I can hear the morning birds if I listen

I can hear the morning birds if I listen, 2012, collage on paper, 70 x 100 cm (detail)

Last days of my show! Ends THIS SATURDAY! OH MY GOODNESS!!!!

BLADE RUNNING: Nostalgia under the knife

Hello all! To celebrate/commemorate/farewell the final week of my show at Anna Pappas Gallery, I thought I'd share the catalogue essay written by the ever-clever Tai Snaith! If you haven't already, you have until Saturday to see the show - pip pip!

Traditionally when we think of post apocalyptic visions we are inclined to imagine bleakness. Arid, desolate highways towards nothingness and night. Or places where Mad Max-esque machines roar past in clouds of dust towards wintery, nuclear coastlines. In the collage world of Lucy James it’s a different vision. She imagines a new age of yearning for another beginning. A bright white, hypothetical,  happy post-apocalypse. She presents a different tint to our future memories. Vignettes of people and creatures exist in a strange limbo between fiction, history and assemblages of half-truths. Nostalgia goes under the knife to deliver us a new past for us to look forward to in a parallel universe.

James’ images seem to be selling us something we can’t quite put our finger on, but we know we want. Something we are charmed by, something we think we might need, but we are slightly apprehensive about what might happen if we fully let ourselves go there.

These images possess a sweet, slightly detached yet irresistible irony. Not saccharin or sentimental but not nasty or dark either. Vaguely patriotic signifiers remind us of nationalistic Pie in the Sky promises. Familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Run of the mill and blade-runner in one hit. Looking at these images we can’t help but imagine they are a kind of propaganda for a new political party that exists exclusively in our collective unconscious. Like they are something we just don’t understand yet, but very well may in times to come. Like the absurdist dreams of a future incarnation of Leni Riefenstahl.

In her memoir, Riefenstahl writes of her first impression of hearing Hitler speak;

"I had an almost apocalyptic vision that I was never able to forget. It seemed as if the Earth's surface were spreading out in front of me, like a hemisphere that suddenly splits apart in the middle, spewing out an enormous jet of water, so powerful that it touched the sky and shook the earth".

Using second-hand imagery from this era, James has created a similar, hypnotically beautiful post-modern epiphany. The finished images seem to amass a haze of snippets and glimpses of a new reality. Full-figured, red body-suited marching girls dissolve mysteriously into a cloud of blue flowers. Young boys excitedly catch bolts raining from the sky as if they were Easter eggs. Perfectly normal and yet completely, deliciously absurd.

There is also an undeniable whiff of the American dream in these works. The girl clutching the car, or the erudite 1950s stereotype of a mother waggling her finger as birds explode and cascade out from her neck. There is something of an anti-dream lesson here too.

An impression of exoticism and spiritual aspiration is detectable in these works. Like a rich collector displaying an ancient pipe brought back from the Middle East or a taxidermy endangered species of owl, there is a sense of forcing a relic to perform as a lifestyle symbol. These symbols may seem playful and light to some people, while to others they may represent everything that is problematic about fetishising the exotic.

James has a knack for selecting a vivid, yet delicate palette of subjective content and arranging them just so. Often reminiscent of a propagandist campaign, but unlike propaganda, this is subjective material without an aim. Or perhaps with an oblique aim. She has found the recipe for encouraging literal signifiers to coagulate into an informative nonsense conclusion. A visual wild goose chase that ends down the rabbit hole.

The images are constructed by a combination of surgical precision and a conceptual lucky dipping of sorts, like cutting tiny fragments of dreams and transplanting them onto fresh white sheets of paper reality. Hours of laborious and meticulous cutting are followed by a type of controlled happenstance whilst she is assembling. This finely crafted series of not-quite-real revelations on stark white are as unsettling as they are intriguing. after the end is about collecting, cutting and constructing dreams out of images of a bright future that looks a bit like the distant past.

Tai Snaith, 2012

Why I Eyes Ya - catalogue essay by Roger Nelson

Cats can live without people but some people can’t live without cats.

WHY I EYES YA manifests a complex and unique collaboration: Lucy and Tai each do their work, obsessively and alone, and then come together to show and tell. They swap ideas, correct each other’s mistakes, tell each other ‘more of this’ or ‘less of that’, ‘that’s too gross’ or ‘make it grosser.’ Following this, they return to their separate studios, back to their solitary and obsessive work, collecting books and magazines to cut and paste, while keeping in touch by sending each other links to kooky online videos, cutesy photo-blogs, creepy fan-sites and other feline flotsam and jetsam.

For Lucy and Tai, a self-consciously cultivated yet sincerely instinctive obsession with cats and the craziness of cat lovers is interbred with a careful yet intuitive emphasis on collage. A casual but keen interest in the proliferation of online memes meets a subtle yet insistent blurring of the line between processes and products. The discourse of the collaboration is as important to them as the pin-boards adorned with their combined constructions. Before WHY I EYES YA, these peculiar collages of cats were Lucy’s and Tai’s private passions. The artists saw this activity as separate from their ‘proper’ practice: as somehow too strange and silly for public or professional presentation. But just as homemade pet videos ‘go viral’ when their often rather hapless makers post them online, so too this bit of fun grew to become a fixation and a focus for the artists’ work.

In her 2011 novel A Summer Without Men, Siri Hustvedt writes of Abigail, an elderly woman whose seemingly lovely, lacy embroidered quilts, tablecloths and tea-cosies contain hidden details of deviance and transgression. Floral patterns conceal miniaturised and disguised scenes of sex and masturbation, violent retributions and feminist rebellion. Lucy and Tai do not seek to hide their deviant impulses: the ‘wrongness’ of the images they select and the compositions they arrange is made manifestly apparent. But their work shares with the fictional Abigail’s a sense of defiant humour and subversion of sociological stereotypes. Abigail’s ‘private amusements’ wryly explode the fantasy of the sweet little old lady: for her, needlework is a potent means of creative expression, not merely a decorative pastime taken up to please.

Even more so than needlework, cat-loving is an obsession that is inseparable in the popular imagination from a kind of solitary, spinsterish femininity. In writing this essay, I collected from friends and acquaintances many dozens of stories of eccentric aunts and odd neighbours: women whose cats suckle at their earlobes and at the folds of skin around their neck, women who feed their cats fresh oysters by candlelight, women whose muscles are atrophied from years of sleeping in a bed overtaken by a dozen purring animals, women whose meagre incomes are spent almost entirely on veterinary care and toy mice on strings. In the stories I was told, these women are never partnered, and are never professional: their personhood is imagined as incomplete, and their emotional life as tragically (if comically) stunted and sick. (Thanks to the rich and curdled mass of cat tales I was told, this essay too is something of a collaboration.) It is invariably assumed that some woeful betrayal or terrible trauma must have made these women what they are: crazy cat ladies, so lonely without a man or a mission in life that they surround themselves with animals that will be loyal and will tolerate their love.

But a love of cats is, of course, not always so wild or extreme. To witter about a pet is socially acceptable in a way that to gush about a partner or spouse is not. In the right kind of moderation, cat-loving is seen as a sign of a warm and gentle nature. Lucy and Tai are as interested in this kind of controlled emotional transference as they are in the fanatical extremes of crazy cat ladies. In focusing on creatures posed at awkward angles or in wacky surrounds, they test the limits of what we can find cute; revealing that what ought to be sweet very often turns out to be quite sick. The artists are fascinated by the most bizarre feline breeds: wrinkle-skinned hairless cats that must be kept out of sunlight, creatures too in-bred and genetically deformed to be able to walk more than a few metres, even one ‘pure-bred’ unable to drink from anything but a running stream of cool water.

WHY I EYES YA treads the boundaries between the cute and the creepy, the seductive and the sinister; the exhibition presents two artists’ private obsessions for public consumption in a context that questions whether their work should be appreciated for its conceptual challenges or its technical charms. The work is a hybrid of the analogue, homey and handmade with the digitally global and anonymous. It is captivating and seductive in its often sickening weirdness. Lucy James and Tai Snaith may not be crazy cat ladies, but they are every bit as hilarious, as kooky and as compulsively obsessed.

In perhaps the strangest quirk of all, they are also truly warm, sane, kind and clever people—and they each possess perhaps rather surprisingly well-developed social skills. Say hi, show them your cat photos, maybe even introduce them to your cats. You know you want to—and they know you want to, too.

Roger Nelson

dancing with ghosts

dancing with ghosts, 50 x 70 cm, collage on paper, 2012

One of my absolute favourites. There is quite a bit more white space around this work, so I recommend seeing it in the real world — after the end is showing at Anna Pappas Gallery until 7 July. Only one and a bit more weekends to go!

Please do pop in if you're in the area.

x

the one that was left behind

This little dude got forgotten in the scanner! It's pretty tempting to sneak it into Craft Victoria - see if anyone notices?

2 and a half cats

Is it just me or does this ACTUALLY look like Charlie Sheen?

It's coming ...

2 more sleeps!!! 

brother, my cup is empty.

brother, my cup is empty, 2012, collage on paper, 50 x 70 cm

Oh Nick Cave - every song is a story.

and now that I am here, I don't know why

and now that I am here, I don't know why, 2012, collage on paper, 50 x 70 cm

Now on show at Anna Pappas Gallery, until July 7.

and I watched you, as you disappeared

and I watched you, as you disappeared, 2012, collage on paper, 50 x 70 cm

Now on show at anna pappas gallery until July 7!

an uncomfortable dream

 an uncomfortable dream, 2012, collage on paper, 32 x 42 cm

Now on show at anna pappas gallery, Melbourne. Inspired by the beautiful song 'Flowers' by Tinpan Orange (which might sound strange, but really it was!). You might remember me mentioning the song in a previous post, when these guys used some of my work to promote the single. I think they are currently filming the video for it, so keep your eyes peeled for the amazing shock of hair belonging to gorgeous frontwoman Emily Lubitz.

The majority of this collection was inspired by music, which you will probably see seeping through the titles as I post them. It was truly a joy to put together, so I hope you get enjoyment out of looking at them. On show until July 7 - anna pappas gallery!

x

While you're at work, I'm doing this.

As many of you may know, from time to time I tend to get a little down about life and where it's headed. I find the irregularity of my work depressing in its lack of sustainability (this is usually at its strongest near rent day - so I still have a couple of weeks!).

So I swoon about, weeping about how I have never acquired any real skills, how I should have finished high school and studied something soul-destroying like accounting, and then at least I would be able to pay my rent and then buy d'affinois instead of coon cheese.

And then I spend a Monday morning making THIS:

 

I realised the ridiculousness of this life in an email I just sent: "I was just gathering materials to make some crazy cat toys for next week's show (I can't believe I can classify this as work - I just pasted some 'cauliflower eyebrows' onto a cat's face)" 

That's right. This is actually my job now. The highlight of my morning was finding a miniature fake lemon at the opp shop (PERFECT for making said cat toys), and getting it for free, because the opp shop lady couldn't fathom why on earth I would want it. 

By the way, this is about the size of a large grape. Hilarious.

 

So I suppose I could always study to be an accountant next year. Right now I'm too busy sticking food items to animal's faces. 

after the end

 after the end, 2012, collage on paper, 70 x 100 cm

Title piece from my current show, after the end. By PURE coincidence, this little girl looks scarily a lot like a combination me and my eldest sister Sarah - perhaps if there had been a fourth sister in the family, she would look like this little girl.

Starting to notice a bit of a pattern of little dark-haired girls in my work. My goodness, a psychologist could have a field day with that.

a light goes on and a door opens

a light goes on and a door opens, 2012, collage on paper, 32 x 42 cm

Work from my current show, after the end - you can see it in person at anna pappas gallery (it's quite nice) until July 7.

xx

RRR Review for after the end

Many thanks to Ace Wagstaff's ripper review on RRR this morning! If you missed it, or like me, only caught the tail-end over breakfast, you can hear the whole program Smartarts by clicking the link, or if you'd like to hear Ace's insights for this show, skip to the 33 minute mark.

Big love and thanks to all who traipsed through peak hour madness to get to the show last night, it was much appreciated. If you are keen to have a look, it is on until ... 7 July. I think. I will check and remind you all near the end.

 bird girl flappin' and squawkin' - 32 x 42 cm, collage on paper

Thanks again for all the wonderful support, it is so appreciated. When our internet is fully installed and working, I'll have images up for you all to enjoy! In the meantime, I could so go a bottle of champagne and a Disney movie. It has come to that.

xx