, or Hare Krishna faithful. No such fate for the High Vis Dandy – they turn risk aversion in to a fashion statement. Tutus, tailcoats, one I thought I’d call the Sergeant Reflector Pepper vest, and turned out brocade lining! These and similar pieces I believe are the outcome of the sewing workshops the group have been holding in the lead up to the performance/install. Anyone could get involved so, ‘I can’t find one that’s nicely tailored and sexy’ is no longer an excuse for not wearing high visibility safety wear on your bike. High Vis Dandy is about more than looking good though. Aptly set up in the high fashion, aka ‘Paris’, end of Collins St, I saw the group on their fourth day of performing four daily sessions of cyclical performative actions and they had staked quite a presence alongside the likes of Rolex and Prada. It is a jibe at fashion, known to colonise any demographic towards its evil marketing ends. The Dandies take a lunch break from their hard work. A trady cliché and good opportunity for some product placement. They pout and pose and drink their Big M choccy milk like good product pinups. The work is also an elbow nudge at the dominance of ‘the masculine’ in trade-based work places. It subversively proposes an alternative identity to the Australian ideal of manliness (hard, rugged, practical) by appropriating a symbol of this manliness – the high visibility workwear – and making it over and camping it up. While High Vis Dandy was a delight to watch and certainly open to various interpretations and experience, I’m going to go with, ‘You can be safe and practical without being a macho jerk. You can dress well and be creative about how you look without being a mindless-consumerist-whore’.

High Vis Dandy, 17-21st May. Collins St Melbourne, as part of the Next Wave Festival. Artists: Jessica Daly, Matthew Kneale, Daniel Kroener, and Zoe Meagher.

You lent me your laptop and all I did with it was throw it off a bridge

Well it's a cold and shitty day in Melbourne. I'm out to Deborah Kelly's lecture later on to find out why Kelly keeps on fighting the good fight.

I got to go to the closing-night of Ashley Dyer's And Then Something Fell On My Head last night. I was interested to see whether the concept was as simple as the title would have me. Pretty pencils rained erratic yet purposeful from scaffold. The audience was split, the 2 groups sitting on either side of the 'auditorium' (not really) - one group had extraneous safety wear, white suits and rubber gloves. I received an insight from the project's dramaturg Simê Knezevic that the 2 groups were named The better equipped/ The unencumbered. White shrouds dropped from different places atop the 10 metre or so scaff and became the surface for video projections, mostly of a man (Ash Dyer) crawling and falling. More things dropped poetically, all also seemingly office related; water cooler bottles, clean paper, dirty tissues (people are always sick in offices right?). Ashley appears every now and then, in the same shirt/tie/suit pants combo of the video, and looks around perplexed and in wonderment, occasionally his body reacting to the pencils, water bottles or paper that gets too close. The lighting is moody and only some times frustrating. Designer Travis Hodgson aims for the sensory (as opposed maybe to the pictorial), flashing lights towards the audience and at times leaving us in darkness. It's both spectacular and meditative, even if I can't help thinking it is about an office worker who got lost in his daydream. There was a publication that might have shed some more light on the ideas in the piece, but these were not available to all audience members.