1/2doz. 2007 Program

2007-01-08T18:48:00.000+11:00

REPLICOTTA WARRIORS

CHALK HORSE

Thursday 25 January 2007
6-8 pm
56 Cooper St Surry Hills
One Night Only

Each year, 1/2doz. runs an all-in art show, a community-driven event in which artists and other supporters of 1/2doz. get a chance to create, exhibit and buy each other’s work. Last year in the Dunlop Ping Pong Project, ping-pong bats were painted, drawn on, cut, built and customised to make 150 unique artworks.
This year, get your Gnome on. Forged from the ancient sands of Downunder Discounts, Foveaux St, these Replicotta Warriors are raw and ready for you to sculpt, smash, paint, clothe, or re-imagine in multitudinous ways.

You can pick up your Gnome from the 1/2doz. office, Level 2, 810 George St. Please call on approach on (02) 9280 0773. Alternatively, contact one of the 1/2doz. directors to collect your Gnome.

Please drop your finished Gnomes off to Chalk Horse
56 Cooper St Surry Hills
On Tuesday 23 and Wednesday 24 January

Gnomes will be on sale for $30 at the One Night Only Replicotta Warriors show, with all proceeds going to projects supporting emerging artists through the 1/2doz. Artist-Run Initiative.

2007-01-08T18:31:00.000+11:00

1/2doz. presents
From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come)
Wednesday 17 January 2007 6:30pm
Chauvel Cinema, Paddington, Sydney.

Featuring Video and Installation Works by

Matthew Hopkins, Kathryn Gray, Emma Ramsay & Anna John, James Newitt, Sheena Macrae, Sean Rafferty, Michaela Gleave.

Curated By Elizabeth Reidy

Tickets $7.00 at the door.
All proceeds go to supporting 1/2doz. 2007 projects.

1/2doz. & C.O. present BEFF

2006-08-30T10:38:00.001+10:00

Half Dozen and Camera Obscura present ...

'DEMOCRAZY'
selections from the 4th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival

Monday September 4, 2006 at 7:30 pm.
Lanfranchi's Memorial Discoteque.
Level 2, 144 Cleveland St Chippendale. Free.
comfortable seating - 5.1audio - large scale projection

[click image for flyer]

This screening showcases the best of 340 short videos and films from the Festival. The films focus on the ideas of democracy, inclusion, participation and freedom of expression. The original program was screened outdoors in Lumpini Park, Bangkok over 3 consecutive nights.

In the US, the screening of the selections reel was held at the prestigious Disney/Cal Arts Theatre in the new Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. We're pleased to host BEFF's Australian tour.
For more info, please email Dougal Phillips - dougalphillips[at]gmail.com
NB: The 'Thai Experimental' component of the program will also be
screened at Newcastle's Electrofringe Festival on the 28th of Sept.

1/2doz. presents... The Green Zone : Palm House, Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney

2006-07-07T18:04:00.000+10:00

The Green Zone
The Palm House, Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney.

Artists: Lucinda Chambers, Clemens Habicht, Brennan King, Sarah Lindner, Michael Robson, Alexander Seton.
Curated by Dougal Phillips and Oliver Watts

The Green Zone was installed at The Palm House in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney, from Saturday 15 to Friday 28 July.

The show includes new works by six Sydney artists which all engage in various ways with the surroundings of the Gardens and the Domain, and the themes these spaces evoke.

[click map to enlarge]

Images: (above) Alexander Seton, Unite (The Claymore Apartments), 2006; (below left) Lucinda Chambers, Female Superb Warbler (detail), 2006.

1/2doz. presents... Australian Video Art Screening, Chiang Mai

2006-06-13T14:58:00.000+10:00

1/2doz. presents...
Video-Easy: Australian video art screening

Thursday 6 – Friday 7 July, 2006, 7-10pm
Lecture Room, 2nd Floor, Media Arts & Design
Chiang Mai University Art Museum
239 Nimmanhemin Road, Chiang Mai, THAILAND
Tel: +66 (0)53 944 846-22

click image for poster

1/2doz. presents Australian video art in Beijing

2006-06-13T14:57:00.000+10:00

1/2doz. presents...
Video-Easy: video art from China & Australia
curated by Thomas Berghuis & David Teh
Fri 26 - Sat 27 May, 2006
The Hart Center of Arts,
798 Dashanzi Art District,
Beijing, P.R. China.

Half Dozen recently presented a 2-night screening of Australian video art, including The Late Sessions (curated by Soda_Jerk) and highlights from Newcastle's Electrofringe Festival (2003-04). These were matched with a selection of new and recent screen-based works from China, curated by Thomas Berghuis and featuring the work of 马永峰 (Ma Yongfeng), 邱志杰 (Qiu Zhijie), 赵亮 (Zhao Liang), 乌尔善 (Wu Ershan), 倪柯耘 (Ni Keyun), 陆春生 (Lu Chunsheng), 吴玉仁 (Wu Yuren) and 胡昀 (Hu Yun). Big thanks to Cindy Zeng and the Hart Center for having us!

1/2doz. presents... Ghosts of the Coast : Gallery 4a, Chinatown

2006-06-13T14:56:00.000+10:00

Ghosts of the Coast
Gallery 4a, Asia-Australia Arts Centre, Chinatown, Sydney.

Artists: Lionel Bawden, Cherine Fahd, Alex Kershaw, Mel O’Callaghan, Todd Robinson, Pat Sae-Loy, Evan Salmon, Prateep Suthathongthai.
Curated by Dougal Phillips
Dates: Thursday, 27April – Saturday 27 May
Opening: 6-8pm, Friday, 28 April

This show brings together works which use the forms, equipment and spaces of the maritime to explore the uncanny connections and presences found at the coastline. The artists in this show approach the concept of the coast both literally – in terms of the detritus and ghostly traces found at the water’s edge and under the sea – and figuratively, as a limit, a point of facing-off between the known world and the unknown possibilities of the expansive otherness of the ocean. This otherness is ingrained in the psyche of Australasians who gather at the rim of waterbound lands. In this show the coast serves as a metaphor for the liminal points of form and content, lines crucial to our marking out of Self and Other and of fantasy and reality.

Beyond this overall maritime or coastal metaphor the works expand in different directions to describe many, and overlapping themes. One major approach is on the level of social commentary looking at the strange boundaries and margins within the community. Alex Kershaw’s Construction for Watching Waterloo places faceless figures on the rigging of a playground apparatus on an urban sandbank facing the cliff-like edifice of a housing project. The delineation of the coast is fused with concept of what it is to neighbour someone; the question asked is whether the various “tribes” of Waterloo that mingle together ever meet. Cherine Fahd, also, is exhibiting a strip of photographs juxtaposing homeless people sleeping in parks and dead birds under sand. Boundaries of life and death, the horizon line, of society and outlawry, weave together across the series. Mel O’Callaghan works seem to move from the intimate (in the video) to a discussion of international boundaries and limits in The Maze (floor work). The oil rig defines the perimeter of a country more correctly than a coast and become gatekeepers on the invisible frontier of international maritime law.

The metaphor of the border is also described through many of the works through the uncanny use of materials. A few works along this line can be highlighted. Lionel Bawden’s sculpture Monster is produced through the erosion of coloured pencils, referencing both coral forms and the sedimentary edifices of seaside cliffs. The line separating the object from drawing practice is blurred and the use of common materials, first encountered in preschool, draw another line between what we consider high art materials which are appropriate for high art objects. Evan Salmon, through his painterly and mannered reconstruction of WW1 naval camouflage further problematises the already paradoxical relationship between artists and the military machine; what is it when an artist becomes the camoufleur, illusionist and engineer? Does any “artistic consideration” just fade away or can a naval ship be aesthetic?

This sense of an ironic limen is central to other work. Prateep Suthathongthai, a Thai new media artist, has sent a multi-panel projection of a digitized riverscape entitled, Tidal Wave, in which the flat horizon of a river is tilted to produce a strange ocean-like swell. The local is turned through a very simple camera trick into a representation of a disastrous natural event. Pat Sae-Loy has installed a wallwork of invented text made out of dried and sewn fish maw, placed above votive ashes on pillows. The cheapness of the material belies the religious and social intention of her work. In Todd Robinson’s piece the grotesquery of severed limbs and the gothic associations of ghosts and animal sacrifice are underplayed with the non threatening and humouress notes of Disney and B-Grade horror.

Images, from above: Mel O’Callaghan, The Maze, 2006; Prateep Suthathongthai
Tidal Wave, 2005 (installation view); Pat Sae-Loy, Predicting the fortune of Buddhism, 2006 (detail); Todd Robinson, Untitled, 2006.

1/2doz. presents... The Late Sessions, Bangkok : About Cafe, Bangkok

2006-06-13T14:55:00.000+10:00

THE LATE SESSIONS: Australian video art screening

Wednesday, 29 March, 2006
6:30-8:30pm
at About Studio / About Café
402-408 Maitrichit Road,
Pomprab, Bangkok 10100

Artists: Daniel Askill, Stephen Fox, Emil Goh, Wilkins Hill, Jaki & Dave, Brendan Lee, Tara Marynowsky, Ms & Mr, Sam Smith, Soda_Jerk, Grant Stevens, Matthew Tumbers. Curated by Soda_Jerk.

Half Dozen recently presented The Late Sessions at Bangkok’s About Studio / About Café, giving Thais a chance to see the latest video art by emerging Australian artists. The screening room was packed, and the work generated a lot of questions and discussion amongst the city's new media artists and punters.

The Late Sessions was commissioned by Half Dozen for its 2006 summer festival, and premiered at the Hoyts Cinema Complex in Sydney in January. This event sold out and received unprecedented media coverage for a video art program.

This project was supported AARA, Asialink, the Australia-Thailand Institute, ArtsNSW, the Australia Council and the Australian Embassy, Bangkok.

images: Wilkins Hill's Sunny mesmerises the locals; dt introduces the program to a full house; event flyer (image from Tara Marynowsky's The Apple of My Eye, 2006) click for larger version.

1/2doz. presents... Space Invaders : Gallery 4a, Chinatown

2006-06-13T14:50:00.000+10:00

Half Dozen Presents… SPACE INVADERS

Artists: Alex Davies, Biljana Jancic, Suzan Liu, Koji Ryui, Sam Smith.
Curated by Half Dozen
Dates: Thursday, 23 March – Saturday 22 April
Opening: 6-9pm, Thursday, 23 March

Downstairs Project Space
Artist: Mimi Tong
Title: Folding Interface
Dates: Thursday, 23 March – Saturday 22 April
Opening: 6-9pm, Thursday, 23 March

Space, it has been said, is the final frontier. If we disengage this idea from the realm of science fiction we open up a timeless question: how do we come to process the spaces around us? How do we understand their relation to the materials of our world, their internal and external connectivity, and their lifespan, from birth through to the unknowable death of space – that which we can only understand as a radical Otherness: the Black Hole.

Artists today are not afraid to venture into these uncanny mental and formal territories. The ‘Space Invaders’ who made up this show were not retro video game fetishists but instead might be seen as Art-ronauts on a mission to build up new spatial experiences anew. In these works invasion met involution, time and space were played with like a game, and art colonised and de-territorialised the art gallery. This exhibition drew together six artists who work with spatiality, inflated and modular architectures, with tele-presence and with the spectral effects of new media.

In Alex Davies' Pugilist Series 449, the viewer is put into the place of a boxer facing down a space-invading opponent, as a POV beating takes place, sped up and sped down and matched with the location sound of the artist takes the punches – the true artist’s suffering for his work, and on our behalf. Sam Smith's Passage, projected onto a large scale installed aeroplane chair hand-made by the artist, gives the sense of an in-flight viewing experience. Set in a strange post-cinema world, this work explores how we inhabit new media spaces, drawing on film history, the experience of the cinema, and the technical vocabulary of new media production.

Three installation artists installed work in the main gallery, all of which were patiently constructed in the space in which you are now standing. In Construction # 2, Koji Ryui presents a large-scale modular sculpture of intersecting white planes which connect to take on a molecular sort of volume, organically arising out of piles of awaiting planes and shards of foamcore to wind its way through the space of the gallery. Biljana Jancic inflates everyday mundane plastic bags and constructs them into a poetic and free-flowing sculptural assemblage, using only air gathered in the space by the artist, with the hardiness of the plastic bags trapping the natural elements contained within the gallery in a way that unconsciously mirrors Davies’ boxing gloves.

On the main wall, Suzan Liu installed a complex and ornamental wall-work which turns networking cables into a unique physical narrative of connectedness. There is a story here, and although it is known in full only to the artist, we do know that you are looking at a map of a relationship between two discrete things (People? Flows of information?) which twist and turn, finding relief after tension and ultimately coalescing into one. In the downstairs project space, Mimi Tong exhibited her Folding Interface, which challenges gallery space in the form of art materials, bent, stretched and reconfigured into a folded architectonic maze, as if the canvases, with their stately references to the high modernist constructions of the twentieth century, are mutating and repossessing the gallery space. The works in Space Invaders all dealt with the intersections of form and space and the weaving together of divergent materials and shapes into a show that resonated in a poetic and highly contemporary way. - Dougal Phillips

Images, from top: Biljana Jancic, Untitled, 2006, plastic bags; installation view of Koji Ryui, Construction #2, 2006, foamcore, and Suzan Liu, Study in Chaos (aperiodic thought-factors), 2006, network cables; Mimi Tong, Folding Interface (reconfigured for 4A), 2005, wood, canvas, acrylic paint; installation view of Alex Davies, Pugilist Series 449, 2006, video. Photography by Isabelle Raphael.

1/2doz. Summer Festival 2006 6/6 Cutting Fields: collage in the 21st century- First Draft Gallery, Surry Hills

2006-06-07T18:40:00.000+10:00

Half Dozen Presents…

Cutting Fields: collage in the 21st Century

Artists: Naomi Evans, Chris Firmstone, Clemens Habicht, Chris Hanrahan, Jasper Knight,
Alex Lawler, Mel O’Callaghan, Stephanie Smiedt, Bianca Spender, Nick Tory
Curated by Jasper Knight

First Draft Gallery, 116-118 Chalmers St, Surry Hills

Wed 1 Feb – Sat 18 Feb, 2006
Opening Wed 1 Feb, 6 – 8pm

With the advent of collage, cutting and pasting became a hallmark of 20th century modernism. From Picasso, to William Burroughs, to DJ Shadow, artists have been inspired by the play of recombination – by the possibilities of finding, cutting and rejoining materials from the world. As the rising paradigm of digital media production, ‘cut-and-paste’ techniques have been renewed and spread across a myriad of art forms, from Hip-Hop to hypertext, from film to fashion. But the art of the blade is not only about recycling, irony and iconoclasm – it can be a tool of creation.

Cutting Fields shows that both cutting and pasting have deeper histories, in ritual, folk arts, craft and design traditions. These artists, from diverse professional backgrounds, map the traditions of cutting into the 21st century, exploring the paths between drawing and sculpture, collage and installation, the tensions between object and image.

1/2doz. Summer Festival 2006 5/6 Clearing Customs - Museum of Sydney

2006-06-07T18:25:00.000+10:00

CLEARING CUSTOMS:
Australia Day performances

Thur Jan 26, 2006 at 11am-12pm & 2pm to 3pm (Free Entry)

Museum of Sydney, Cnr Bridge and Phillip Streets, Sydney

Artists: Brian Fuata, Christian Thompson, The Fondue Set (Jane McKernan, Elizabeth Ryan, & Emma Saunders)

Curated by Dougal Phillips and Oliver Watts

Every Australia Day, questions of nationhood must be faced, whether in public debate, or over a friendly barbecue. This year, as racial tension simmered in the suburbs, our national identity had never been more at stake. Who owns the symbols of Australia? What does it mean to be Australian?

The Museum of Sydney plays a key role in writing official narratives of colonization and cultural identity. Clearing Customs intervened in these narratives, turning the museum into a platform for critical performance art. Five of the country's most exciting, emerging performance artists led audiences on an alternative, guided tour of the museum, with an innovative fusion of history and politics in sound, video and live performance.

In this time of war, of sedition and subversion, these performances shed new light on the museum's collection, its audience, and its role in defining Australian identity. Clearing Customs' three site-specific interventions were commissioned especially by Half Dozen for this event.

images: (top left) Brian Fuata; (left) Christian Thompson, Ethno-Aerobics; (above) The Fondue Set. Photography by Jai Odell.

1/2doz. Summer Festival 2006 4/6 The Late Sessions: video art at the movies - Hoyts Cinema Complex, George St Sydney

2006-06-07T16:48:00.000+10:00

1/2doz. Summer Festival 2006 3/6 Approaching Intimacy: contemporary miniatures - Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Paddington

2006-06-07T16:10:00.000+10:00

APPROACHING INTIMACY: Contemporary Miniatures
Curated by Oliver Watts

Ivan Dougherty Gallery, College of Fine Arts, Paddington
Wednesday 18 Jan – Saturday 28 Jan
Opening Wednesday 18 Jan 6-8pm

Artists: Jessie Cacchillo, Lucinda Chambers, Nina Davis, John A. Douglas, Stuart Fleming, Philip Freeman, Kyra Henley, Hobart Hughes, Sarah Lindner, Craig J. Loxley, Brett Moffatt, Sam Smith, Teo Treloar, Oliver Watts, Jess Wright.

"A bit of moss may well be a pine, but a pine will never be a bit of moss. The imagination does not function with the same conviction in both directions."
Gaston Bachelard

In a society of spectacle, the work of art struggles to be seen. But while many visual artists are turning to the screen - to video, film and new media - others are returning to old media, and finding fresh new ways to critique the dominant visual culture. The miniature is one such resistant form. Originating in beautifully illuminated religious texts, it was certainly endangered by the memento and portrait-making powers of the photograph. But if the miniature is making a comeback, what might this say about art's role in contemporary society? Is the image responding to our shrinking iPods and mobile phones? Or is it asking for something more from the viewer?

The craft of the miniaturist is to draw the viewer into intimate encounters, into a more searching engagement with the image. They reveal hidden worlds, whilst blinkering us from the spectacle that surrounds us. The artists in Approaching Intimacy challenge our everyday engagement with the world, through illustration, garden design, sculpture, installation, video, photography and painting.

1/2doz. Summer Festival 2006 2/6 The Dunlop Ping-Pong Project - Blank_Space, Surry Hills

2006-06-07T15:42:00.000+10:00

The Dunlop Ping-Pong Project
blank_space gallery, 374 crown st, surry hills
wed 11 jan – tue 17 jan 2006

“Man invented perfect movement and built it into the machine. Now he wants to recapture it through the medium of sport. The three factors of modern life are sport, technique and the cinderella of the moment – thought. The three have always been present in different quantities. It is the task of the present generation to bring these three elements into harmony, thus to improve the position of mankind. This should be the object of what remains of the twentieth century” - Table Tennis champion Kelen Istvan, 1936

There exists a small class of professionals who would be dismayed to see the words “ping-pong” in the title of this show. Those who draw modest livelihood from table tennis are set the Sisyphean task of reclaiming their sport from a game. These athletes are loathe to describe their object of devotion as “ping-pong”, not just because it holds them in the same realm as backyards, carports and basements bathed in fluorescence, but because the words themselves are derisory.

Ping-pong is perhaps the only sport played by adults that retains an onomatopoeia for its name, and the toymakers Parker Brothers still hold its trademark. Mercenary players try to strengthen table tennis’s claim to the nomenclature by invoking the Olympic game – the extreme speeds (up to 180km/h) and spins, the special rubbers and lethal glues – but the question has already been settled in the only jurisdiction that matters. Sixty million Chinese play ping pang qiu.

Table tennis and ping pong are not identical twins but craniopagi, born from the paraphernalia of the aristocratic dinner table. The bats in this show trace their lineage to Victorian cigar box lids, the balls to trimmed champagne corks. That it was ephemeral was the point, if the game’s early names are an indication: whiff-whaff, flim-flam, Gossima. Carl Jung, a keen pong player, wrote that “one of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however much others despise it, is the invention of good games, and it cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive selves,” and ping-pong was the most instinctive of games. Taxing neither the body nor the mind, it was an expression of enjoyment unencumbered by exertion or thought. Henry Miller, the sometime opponent of Man Ray and Anaïs Nin wrote that “the importance of my recreation lies in preventing intellectual discussions… and no other sport can engage in the same way; it allows you
to dream, it is like being in a trance state.”

In the few representations of ping-pong in Western art, this mindlessness has often been mistaken for emptiness. It is one of the few acceptable remaining avenues for pleasure in 1984, where preferred recreation of “the little beetle-like men who scuttle so nimbly through the labyrinthine corridors of Ministries” is a sweaty-handled game in a soulless rec centre. Damien Hirst found a death rattle in the clack of celluloid on ply, and represented the Last Supper with ping-pong balls suspended on miniature geysers of red wine. One of the only positive invocations of the sport comes from Mexican conceptual artist Gabriel Orozco, who reinterpreted table tennis tables in his work. “Ping pong is a game about the universe playing,” he said, “or is a game about how the universe is so arbitrary and how it’s constant.” - Richard Cooke

Each year, one of the six Half Dozen shows is a community-driven event in which artists and other supporters of Half Dozen get a chance to create, exhibit and buy each other’s work. This year, with the support of the Dunlop Family Sports division, some 200 ping-pong bats were distributed through the friends and family of Half Dozen. All bats are on sale for $30; proceeds go to the festival’s running costs.

1/2doz. Summer Festival 2006 1/6 Year of the Dog - Gallery 4a, Chinatown

2006-06-07T15:23:00.000+10:00

1/6 Year of the Dog: Chinatown Public Art Project
4A Gallery (Asia-Australia Arts Centre) & McK17 Window Boxes, McKell Building, Haymarket
Fri 6 Jan – Sun 13 Feb @

Artists: Vladimir Cherepanoff, Shoufay Derz, Pat Sae-Loy, boat-people.org, Isabelle Toland, Mimi Tong.
Curated by Jasper Knight and David Teh

In recent years, Australia’s image in Asia has been coloured by issues of crime, security and border protection, and our alignment with the so-called War on Terror. But at the same time, free trade agreements bring us closer to our neighbours, creating commercial relationships that will shape our shared future. What role will art play?

Utilising Chinatown’s two contemporary exhibition spaces, six Asian-Australian artists celebrated the Year of the Dog with engaging window displays. Year of the Dog plugged emerging local artists into Chinatown’s Lunar New Year celebrations. The show comprised a new installation by Shoufay Derz at 4A Gallery, with works by five other artists installed in window boxes on the exterior of the nearby McKell Building.

Emerging visual artists exhibited alongside commercial designers, versed in the aesthetics of the shop-front and attuned to the gaze of the passer-by. Reviving the vitrine, this exhibition created a dialogue between contemporary art and Chinatown’s unique commercial heritage.

Images, from top: Shoufay Derz, The Break-Up, 2006 (video still); Pat Sae-Loy, Study for Year of the Dog, 2006 (mixed media); Shoufay Derz, The Break-Up, 2006 (installation view); boat-people.org, Untitled, 2006 (installation view, McK 17 Window Boxes). Photography by Jai Odell.

1/2doz. Summer Festival 2006 Launch Party - Mandarin Club, Chinatown

2006-06-07T15:14:00.000+10:00

The Half Dozen Launch Party was held on Friday the 6th of Jan, at the Mandarin Club in Chinatown Sydney, with a special secret appearance by PNAU. Thanks to all those who came along to help us launch the festival!