 Welcome everyone to the panel's session tonight, it's very informal discussion, so if you have some questions, just jump in, curate this into the others in the show and some others in the audience as well, so if the others in Jicco have anything they'd like to add to the conversation, jump on in, it'd be great. It's my job as chair to introduce the speakers. By the way, I'm Anna Zavattar, the program manager at the Institute of Walmart and co-founding co-director of Independent Press. So the speakers we have tonight are the curators of the show Laura Brown and Tess Maunder, and both Laura and Tess are emerging writers and curators and co-founders of Maximillian Online Critical Art Discussion. Also we have Danon Kuhn and Julianne Malinsky, I hope I pronounced that correct. Danon's practice explores pop culture and fandom, in fact we're sitting in front of it this evening, employing Laura's processes, his work on the show's fibre conditions of compromise and failure, and as you can see it maps the relationships between the characters in the television series The Wire. Danon is co-director of Box Copy and has held solo shows at Metro and I can certainly cast my mind back to 2007's Fresh Cut at the Institute of Walmart. So Julianne's work, she moved up here a couple of years ago, we've been talking about this from Melbourne to complete her honours last year at QCA and Julianne's work creates a human-made environment resembling artificial gardens that underpin our desire to mediate the natural world. Her hanging garden is in the next gallery space. She uses materials associated with domesticity and the built environment. So Laura and Tess, perhaps you could kick us off for the night to talk about the curatorial premise that you've discussed briefly in the catalogue, which I believe people can pick up tonight. So thanks everyone for coming. So I just thought I'd start with discussing my understanding of the theory. So that is that we kind of put in a loose framework to accompany the situation of the exhibition and us organising the exhibition. So for me that means placing the importance of the organiser which is us, the artist and the artwork and the audience on an equal playing field. Yeah, it sort of exists based on the proposition that the exhibition is made up of three things being the artworks or the artists, the organisers and the audience. And they exist with equal importance but also equal activity or equal dialogue within the situation. And it was sort of according to that which we organised and operated and produced the exhibition with basic explanation. So the first question I wanted to talk about was in illustrating the theme or framework of the show with the Geocultural Tribal, were you suggesting that the elements, the audience, the artworks and the organisers are equal of value or importance? Well yeah, they play an equal role and they're equally important and for us it exists without one of the things. You can't really have an artwork that has been curated without an audience to come in and sort of close the circuit off. So they play an equal role and they play it with equal importance I think and they're equally active. And they might be in different ways, obviously they play different roles but yeah, they are equal. So just because you can't have one of those things without the other two, does that mean that beyond that they rely on each other? I mean we've talked about that you represent it as an ecological triangle rather than for example a right angle triangle or another shaped triangle. Can you talk about what are the factors or what that assumes and is that obviously a theory that you're testing in the show and the process of developing the show? Well it was something that was developed through the process of putting the show together and sort of developed as a way of understanding what our role was or understanding what we're actually trying to do with it. So it is still in progress and I guess the discussion is a way of opening that up because we are trying to, we're proposing that it's equal so it's kind of why we're opening it up to invite the audience to be a part of that when we start answering questions I guess. Well I'd like to get back to how the whole process started and you said to me that these are all new works. Was that important to the show that they were all created for specifically this exhibition and did you give the artists any new framework when they were developing the show? So the framework that we gave the artists was to, we hoped that we would be encouraging the artists to develop new work for the exhibition so that would mean pushing their practice in a way that hadn't been looked at or kind of been played with in that way in a few years or something like that and the framework was just kind of encouraging that new aspect. Okay well Julianne would you like to comment about the work in the show that you've developed? I mean it does come out of the work that you had in the QCA show but being in a new environment, being in a different show do you feel like you've taken up that challenge that the audience have given you for that purpose? Up until probably I'd say a month before the show was installed I was probably at a point where the work would have really all been new because I'd pretty much taken it that I wasn't going to use existing pieces so I made a couple of new large pieces and the grad show work had all been suspended so everything was hung and it had a very vertical feel to it because of the heritage restrictions in the site that wasn't a possibility here so I had to employ some new way of working to get things coming from the ground up and in the end I was able to do a combination of both and the other thing that we'd discussed and agreed upon was I would take up some new form of craft which is the French knitting so something that I had no idea how to do, how I would utilise but would incorporate that into the existing work so it's absolutely moved from where the work was to pushing new ideas through the work giving me a way of expanding the work definitely And the materials that you've used, I mean I've looked at your practice before, they are relatively new to Brisbane as well They're certainly new to me Do you want to talk about why you've used the orange colour and where that came from? Sure, the colour scheme and the materials in the work are something that is relatively new to my practice I moved to Brisbane and the start of my honours here, I'd gone out and done a survey, a photographic survey of gardens in Brisbane it was straight after the Brisbane floods so the orange comes literally from safety barriers from which is hats from Bunting where the gardens along the Brisbane River had been barred from flood damage so what originally I thought would be photographs of pretty much the botanical gardens in the south bank looking very green and lush and tropical were pretty much all these sites of devastation and the orange was so predominant in the photos, it's something that I decided to incorporate into the work And your previous works had lots to do with grey, black and whites of colours talking to me earlier about that it was a draught that Melbourne had gone through I've been making work in Melbourne along similar ideas to do with the garden and gardens in urban environments and the palette I was using was really subdued and I wouldn't even describe it as being particularly green so it's very much the local aspect of this work that's informed the palette I'm not very good at it Dan, if anyone has seen Dan's work before this is a complete departure from video works but it still fits very much within the practice that you've developed thus far I think the opportunity that Tess and Laura were opening up was to make new works specifically and we had formal discussions about the idea of pushing a practice in a way that hadn't been pushed before and I was really keen to do something with my hands that didn't involve a mouse So I had this idea of replicating that trope of the big corkboard in procedural dramas TV dramas, Law and Order and The Closer and every other procedural cock show ever and ironically that ended up not really happening I mean I definitely used my hands but the process of creating the map and planning out this work actually still happened digitally so at the same time that I was trying to do something in my practice that I hadn't done before for a long time ended up falling back into the normal way of processing that my practice employs that is like mapping out or connecting or collaging or something, always digitally first So I think that was really interesting then to follow that same process in my practice but end up with something so different I guess So it ended up different but the same at the same time And do you think that this work will be further developed into future video work? Into future video work is probably a pretty good question There's lots of potential that I'm sort of imagining for digital versions or interactive versions or web based versions of maps like this which could be interesting But at the same time I'm very much interested in that laborious process that happens before you get to any of that stuff and because I'm so interested in that process I think I'm probably more likely at the moment to be less inclined to translate this to a video form than to re-translate that process of digital to analog again So the digital processing, the digital mapping, going into other kinds of analog forms maybe painting, drawing, objects, stuff like that Okay well I'd like to go back to the role of each of the people on the show So your role, you described it as organisers as opposed to curators So without getting into the politics how do you think that changed your perception for example of the show and how much control for example as organisers have you in the development of the works and the presentation of the works? Well I think that really helped to open it up more I suppose instead of getting stuck in the limitations with terminology of curator what supposedly that specifically stipulates it opened it right up again so we could do what we needed to do I suppose and I guess it was different to what we would have done if we'd stuck with a more specific term in that and how we interact with the artists I guess and how we valued the sort of ongoing dialogue ongoing conversations to what they're doing but also what we're doing for them and how that show actually came together in terms of install I guess I think it was also about making the title made the collaborative process easier and it was about relating it back to that triangulation thing that we were speaking about at the beginning by having the audience artwork and organisers on the same level because I guess they can be kind of a sort of reverence supply to the idea of curator I think where they're sort of like the hand of God coming in and sort of leaving again almost well also for this show because we didn't select work to suit the specific theme it was not appropriate to use that term yeah I guess we didn't curate the show in terms of having a specific theme or a specific idea and choosing works that fit with that but rather chose works from an open core without any prior idea of that and then sort of fit them together like a puzzle I guess and towards the end of the process installing the show itself did you have a matter of control or did more work some works more than others? yeah that's sort of where you let go I guess and let the artist I mean you can't really tell them what to do there was some work so we would make suggestions and they'd be rejected and that was fine you sort of have to there's a lot of control you can have to a certain point I guess yeah it depends on the personality of the artist as well and like some artists really enjoy the collaborative process and having lots of feedback during the organisational period and actually having kind of like active development of their work through email conversations and through various meetings that we had with the artists and stuff whereas other people were quite fixed on their idea from the beginning and that was completely fine as well so Joanne do you want to comment on how you did you actually install your own work and was that to that take a period of time and did you seek any advice during the process how did you manage it? I installed my own work and I think probably the interaction I had a lot with Tess and Laura was in the lead up to the work so from the initial meeting where we discussed the idea of doing something new I would email photos and say this is what's going on in my studio because I had just finished my honours year and probably did a lot of work over December, January where I didn't have my peers if you want to go on pretty much off on summer holidays and so it was great to have someone to still keep up the dialogue of what I was doing what I was intending to do and some of it was really like you know a photograph of a couple of pieces string on the studio wall saying I think something will hang off this but I'm not really sure because I was trying to come to terms with the space and the limitations of what I could suspend from the ceiling the fact that I could only utilise existing holes in the wall so there was this great dialogue in the lead up and once we were in the space it was more a setting of a limitation saying okay here's where your work will be and in relation to the other works in the show and then it was just the fact that there was always someone here while I was installing to get advice and so okay I'm thinking this is where I'm going to put the main pieces this is what I'm thinking what do you think how do you feel about that and then I don't think either Tess or Laura would have offered to help much with this it looks like a huge amount of work great I had a few pairs of hands that I was grateful to help in the final stages I had to go a lot from my memory and the map that I only I could ever read that I'd made to plan the thing where I think similar what Julianne was saying is that where I think the organisation was beneficial is those sort of like touchstone moments where so I'd be going away I was watching the wire and every now and again just a couple of times there I would come and chat about what was going on and that was kind of nice to prevent me from spiraling off into just watching the wire I guess but to also think about what processes were happening as I was making it it was really beneficial to come and just chat and say like this is what I'm doing and I think it's sort of about this and then the next conversation we had that was what I was doing but it's also this thing and just those couple of conversations really help locate or ground my process as it's evolving rather than it sort of going off into the ether somewhere and that's the real benefit of I think organising because maybe that's not always the strong suit of every creative practitioner Well I want to talk about the triangulation theory I don't feel that it takes into full account some of the other elements like the site of the exhibition and other external factors like the timing and I think we can consider this in the broader context of the history of for example local emerging art shows in Brisbane and also the terms like emerging on an international highly contested trend without getting too much into that so I'm sure we can talk about emerging later on Do you want to talk about how you came up with the triangulation theory itself? Well it is sort of quite, I don't know about the word insular but what is actually happening in this space and things like considering the context of the history of the site sort of comes up from the ground up and some of the works themselves like site response of works but it might be something that we could sort of extend upon I mean there's a thing in process so it might be a second part and a second part show or something like that but that's sort of something that was just sort of taken in and adapted for a long rather than a clearly stipulated facet to the idea I suppose So it was almost like a scientific approach in testing it as a theory? Yeah, yeah it was a lot about the hypothesis I guess In the catalog I think you also talk about an understanding of the work I hope that you might be able to elaborate on what you mean by understanding like physical conceptual readings Well part of the theory was part of the synthesis was taking into account briefly semiotic theory in the idea of like a first and second order reading and sort of making that parallel being a physical reading and then conceptual reading and the idea that you can't really conceptual can only really occur after you've taken and what's actually in front of you So that's not to say I think that what's separate from saying that a physical reading is a shallow one so it's sort of not quite developed as much because some of the works are much more experiential than anything else So I guess when we're considering the idea of understanding we can use those two terms Yeah and a lot of the works were really conceptual as well So it's like an access point So I think this understanding thing is like it starts on an experiential level and then from there you can then access the conceptual points So given the guru talk we've talked about and the other factors involved in the process of developing the show and the works I'm going to throw a tricky question at you and ask you how you might measure the success of the show with consideration to those frames up framework and those factors For me, I mean success is a pretty difficult word but I think for myself anyway in collaboration with artists the success for me was having that sort of collaborative process and being in dialogue for six months and having something at the end and working together through this process of meetings and reflecting on work and stuff So for me that was successful because it was more than just chucking work and exhibition spaces about developing new ideas through this collaborative process So for me that was successful Yeah, well it becomes a process of feedback and there's those two and I guess the audience also offers feedback I don't really, I think we can determine for ourselves how successful it is without being a bit delusional So the feedback becomes really important after the fact Well that actually brings me to a point that I was going to talk about which is that you've described the work as active or the work such as active and what did you mean by that they're active and what has been done in Hongdae for how long Well we stipulated that basically because the way we approached it wasn't like it was just a benign object or an instrument in the show that fit together with other things to make up a story but actually an active dialogue with other works around them so there might be a conversation between these two works or those two works or whatever happens and it becomes a narrative rather than just a flat because we kind of had these intimate discussions with the work and kind of saw the work develop over the six month period we could then kind of quite clearly see these things emerging from each person's practice and then could start to make connections between particular artists and between obvious aesthetic connections and then the conceptual connections and then that's how we kind of decided to replace the works in relation to each other so I think that's kind of what we mean by facilitating facilitating the arrangement I'd definitely like to ask Julianne and Dan and then Julianne first if you feel that your work is active with the viewer and doing that process during the installation process which was funny because I was on the other side of the wall and I could hear you tell people where to run the stream from and you'd say where this runs to a particular person in this court court and I'd be gazing through my seared stream thinking if I make a really big loop here you'll be able to see that plant and it'll lead your gaze to a particular direction and it was just so funny listening to these but we were also doing the same thing it's like where's the scissors, where's the pins and so it was a really strange experience that of hearing what was going on here and imagining what was going on here and it was always straight lines and it was a really built up layer thing and I'd sort of done some sort of weird collapsed version on the other side so that was interesting during the install but just in terms of connections to other work while I was installing and Caitlin was installing I started to find that I'd often walk over and be watching Caitlin's work and then walk back to mine so I felt a real synergy there too Caitlin, any comments? You're doing the same thing and Dan? I think there's certainly an activity given the discussions that I have with Sam and with Dan and Marcel as well in the corner there about these processes that involve connection and threats of connection those sorts of things so I think there's certainly dialogue that literally happens that also is reflected in what we're doing where the process, I guess has this activity or this active sense that gets sort of put on display as an invitation to continue activity then for the viewer as well so whether it's making connections between different names and whoever that guy is without the mustache or the different identikit images and then the different entries of who's a victim and who's not those sorts of things and then who sits in what realm of whatever part of whatever show there's this continual idea thread no pun intended or pun kind of intended thread of making connection that doesn't stop, I guess so the activeness continues Lastly I just wanted to ask you to talk about mapping and fantasy and revisiting which are terms that you've mentioned to me in relation to the show well those were and again after the works were created we sort of drew out common threads as a part of the way of how we would actually fit the works together and how they might be in that dialogue with each other and those three ideas were the main three things somewhere we can talk about them one at a time I mean dad's already sort of started on mapping mapping, yeah so I guess to start on mapping Laura and I both found through speaking to the artists that a lot of artists had this kind of conceptual processional thing of mapping and so it would be kind of doing this research based task and finding correlations and that would be their mapping process that would then lead them to their physical work and then other people were more literally used mapping like Dan's actual process of putting stuff on was actually mapping out like a node map like it was on the internet and then putting it on to a work so I think that kind of goes into mapping yeah and then we have sort of a joint with the idea of fantasy because it's more like a imagined space I guess that some artists work with being that something more like Caitlyn or Julianne's was actually like an experiential almost like a wanderlite type thing so something more like Louise's work what's about the mind space and like being drawn into a void or something like that and the third thing was revisiting which is also quite broad in terms of whether that be art historical references with people like Steve's work or a more personal history like you did with your grandfather and the wood turning with some kind of looking back along the spectrum of time and bringing that to now and working with that I guess we have Clarke Bermont who have like going to the future and many of that which is revisiting but to a really weird future way revisiting the future yeah so those were the kind of three common threads that we found throughout people's work does anyone have any questions at this point? I just wanted to go back to you talking about the exact parameters and I wanted to know what the exact parameters you were that you gave out for the call out for artists and the second part of that as well is did you choose artists based on whether or not they fit with your idea or whether or not they fit with each other? Well I guess that's what we were saying before is that we never we didn't really have an idea like we didn't have a a thematic beginning point to the exhibition Clarke we just talked about three common threads and that comes out of sort of almost like a survey and your first bit was the original parameters for call out was it? I guess for me they seem like like the stuff that we asked for application parameters seems like a pretty standard thing to do is to ask for like a bio type of images in the CV and stuff but I guess within the broader festival context there were kind of discussions about the overlapage of visual arts and film or the overlapage of visual arts and performance and that sort of thing and we decided that we would deal with that as the submissions came through so I hope that answers your question Yeah did whether artists given the word triangulate at all did that come in? No So that was something that developed throughout the process No Yeah we definitely developed that afterwards So yeah it's kind of like this backwards process Yeah So I take it then that they in process yeah Being that you didn't know the actual works that were going to be in the show how did you look at the artists was it just their whole body of work or did you ask them to give you an idea of what new way they were looking to do or what new way they were looking to work with? The artists did give a brief obviously quite loose proposition of what they were thinking of working with but I guess that comes back to that discussion of control where we're talking about where we had an idea of what someone was going to make and then they completely flipped over and wanted to do something completely different because it's quite a long period of time Yeah and I guess when you're making a new work you can't stick to it Yeah necessarily was it just purely a visual thing there which is that they sent through or did you read through their liars and go oh did you read really well like you Yeah How did you In terms of parameters like balancing gender or balancing age or balancing which university they went to or anything like that we did hope to have a balance but kind of completely forgot about that until the end and we're just lucky enough to have an equal stance it was more based on the strength of the work Yeah And how do you think that and emerging art show like this might differ from for example the Bari Festival which you know it's a different format altogether with previously an independent curator several different hour eyes and sights involved various number of exhibitions and events How does this come across do you think Well you just listed all that like external differences I suppose of what actually is produced but I think the process would have been very different as well and it was something that we sort of came up with what we ideally wanted to work with and I imagine it's quite different for whoever organizes that each year And also just the fact of location like we're situated in the White Cube Gallery in Metro Arts whereas the Bari Festival was something that did happen I know for the last festival which was not last year, the year before 2010 it was you know kind of tent location which was kind of utilized as like an ongoing studio program for these artist run initiatives so for me that's like in itself is a complete difference because it's you know the context of the work Any other questions Can you speak about one of the traditional triangle being audience do you think about the audience who knows that they're one of the like they're as equal as the artist or the they don't read that along the same hand That's a really good question I think in a way when you're an audience and come into a show you come in with some kind of I don't think importance but I mean you come in to engage with the work so inevitably that does happen but of course people wouldn't have any idea of the structure that we've proposed if they haven't read it they're not sure that's incredibly important to the success of it, yeah I think it's also you can't really determine life with your audience either I mean I mean it's a gallery space that anyone can walk into so that someone who has no prior experience with art might engage with work completely different to someone who's kind of done their PhD in art history so it's just kind of particularly with the festival context in the night when there's like 750 people running around five floors and we did keep that in mind so I mean we as organisers with the work you do work with sort of an ideal audience and of course the ideal audience never actually exists but you do work towards some kind of target yeah I think audience is such a broad term that I mean I know some people who are really threatened actors are threatened audience that when they encounter art they don't feel perhaps as activated or unequal footing as others who might be sort of antagonistic towards it or like that ideal situation of all things being equal in this triangle is an ideal situation only and so that's why I'm interested by that idea of activity or active engagement because then there's all different kinds of active engagement that happen and someone who's threatened by work might spit at it or you know something like that or another person who's antagonistic towards it might also actually spit at it or try and move parts of it or anything like that so there's such a broad range of engagements or activities that are generated I think that that equal thing is very idealised be interesting I had a great audience exchange with two lovely gentlemen who came into service the air conditioners and couldn't actually get to mine while I was installing and I probably talked to them for a good 15 minutes about the work and they wanted to know about it and it was terrific and me having to go through the process of explaining the work to them was really good for me and to see what they engaged with one of the guys was probably 18 had recently attended school and he'd done woodturning in whatever manual manual arts and he found that pretty much anyone could do it but the McCramay had him baffled and that was really interesting he was so taken with it and I thought in terms of skill for me I struggled so much more with the woodturning because I'd never done it before but yeah and that was such a random encounter so yeah there's some interesting aspects to an audience another question I guess as an ongoing discussion that I'm sure we can all enjoy over a drink later which is what I'm planning to do after this would be to get rid of the elephant room talk about even though it has been rehashed recently which times the word emerging and I guess I'm particularly interested to hear from the artist as to how because it is often a hotly contested thing as to whether the artist considers themselves emerging or not but I pose that question to Dan first because I know that he has 2007 IMA fresh cut shows so Dan have you emerged what stage yeah well I guess someone else could maybe tell me that instead I don't think that I can't really imagine what it would feel like to not be emerging I think there's probably a few different measures that are applied to decide whether someone's emerging and I don't get to or I'm not part of the discussion of commercial side of things that might draw a line in the sand as to who's emerging and who's not or grant applications that decide whether you're emerging or not I can only really speak to the idea that as a practitioner I feel like my practice is still very much emerging for me in that I still am finding out how I make things why I make things how some things turn out the way they do and how some others don't that's what feels emerging to me and I don't really know when that stops because it hasn't yet or what happens when it does do I just keep making the same kinds of work then so back that whole time of emerging for me is something that's kind of baffling I just pretend not to think about what I don't think about I pretend it's not there because I don't know what it looks like otherwise Jillianne I'm going to talk about emerging what that means I see this having a certain amount to do with freedom at this stage where what you can get away with as an emerging artist in terms of trying things on and if it's an abysmal failure it's like you can't hold a gun to my head at this stage because I don't have commercial representation it can be a folly so I guess in that regard I see this being this period of freedom maybe somewhere after uni and before hopefully you maybe you're not quite as refined you're still trying to work out exactly what it is you're on about and what you want with she Erin to enter for bettermenting I think I feel very much the same way as Dan I don't necessarily find it to be a problematic term I know a lot of people find it to be quite limiting I can't find it quite useful particularly if I am applying for grants because at the moment at my age I do pretty much all of those things that define learning so at the moment it works but I quite like it and makes me feel comfortable and also as Julian said you're pretty good to me well I mean Tess and I are also emerging practitioners it's an emerging show in general it's not like an established curator came in and curated an emerging artist it was the same playing field so from my position it's similar to what Julie Yan said in terms of developing what you actually are working what you work is actually about and what you actually care about and where you are positioned within that and something like this theory is very much a part of that process is sort of proposing ideas and getting feedback and finding your way yeah I suppose I guess a second I don't know situations that I guess for instance interning with an institution I would consider myself even as an intern a curator because that's the position if that makes sense so I think it depends on the situation not necessarily the time of the emerging period so this is something that is basically independent so it's emerging it's organisational as opposed to curation because of the equal thing does it also pertain to the level of collaboration and the sense that you're working with your peers within that environment and you're testing things out together because it seems like from the Chinese theory that if all parts are equal that you're getting just as much from the artist and the audience as well within developing that theory well I wonder if I wouldn't know because I haven't been established yet and then come back in time but the things that we are allowed to do working collaboratively first of all working with the artist to create something rather than in some kind of hierarchy or things like that structures that whatever we want to work within and either we find our way and decide if it's not for us or if we're allowed to do that later on I'm not really sure if the structures that we're working in now sort of apply specifically to emerging and that's part of it is being able to work collaboratively and be able to work with artists and etc etc so then it comes back to the freedom point that these guys are making earlier there's a few more questions comments well thank you everyone for joining us thank you to all the panel members and see you all next time thank you