Don’t Look Gallery presents Melodien and Comings and Goings.

Melodien

Jacob Craig is a Sydney-based composer and sound designer whose work merges organic field recordings with fragments of sampled instrumental music, dissolving the structures that inform our everyday listening experiences and expectations. These sonic re-imaginings are improvised using Ableton Live and other software.

WHAT: Melodien WHO: Jacob Craig WHEN: Sunday March 22 2009, 6pm WHERE: Don’t Look Experimental New Media Gallery 419 New Canterbury Rd, Dulwich Hill, Sydney 2203 CONTACT: Greg on 0401 152 434, dontlookgallery@gmail.com COST: $10/$5

Coming and Goings

The entrances and exits of the artist Andrew Newman.

“I don’t know what you do with your days,” my father recently said to me. “I go to my studio ,” I said. “And what do you do there all day?” he asked begrudgingly. “I make art.” The conversation stopped there. My father didn’t really try to unravel my life any further. Art was a foreign concept to him. At every exhibition opening he would walk around the gallery exclaiming, “this is art?” I told my father I would document my days for him and start a blog so he could see that I was doing something. I wasn’t too offended by my fathers inability to understand what I did each day. I never understood what he did each day. He was an accountant. He would go into the office, and then he would leave the office. The hours in-between were a mystery to me. Once as a child I spent a day in his office and I watched what he did. He had an inbox and an outbox. He would take pages from the inbox, look at them, change them, and then put them in his outbox. It seems to me now that an accountant isn’t too far removed from a conceptual artist. This abstract of the daily grind that exists in most modern professions, where people are at pains to exactly explain what they do each day is the motivation for the blog titled ‘Comings and Goings’. The blog documented me at the door of my studio, entering at the beginning of the day and exiting at the end of the day. Each blog post included a photograph and a short text explanation listing what I had done before I entered and after I entered the space. Instead of clearly articulating what it was ‘I did’ the blog revealed an absurd, Beckett-like, state of existence that expressed the persistence of the passing of time. The sociologist Manuel Castells wrote that ‘the process of work is at the core of social structure’. The idea of ‘work’, particularly during this current rise in unemployment, is a pertinent issue that needs to be addressed by artists. People’s very existence is shaped by work and their daily comings and goings. Yet artists, who have a vital social role to reveal the idiosyncrasies of the world, often overlook the nature of ‘work’. An artist practises art. It is an experimental state, yet at the end of this practise, this dress rehearsal, the artist has an artwork.  This is where the work begins. WHAT: Comings and Goings: The entrances and exits of the artist Andrew Newman. WHO: Andrew Newman WHEN: Wednesday March 25, 6pm (opening), Thur March 26 – Sat April 4 2009 WHERE: Don’t Look Experimental New Media Gallery 419 New Canterbury Rd, Dulwich Hill, Sydney