Bordertown is a study in conflict, social partition and border construction in Australia. This sound installation relates the story of two women who live in Bordertown, a community sited at the frontier of two Australian states. One woman has been dispatched as migrant labour to an internment camp on the outskirts of Bordertown; the other is an angry and disenfranchised young woman from the poorest part of town. Both are witness to escalating antagonism and the social exclusion of women and other minorities in the town. For those living in Bordertown, existence consists of daily confrontations with an impassable frontier, a wall being constructed along the border. It is a place renowned for its political and geographic conflicts as a town that straddles two states. As global politics and militarisation trickle down into everyday life they are evident in personal relations, and Australia’s brutal history pierces the present in language and architectural structures that defend and divide. While conflict and aggressive human engagement are inevitable, the divisions are fuelled by political elites as this maintains the structure of the dominant culture. Yet borders are not substantiated in mountains, rivers or walls but the people they separate. As the women in the story of Bordertown resist their subjugation, situations of direct conflict with authority arise. Through a series of assertions their vulnerability is transformed into solidarity through aggressive expressions of courage and resistance.
Exhibition: 8 February – 1 March 2008
ARTSPACE
43 – 51 Cowper Wharf Road
Woolloomooloo NSW 2011
Sydney Australia
T: +61 2 9356 0555
F: +61 2 9368 1705
artspace@artspace.org.au
www.artspace.org.au
This series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 410,000 paper cups used every fifteen minutes. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.My only caveat about this series is that the prints must be seen in person to be experienced the way they are intended. As with any large artwork, their scale carries a vital part of their substance which is lost in these little web images. Hopefully the JPEGs displayed here might be enough to arouse your curiosity to attend an exhibition, or to arrange one if you are in a position to do so. The series is a work in progress, and new images will be posted as they are completed, so please stay tuned.
~chris jordan, Seattle, 2007
Totally worth the view : website
By Caroline Stanley at Gen Art
Walking through a gallery filled with Hope Gangloff’s paintings and drawings is kind of like flipping through an album of candid photos of your best friends (albeit, her subjects are a smidge cooler). Maybe that’s because everyone in this Brooklyn-based artist’s current show at Susan Inglett is someone she knows…right down to two dogs she pet sat last year, that in an indirect way, inspired her boyfriend (and fellow artist, Benjamin Degen) to pop the question.
Born and raised in Amityville, Long Island, Hope (who claims that if she was an animal, she’d be a bottlenose dolphin) always loved to draw. “I was cocky about it,” she has explained. “It was a way to relate to my peers and my family—be it to disarm, tease, flatter or explain things.” After spending her formative years painting in her parents’ barn under the tutelage of a local artist, Hope landed at Cooper Union, and thus her slice of city-life illustrations filled with images of beer cans, tattooed beauties and cult video stores, were born.
“It is very autobiographical,” she has said of her work. “This is my version of a scrapbook. I can look at these images when I’m an old fart and remember my beloved friends.” After hanging out with the artist for less than an hour in Chelsea, discussing everything from her artist friend Blaze Lamper’s perfect bangs to the hilarious videos on the Segway Web site, I wanted to be one of them. A lot.
When I told her this, Hope threw her head back and laughed a little, but she didn’t look at all surprised. And then she invited me to lunch.
ENGAGEMEDIA FACEBOOK APPLICATION
We’ve released a Facebook application that allows you share the latest videos on EngageMedia with your friends on your Facebook profile. If you are a Facebook user go here to install the application: http://apps.facebook.com/emlatest
As a small caveat we think Facebook can be rather problematic (privacy, intelligence gathering, corporate control etc.) but we also think it’s a good opportunity for outreach and for distributing videos from our community more widely. For one interesting critique of Facebook you might like to read this article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook
For fans of EngageMedia they will be taking part in a number of events at the Sustainable Living Festival, Feb 15-17. Melbourne
Highlight
Panel: The Role of Information Technology and Media in Sustainability
Sat 16th February 08 | 4:00pm – 5:00pm
GetUp!, EngageMedia , Engineers Without Borders
At:The Edge, Federation Square
The mainstream media is catching onto key ideas about sustainability that have existed within the environment mainstream for the last thirty years, and have put a fresh glossy spin onto sustainable ideas and action. This forum will discuss the current formats of the current media landscape, as well as the less seen but vibrant independent sphere and the spread of sustainable ideas viral media strategies.
http://www.slf.org.au/festival/
