Every morning at the train station coffee spot I saw him there. Started sketching. Filling out his form guide, living through his skin cancer flaps and tracheotomy. I started to miss him when he wasn’t there. Somehow the sketching drew me to him. 
The “Exquisite Corpse” show at Jugglers was a great idea of gallery manager/curator Sam Eyles. Founded on the Dadaist “anything goes” idea or the concept that art needed to be non art in order to be art [!!] 36 artists were invited to contribute a piece referencing naturalist David Attenborough. Each artist was to pick up a piece of paper from Jugglers to work on [all pieces the same size]. Nine completed works would make up the show, with each work made up of 4 drawings by the 36 artists. [Making sense?] There were 9 heads to be drawn, 9 thoraxes, 9 abdomens and 9 legs/feet. [To clarify – each artist did one piece and there were four artists represented in each of the nine works] The final call on what went with what was Sam’s. Well worth a look. The draftsmanship, construction and composition not to mention the sense of anticipation and community were all positive outcomes of this unique on the run innovative idea.
Congratulations to the three winners of the inaugural Marie Ellis OAM drawing prize. What a great achievement. And what great entries. Thanks too to the judges, Vernon Ah Kee, Nic Plowman and Jeff Hopkins Weise. Auspicious judges indeed!
Thanks to each of the artists for their story telling tonight linking spoken word to the stories that hang so profoundly on these walls.
Some of the people I read in the 70’s talked about the flow of history. You could say that history repeats itself or there’s something greater that flows through events or is the organizing intelligence paradigm in all that happens. We can only know this when we reflect on events. We could say that one of the organizing intelligence paradigms in all foreign power invasions from Rome to the British to the Spanish to the Americans to the Japanese is the desire to impose one culture on another. We understand that culture is a way of thinking, of seeing, of being together, of custom.
What happens when we reflect on works of art, on movements in visual art? Is there a flow? Is there an organizing intelligence paradigm at work? Charles Blackman with alcoholic dementia is showing work again and today I had a patient starting X-ray art. Here at Jugglers we have Sue Ching’s felt sculpture, regular graffiti and street art, artists in residence Nic Plowman, Abby Whitaker, Sam Eyles, Randal Breen, Megan Cope, Nina O’Brien & Anthony Walker & the Marie Ellis winners Greg Grienke, Ben Warner and Gimiks Born. Such diversity! Is there an organizing intelligence paradigm to explain this creative phenomena? Or is it just chaos theory?
If we look at another invasion we can maybe get a perspective on this question. The Brand invasion. The brand invasion we are all familiar with I think has as part of its organizing intelligence paradigm the desire to impose a certain cultural mindset on the masses and to dominate the culture to control how we “are”. Just as imperial invasions do. The brand can be as simple as the toothpaste we use or as expensive as the cars we buy. An interesting phenomena in the USA is that young adults are not buying cars as a right of passage but are using public transport as mild reaction to the car brand. The iphone [he pulls one out of his pocket!] is a brand phenomenon as normal as the toilet!
Visual art as we have here at Jugglers though driven by some desire for sales has as one of its organizing intelligence paradigms the representation of the artists’ reflection on life, as the artist’s reflection on the culture. We are not a design studio or interior decorators. We are reflectors of the brand invasion and what it is doing to us. As a contemporary ARI we produce art as a reflection, as a feeling, as a meditation , as a story of what we see, what we feel, what we experience. And so our art is the nerve end of the culture whether it is sold or not, whether it is graffiti or felt sculpture. And in that sense we expose the brand invasion calling the normal into question.
And in doing that we are always in danger of loosing the questions and of becoming the normal culture that needs to be unsettled!
Peter Breen MA, BTh, ARMIT, MIR
Chair
Co-Founder
Jugglers Art Space Inc
Ben Werner
Runner Up [$500]
Being part of an innovative art space where graffiti is recognised and affirmed and legitimatized within a broad range of art practices including felt sculpture, abstract, web hosting, impressionist styles and portraiture, increases for me the puzzle that the debate is still on around the place graffiti has in the visual arts. Poking fun at Munch in Hosier Lane in Melbourne, under a bridge in the northern Burnett area of Gayndah in Queensland or in our space at Jugglers – the stories continue to be written across a broad range of art genres “for those who have eyes to see”. Interior decoration and art might be a better debate rather than graffiti and art.
The “space between” for a young man injured in an innocent enough activity might be expressed in the question -” how much longer will I be in this state?” These drawings are interpretations of an x-ray taken in a large city hospital where I have represented the healing compound fracture, the illiolazi frame and the psychological impact on this young man’s life. There are no reds or colours in an x-ray but I have used red and white ink to represent what I sensed this young man might be feeling as he lies in a hospital bed waiting for his leg to heal. [The graphite on white paper drawing on the right has been bought by RBWH Department of Medical Imaging.]
Exhibited as one of 4 “artist’s proofs” this skull and flowers was first drawn in graphite from a photo specimen in KC Clark’s Positioning in Radiography [1964 Ed] before I made the lino cut. Late last year my sense was that lino cut was a great way to represent the x-ray image. Unframed $65 [SOLD 1/4,2/4 ]
One of a series of 10 lino cuts where I added more garden images to the lino cut after the artist proof run that seem to give the whole image a kind of Caribbean/graffiti/ hip hop feel. Unframed $65 SOLD 1/10,2/10,3/10,4/10.
Garrotted
From rock star to some kind of split off, some kind of metamorphosis in another direction, some kind of domestication of the prophetic. I love the prophet and cringe at political correctness. That is what I have tried to represent here, an inquiry into my own projection into what might be Peter Garrett’s own self talk. [POA]
From “The Space Between”
Jugglers Art Space June 4 – 25, 2010
For Sale $220 Unframed found objects,graphite, gauche on paper.
From “The Space Between”
Jugglers Art Space June 4 – 25, 2010
For Sale $190 Framed. Graphite on paper.
From “The Space Between”
Jugglers Art Space June 4 – 25, 2010
For Sale $190 Framed. Graphite on paper.
From “The Space Between”
Jugglers Art Space June 4 – 25, 2010
For Sale $190 Framed. Graphite, Gauche on paper. SOLD
From “The Space Between”
Jugglers Art Space June 4 – 25, 2010
For Sale $220 Unframed. Ink, graphite, charcoal on paper.
From “The Space Between”
Jugglers Art Space June 4 – 25, 2010
For Sale $220 Unframed. Ink, graphite, charcoal on paper. SOLD
From “The Space Between”
Jugglers Art Space June 4 – 25, 2010
For Sale $220 Unframed. Ink, graphite, charcoal on paper.
From “The Space Between”
Jugglers Art Space June 4 – 25, 2010
For Sale $350 Framed. Ink, graphite, charcoal on paper.
From “The Space Between”
Jugglers Art Space June 4 – 25, 2010
For Sale $220 Framed. Graphite on paper.
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