FELTspace

The Knitted Poo and Other Machines

admin — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 01:06:34 +0000

Ben Leslie ‘Prop Shop for Sculptcha Vulcha’ and Team Textiles ‘The Knitted Poo Machine,’ at Feltspace June 2013

Step into Feltspace and discover art machines.

This is art which eats at the—seemingly—permanent, steel-welded foundations of modernist sculpture. These temporary, performative, anti-monumental assemblages are variously feeding off the old stuff and plugging the immense outside world into their inner workings.

It is hard to stay still in this installation. I am torn between points of colour and the hacked, restless energy of dismembered, zombie-like sculptures that (missing a leg) wrench one from somewhere else to stumble on regardless. This is sculpture that eats sculpture; this is sculpture that sings and howls. The insides of these beasts are loosely held together and assembled from prop-like collections of structural pine offcuts (cheap and temporary) shiny on the outside and ready for the cameras. Their mouths and soft bellies are carved out by high powered machines and are bravely painted.

I am told this is a prop-shop. So… not a ‘walk in off the street’ type of shop but rather one open only to directors, production designers and set-dressers. I am here, so I must be making a film and the Sculpcha Vulcha, is mine to command. If art provides a Mise-en-scene that generates its own narrative^¹, then Ben’s works are props for thinking and Sculpcha Vulcha is an action packed feature that might be made and remade in the minds of all those who visit the exhibition.

The two rooms of Feltspace gallery are connected by play, humour and, a common appetite for the tasting, chewing, spitting and shitting out of other ideas and older forms. In the back room recycled yarn is stretched around spindles, through clasps, and along circuit lines. These symmetrical woolly workings might be the abstracted insides of a great industrial knitting-machine-bird. Its threads spread out on all three walls, pooling at a central point, converging into dual work stations. It is here that the poo making begins proper. In your hands and through your fingers. It turns out that the living heart of the poo-making machine is you… which, I guess, has always been the case.

As Brancusi’s column stands (invisible but endless) amongst Ben Leslie’s works, so The Knitted Poo Machine might be the lovable, funny sibling of Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca; a version of which is now permanently located at MONA Tasmania (on the home turf of Team Textiles). Feed the Colaca with a tasty meal and it processes it, through shiny mechanised innards, into expensive, shrink wrapped shit for nihilistic art consumption.

Mae Finlayson travelled up from Tasmania to install The Knitted Poo Machine and to instruct us in its use. This is the third time the machine has been shown and each time it moves, its accumulated outputs travel with it. The machine was certainly ON at the opening with people lined up to knit with lab-coat-clad Mae. Later experiences of the work are generally of a more distanced contemplative type. The Knitted Poo Machine is a work where the question of ‘what is it about’ might be replaced with: When is it? What is it becoming? And what are the effects of the experiences and conversations it generates?

The work is shamelessly funny. It deflects serious, white cubed arty questions by laughing at itself whilst turning out hand-sized knitted poos; each one different as the variously shaped fingers that made them. Humour deflects seriousness and in doing so makes a seriously important space for playing with big ideas around power structures and co-authorship. Meanwhile, we (the audience, the makers) are nailing our work to the wall with hammers, as if enacting a small absurd revolution.

“It needs to be an activity that everyone can take part in, regardless of skill level” says Mae, as she helps cast a poo onto my fingers… I am with my grandma and learning to crochet, held for an instant inside a half forgotten house and hemmed in by Sunday afternoon rain… The poo grows gently out of the back of my hand. I pull a thread and it magically forms. As we bag it up, Mae says, “you know, you just made the first South Australian poo” – and I feel like I have done something a little bit special.

Sasha Grbich is an artist, writer and a lecturer at the Adelaide Central School of Art. She is currently a postgraduate student at the University of South Australia.

1Ben mentioned this idea when we caught up to speak about his work just prior to the exhibition. We tracked the thought to Lawrence Weiner: If in Fact There is A Context: 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts: Documenta Series 008 (100 Notes – 100 Thoughts/100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken) Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2012.

New Member Applications 2013

admin — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 03:18:55 +0000

Would you like to join the FELTspace committee?

FELTspace is Adelaide’s longest running ARI, run by a committee of six volunteer artists and curators. One of the co-directors will soon be departing, therefore we are looking for a new member to join the team.

FELTspace seeks a passionate, motivated, and dedicated individual with a strong interest in promoting contemporary art in Adelaide.

This position is on an unpaid, voluntary basis. We are currently looking for someone to take over the marketing and publicity role but this position is negotiable. Other roles employed are: property superintendent, grants manager, volunteer coordinator, design and publications, and finance. Each exhibition is overseen by a single coordinator selected on a rotating basis.

Each member is expected to commit to an average of 10-15 hours to FELTspace each week. This includes attendance at weekly meetings held at FELTspace. We are looking for a long term commitment.

Applicants with an active artistic or curatorial practice are encouraged to apply. Marketing and promotions experience is desirable.

Applications must be received by 6pm Friday 28th of June.

Application process:
To apply, please include the following:

1. Cover Letter (maximum two pages)
Include your name, mobile number, email and postal address.

Address the following questions:
A. What is your past experience in a gallery environment, as an exhibiting artist, curator or team member?
B. What is your reason for wanting to join FELTspace and what skills would you like to build on?
C. What skills would you bring to FELTspace and make you a success in this role?

2. Exhibition CV (one page)
Please send a CV with details of your art practice and past exhibitions and projects.

Please note: FELTspace prefers to receive applications electronically via email with a Word Doc or PDF attachment. However, if you would like to submit all or part of the application as hard-copy or have any questions about your application please contact us at feltspace@gmail.com

Team Textiles: The Knitted Poo Machine

admin — Wed, 22 May 2013 10:11:15 +0000

Opening night Wednesday 5th June at 6pm
Exhibition open 6th to 22nd June 2013
Team Textiles will hold a demonstration from 5.30pm

Team Textiles, The Knitted Poo Machine (detail), ongoing project.

The Knitted Poo Machine is an interactive installation piece aiming to engage an audience in serious play. Team Textiles set up a unique participatory scenario by installing The Knitted Poo Machine and participants are invited to share, add too and extend the work by finger knitting their own poo specimen. Staging this activity in a gallery space gives irreverence and valorisation to a private but universally experienced mundane bodily function. It’s also funny and prompts people to share their most hilarious ‘poo’ stories.

Participants tactile engagement with the artwork results in the production of experimental souvenirs that are then placed into zip lock bags, signed, dated and nailed to the wall. The defiant act of a dirty textile protest!

The growing collection of woolly excrement reinforces the open-ended objective of The Knitted Poo Machine as an ever-evolving community engagement device.

Team Textiles is a collective of three artists, Mae Finlayson, Abigayle Tett and Ashley Bird, based in Launceston, Tasmania.

The Knitted Poo and Other Machines
Ben Leslie ‘Prop Shop for Sculptcha Vulcha’ and Team Textiles ‘The Knitted Poo Machine,’ at Feltspace June 2013
Sasha Grbich

PDF DOWNLOAD: The Knitted Poo and Other Machines pdf

Ben Leslie: The Prop Shop for Sculpcha Vulcha

admin — Wed, 22 May 2013 10:06:44 +0000

Opening night Wednesday 5th June at 6pm
Exhibition open 6th to 22nd June 2013

Ben Leslie, Untitled, 2013, digital collage featuring Brancusi’s studio photograph and artist’s objects

The Prop Shop for Sculpcha Vulcha

With ‘The Prop Shop for Sculpcha Vulcha’, I wanted to explore the idea of a ‘prop shop,’ wherein is stored and made-available the various prosthetics for a hypothetical artsploitation film. The title for this speculative artsploitation film, Sculpcha Vulcha, notions themes of self-referential sculpture, devouring its own history, as it tears away at the flesh of its cross-generational scenes. The aim is to allow the works to function as artefacts that generate their own origin, while at the same time occupying and sustaining themselves within a psychic space outside the restrictive constraints and limitations of a singular narrative arc.

Ben Leslie is an emerging artist and curator based in Adelaide. In 2012 he completed a Bachelor of Visual Art with First Class Honours at the University of South Australia. In 2011 he co-founded Fontanelle Gallery and Studios where he has exhibited, curated and currently works as Operational Manager. He also forms one half of the artist/curator team pinkandgold with his wife Brigid Noone, the Director of Fontanelle. In 2013 he curated the group exhibition ‘Thingshow’ at Fontanelle and will be presenting solo shows at FELTspace and CACSA’s Project Space, amongst other projects.

Recently I have been approaching art as space for play and the studio as a site for taking this play seriously. Previously, I experimented with the Unmoment (a neologism I coined using an anagram for monument), whereby I attempted to monumentalise imbalance and collapse in a series of sculptural anti-monuments. By pushing things towards the precipice of imbalance, the potential for collapse was located as an animating condition within the work.

The Knitted Poo and Other Machines
Ben Leslie ‘Prop Shop for Sculptcha Vulcha’ and Team Textiles ‘The Knitted Poo Machine,’ at Feltspace June 2013
Sasha Grbich

PDF DOWNLOAD: The Knitted Poo and Other Machines pdf

Hayley Brandon: Record

admin — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 01:44:05 +0000

Opening Wednesday 1 May, 6pm
Artist talk from 5.30pm
Exhibition open 2 – 25 May 2013

Image: Hayley Brandon, Untitled (Journal Entry #4) (detail), 2013, pen on paper.

Focusing on the slippages between shared and personal experience, Brandon’s practice explores ideas of intersubjective identity and the languages and performances of everyday life. Recording and re-contextualising quotidian materials and events through a variety of media, Brandon questions whether these experiences can ever be re-entered by an audience; and if so, what shifts may occur as a result of this process.

For Record, Brandon has approached journaling as a space to explore the intersection of art practice and everyday life and the slippages that may occur between private and public experiences. Inviting audiences into the seemingly private moments of the artists’ everyday life, Record seeks to navigate the indeterminate space between staged and sincere experience and the potential for intimacy in a gallery environment.

Hayley Brandon is an emerging visual artist who currently lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. In 2011 she completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Arts) with Honours at the Queensland University of Technology. Since then she has exhibited with ARI’s and contemporary art spaces in Brisbane and Melbourne and contributed to public projects with Brisbane Festival’s Under the Radar and at Melbourne’s Federation Square. Brandon also makes up one third of artist collective Threefold who recently took part in the Boxcopy Summer Residency.

Hayley Brandon, Record, installation view at FELTspace, 2013 photography by: Lise van Konkelenberg

Lee Salomone: Hirsute collection

admin — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 01:38:57 +0000

Opening Wednesday 1 May, 6pm
Artist talk from 5.30pm
Exhibition open 2 – 25 May 2013

Image: Lee Salomone, Strange Bunch, 2007, artist body hair and grape vine.

Our bodies are uniquely powerful mediums for self-representation, and the human body is central to this photographic series. The body is a portable canvas and body hair is a fitting medium for exploring self and identity. Hirsute collection is a series of documented performances that look at hair as a powerful symbol for the relationship between an individual and the society & time they live in.

Lee Salomone is a South Australian based artist who divides his time between Adelaide and Berlin. He graduated from the South Australian School of Art in 1991 and has been exhibiting nationally since 1987 and internationally since 2005. He works across a range of media – including installation, photography, sculpture and works on paper. He makes use of nature and natural materials to better understand culture and conversely, he utilises culture and constructed elements to comprehend nature.

www.leesalomone.va.com.au

Lee Salomone, Hirsute collection, installation view at FELTspace, 2013
photography by: Lise van Konkelenberg

Leena Riethmuller: Bodily Purity

admin — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 11:20:58 +0000

Opening Wednesday 3rd April, 6-8pm
Exhibition open 4th – 20th April 2013
curated by Lisa Bryan-Brown

image credit: Leena Riethmuller 2012, Decomposition (nails and hair), HD video still

Showing at FELTspace in April, Bodily Purity exhibits Riethmuller’s challenging Decomposition (nails and hair) body of work. Presenting a film and an object based installation in tandem, Bodily Purity investigates the subjective nature of bodily experiences as related to notions of purity and acceptability, and conversely impurity and abjection. Riethmuller’s engagement with bodily themes and substances stems from her interest in dominant societal codes, and the ways they provide classificatory frameworks for individuals’ bodily maintenance regimes. Bodily Purity is a thought provoking exhibition that explores social perceptions of what it means to be ‘pure’, through heightening viewer’s awareness of their own bodily subjectivity.

Riethmuller has exhibited her works frequently within Brisbane and interstate, having shown work in such notable exhibitions as Going South (Screen Space, Melbourne), Addition 1 (Addition Gallery, Brisbane), and Fresher 2011 (Inbetweenspaces, Brisbane). She has been a finalist in Griffith University Art Gallery’s The GAS: Graduate Art Show + Espresso Garage Art Award in 2010, and again in 2012. She has also participated in festivals including the 2012 Brisbane Emerging Arts Festival, the 2011 What is Music? festival, and the 2010 Exist Festival. She is highly active within Brisbane’s ARI community, and in 2013 Riethmuller will be an artist in residence with Level ARI, and is working as the Gallery Manager of Boxcopy.

Leena Riethmuller, Bodily Purity, installation view at FELTspace, 2013, photography by: Lise van Konkelenberg

Carly Snoswell: Object of Obsession

admin — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 11:05:18 +0000

Opening Wednesday 3rd April, 6-8pm
Exhibition open 4th – 20th April 2013

image credit: Untitled (detail), 2013, cardboard, dimensions variable.

In the context of the material qualities of our everyday life, my practice considers repetitive process within sculpture and installation practice that impose both methods and gestures that guide the form. Through exploring the functional and visual qualities of small, common mass-produced items, rules and limitations are then imbedded within a process imposed upon these objects, celebrating their inherent function, and shifting their energy, to create engaging installations. The objects essentially do what they are made to do; however allusions occur through repetition and accumulation, as the work grows and takes on a life of its own. Through this process I investigate accumulative, rule-based artwork and questions surrounding when and if an artwork begins and ends.

As an artist and even as a child I would be in a constant state of making, accumulating things created during a preoccupied moment. I aimed to employ this process of unconscious making to keep my work spontaneous and open for interpretation. The pleasure of making drives my work and I wanted to explore how this kind of emotion resonates through the work that is produced.

Recently with this body of work I have become engaged with the idea of collecting, using objects that have been accumulated over time by myself and through the help of others. There is something so satisfying about large collections, taking an otherwise throwaway item and holding onto it, transforming it into something else. In line with my work, there is an interesting association that can be made through taking mass produced, functional items and utilising them in an aesthetic way, changing it’s function, forcing the viewer to perceive the objects differently. The audience is compelled to see what is not initially seen. As a result of this repetition, along with the simple methods of construction I employ, these installations accumulate and form according to physical tendencies, resulting in associations with “natural” appearance of forms for the viewer. Similarly, the materials assert industrial replication, a constant production of consumer products and waste, highlighting the human tendency towards constant making. This is not an intentional aesthetic; rather it happens through the intuitive process of making, allowing the viewer to delve into the natural world for associations and meaning.
- Carly Snoswell, 2013

Carly Snoswell, Object of Obsession, installation view at FELTspace, 2013, photography by: Lise van Konkelenberg

Katia Carletti: Pulling against tide and wind

admin — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 09:03:56 +0000

Exhibition launch:
6pm Wednesday 6 March 2013
Exhibition open:
Thursday 7 – Saturday 23 March 2013

Image: Katia Carletti, Milk, 2013, oil on board, 22 x 17cm

Comprising of both painted and sculpted works, ‘Pulling against tide and wind’ responds to a two-month residency undertaken in 2012 by Adelaide based artist Katia Carletti, in Reykjavik, Iceland. Using the unique environment of Iceland as a receptacle for homesickness and loneliness, this body of work hopes to reconcile the act of journeying with a longing for, and consequential return to, home.

Katia Carletti is an Adelaide based visual artist. Upon graduating from Adelaide Central School of Art with Honours in 2011, she has shown work in solo and group shows in Adelaide, as well as undertaking a two-month residency in Reykjavik, Iceland. Creating work predominantly in the mediums of painting and sculpture, Carletti’s practice explores ideas about landscape, emotion and ritualised experience.

Katia Carletti, Pulling against tide and wind, installation view at FELTspace, 2013

Brad Lay: SQUID > I

admin — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 08:58:19 +0000

Exhibition launch:
6pm Wednesday 6 March 2013
Exhibition open:
Thursday 7 – Saturday 23 March 2013

Image: Brad Lay, There is Nothing Left in the World to Discover (detail), 2012 (17 inkjet prints on paper), dimensions variable

As part of the Kings ARI emerging artist program, Brad Lay travelled from Melbourne to Auckland on board the MV Bahia Grande, a Liberian flagged cargo ship. Whilst on board, he gathered material for a series of works in response to the ship and the ocean.

Simultaneously, Brad set up a Facebook page to enable people to write a daily ship’s log from Brad’s perspective. The resulting works are a melding of Brad’s documentation of the journey, and the diverse imaginings of the contributors to the ship’s log.

Brad Lay is an Adelaide-based artist, who completed an Honours degree in visual art in 2009, and is currently undertaking a Masters in Visual Art at the University of South Australia. His work considers the location and significance of the ocean within contemporary culture. He has exhibited at Kings ARI (Melbourne), Waitakaruru Sculpture Park (NZ), MILS Gallery (Sydney), Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia Project Space (Adelaide), Nexus Multicultural Art Centre (Adelaide) and the AEAF Odradek (Adelaide). In 2011 Brad undertook a residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Florida.

This project has been assisted by Kings ARI in partnership with FELTspace through the Kings ARI Emerging Artist Program

Brad Lay, SQUID > I, installation view at FELTspace, 2013