The Blackmail » 2009 » August

The Life & Times Of Mr Squires

tristan — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 02:31:50 +0000

Words: Douglas Lance Gibson Images: Christopher Day

It’s easy to pigeonhole someone. Well, actually, it’s harder not to pigeonhole someone. As a method of organisation, it does have its place. Some order does need to be established but an accurate representation of the individual is often hard to summarise. Mikey Young’s latest project, Brain Children, stands in stark contrast to his ouput as a member of Eddy Current Suppression Ring and the Ooga Boogas. Add to that his role in synth-punk outfit, Total Control, and you’re beginning to see the difficulty in applying a tag that faithfully represents who Mikey is.

There’s more though. On top of producing his own music, Mikey’s an in demand producer, record label owner and with Flip Out Festival in its second year, he’s also a festival organiser. Doug Gibson spoke with the man himself, after he’d finished up yet another day of recording.

Douglas Lance Gibson: You’re pretty active in a number of bands. Does recording someone else’s music provide a break from that?

Mikey Young: I don’t think so. I think it originally started because it was bands I liked, and I had the gear and they wanted it, and they needed someone to do it. It’s fine with bands you love. I feel like I get enough of a break from making music by having the amount of projects I do. Like if I get sick of Eddy Current, I can go make disco, and that’s my distraction from making music, which is just to make different music [laughs.] I guess the lesson I’ve learned in the last couple of months is, because I’ve just had to stop making music for a month, the most important thing to me is just to do my own stuff. At this stage in my life, where at least one of the things I’m doing is making cash for me, I may as well take advantage of that. The original reason why I started to get so hectic recording is because I started to think, “Oh, I haven’t got a job. I need money, I should at least work a bit.” So I convinced myself that I needed a wage, I guess. Then I looked at my bank account the other day and I was like, “Fuck, I can do without this for a while.” Not that I’m living large or anything, but I can afford to live small and have more time, and I’d rather just do that.

DG: With people that are only aware of your music through either Eddy Current or Ooga Boogas, Brain Children is quite a change, but you’ve been playing with synthesisers and computer based music for a while now. You used to have a deal with Modular, didn’t you?

MY: Oh yeah, I guess [laughs.] Not that that’s ever come out in print! Not that I’m ashamed of it. I sort of did I guess, I mean I did. About 10 years ago I bought a 4-track and a drum machine and a synth, and just kept making stuff on little cassettes. A friend of mine heard it, and he was a mate of Pav’s [founder of Modular] and passed it on, and was like, “I think you’d be into this dude.” It was just slow instrumental stuff. I thought it was totally unmarketable, and I don’t know why they thought it was. I think it was the post-trip hop, post-Zero 7 era where instrumental music could be a thing that was sellable. They did sort of did sign me and give me some money to set up a studio, so I just bought a bunch of stuff and kept making the same stupid music and by the time I’d done it, his focus had shifted a bit.

DG: With your latest release, when you look at Max Kohane and you, initially you wouldn’t think that Brain Children would be the result of that pairing.

MY: I guess Max is known for being a grindcore drummer but he’s totally obsessed with Dilla and shit. I think it was just a semi-drunken conversation one night, and the thing with my stuff that I always thought lacked was that I don’t have the patience to write beats that much. I just go, “Kick, snare. Yeah, that’ll do” and I’m more interested in writing the tunes. I’m also shit scared of singing, and he’s not really scared of either of those things. So what he brought to the table was exactly what I was lacking. Maybe I’m a bit more confident these days to go, “Aw, fuck it. Let’s just put out a record.” I don’t care if anyone doesn’t like it.

DG: So do you look for particular qualities in people when you start collaborating with someone? Like with Max, were you aware that he could do beats and that was something you were lacking in, and that was the attraction?

MY: Nah, mainly I’m attracted to good people, you know, that I want to spend time with. I remember looking at Max in a band years ago and just thinking, “Fuck, I’d love to do something with that dude one day.” I probably didn’t think it was disco, but I just thought, “That’s a dude that can drum!” There was no grand plan, it was just like, “Aw, let’s go record drums for a day and we’ll take them home and sample them.” More than looking for something in someone, it was more like, “Aw, I like hanging out with this dude.” Luckily, I’m surrounded by people I think have good taste in stuff.

DG: And obviously that’s the case with all the other bands you play in?

MY: Yeah, I became really good friends with Dan [Stewart] and I fucking love where he’s coming from and have so much in common with him musically and I love him as a dude. It was pretty much the same process with Total Control. It was just really natural and easy. Same with the [Ooga] Boogas. They were all good friends, and all in different bands, and it was just, “Ah, I wouldn’t mind hanging out with these dudes, seeing what comes out of here.” Different people bring different…

DG: Qualities.

MY: Yeah.

DG: Are there any pivotal moments you remember that attracted you to certain genres? I mean, the distance between disco and punk is quite large.

MY: Yeah, they hate each other!

DG: What were the turning points for you then?

MY: As a youngster?

DG: Yeah, I mean, at what point did you realise that you could embrace both punk and disco?

MY: I guess at the end of the day, I’m more of a song man. I don’t care what genre it is, if I think it’s a good song and an honest performance, I’ll be attracted to that. I guess I was into hip hop when I was a kid. From the age of 14 I started taping the funk shows on community radio and stuff like that. And there’s not that much difference between old funk and early disco. But at the same time Danny [Young, Mikey’s brother] was into hardcore stuff, and no doubt I’m sure the influence of that seeped in. Even from when I was eight, I was going to Frankston library and hiring any tape I could, like blues tapes, or Velvet Underground. They had an amazing tape collection. So as a 10 year-old kid I got to hear the Velvet Underground. I just wanted to listen to everything. I don’t remember thinking, “I’m not into this genre.” I loved The Kinks and ‘Louie, Louie’ and I wanted to find more songs that sounded like that and I didn’t know where all that stuff was. When I met all the people at Corduroy that was definitely pivotal as far as a massive door opening to all that kind of shit. That’s definitely the biggest inspiration on the band [ECSR.] Hearing all those inept teenage bands that didn’t really care if they played it well or not, they wanted to get it down. You can hear the excitement in those fucking records, like “We’re making a fucking record! Yeah!” and that’s all I’m trying to do, is get honest excitement down and not worry too much about a bad kick and snare sound or anything stupid like that because at the end of day, nobody cares.

DG: Obviously maintaining control is an important thing to you. You record your own music, you have your own record label Aarght! and you don’t have a manager. You run a pretty autonomous operation, which I think is so fucking admirable. Can you see a day where you won’t take on so much responsibility?

MY: It’s come pretty close. What I’m trying to do now is just get rid of some other responsibilities in my life, like over recording and stuff like that, so I can concentrate more. I think if I organised my life better and stopped trying to do everything, I’ll be able to do that for the band a lot better. And with the recording side of the band, that was never a control thing. I think at the time we started I just wanted to learn. I wanted to get better at recording. Even though we maybe could have paid someone to make our records and make them better, the only way I could get better was to keep doing it. I’m sure if I listened to my first album again, I’d think, “Aw, man, I could have done a better job.”

DG: Flip Out is coming up again soon, what was the genesis behind that?

MY: I think Dan was doing his label Stained Circles simultaneously to us and he’d talked about, I think we’d both talked about, “Ah, gee, there’s a lot of good Melbourne and Australian bands that we’re liking at the moment,” but to give that sort of opportunity so they’re not playing to 50 people, obviously if we attached Eddy Current to it, there’s a good chance that an extra 500 people might rock up who wouldn’t have been exposed to certain bands and might go, “Oh, fuck!” and that’s cool. And I think Rich and I had just come back from Goner Fest and we’d [Ooga Boogas] had played over there and were like, “Aw, this could sort of work.” It just so happened that Rich wanted to bring out M.O.T.O at that time and Dan was already touring someone, so we were like, “Oh yeah, we’ll chuck a couple of internationals on.” You know, no grand plans, [we were] just seeing if it would stick. And it turned out to be a great day. Everyone had a ball, and it sold out. People came early and stayed to the end, so we were like, “Fuck, this could really work.” So I guess trying it in Sydney is the next step. Also, I guess that it’s still at the stage where having Eddy Current, I hate saying that…

DG: No, it’s great to see that a band like Eddy Current can draw that crowd though.

MY: Yeah, yeah. I’m less involved in organising it this year as I’m playing in a couple of bands and I’m real busy, and I said I’d rather just play this year, so I’m sort of just speaking on their behalf here. With the Melbourne one, I think we always knew it was going to be interesting to see how it holds up without ECSR in Melbourne. Hopefully that amount of people had such a good time last year that it doesn’t really matter whether we play it. I guess time will tell. Hopefully, there’s enough interest in it. I don’t know. Dudes like you and I probably live in our own world so much that we think there’s a slightly bigger interest in bands like Pink Reason than there actually is, where as it’s probably just 30 nerds in Melbourne and 30 nerds in Sydney. I just wonder how it’s going to translate.

DG: No, I think it’s going to be great.

MY: Yeah, and if there’s only a few hundred people then…

DG: I was just going to say that my friends are excited about it, but then again I guess my friends are those nerds!

MY: Exactly. You lose a bit of perspective with how out of touch you are with the average dude that just goes to gigs.

Flip Out Festival & Record Fair 2009
Sydney – Saturday August 20 at the Manning Bar
Melbourne – Saturday September 5 at the Corner Hotel

Mikey’s many musical endeavours – Eddy Current Suppression Ring, Ooga Boogas, Brain Children, Aarght! Flip Out Festival

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Weavie Wonder

tristan — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 02:24:28 +0000

Words: Max Olijnyk Images: Christopher Day

Sunday Ganim’s work makes you feel good. Her hand woven scarves and blankets are kaleidoscopic visions of colour and unrestrained imagination, but most importantly, are soft on the skin and warm you up on a cold day. Sunday brings a fresh, unconventional energy to a medium steeped in tradition, while embracing the elements that attracted her to it in the first place. Following her recent exhibition Weavie Wonders, the Melbourne artist had a yarn with Max Olijnyk.

Max Olijnyk: So, how did you get started on the weaving? What attracted you to it in the first place?

Sunday Ganim: My mum used to do it and make these incredible things and I showed an interest, so she organised for me to do a course and went from there…

MO: What was the first thing you made? How has your work progressed since then?

SG: I think is was a really basic bag but then I started making scarves pretty soon after – I used to make them for friends birthdays – I really enjoyed putting different colours together, especially mixing colours that didn’t necessarily go together – completely unstructured and seeing how they would turn out, I guess.

MO: I know you work with some master weavers now. How did that come about? Can you tell me about them? I bet they’re interesting characters.

SG: Well my mum actually knew a lot of them through an organisation called the Victorian Spinners and Weavers Association. They’re in Carlton and are really great, an association of mainly older ladies who get together and weave things and swap ideas etc. They all have a pretty vast amount of knowledge between them and are so eager to help you out it’s amazing – they’re very encouraging.

I came to know a lady who’s a master weaver and has woven all her life. She lives with her husband in one of the most interesting and eclectic houses I have ever seen. She’s super crafty and he’s an ex-photographer who’s now really into aerodynamics, engines and physics. Their house is filled to the brim with all kinds of great stuff – books stacked to the ceilings, and they each have a couple of ‘studio’ kind of rooms. His is filled with thousands of pieces of technical equipment and hers is a kind of craft emporium with books stacked up to the ceiling and all kinds of crafty tools and knick knacks – it’s great.

He’s really into cars and can fix pretty much anything. He bought a Porsche a long time ago and she wove a fabric in tartan that they hand stitched into the seats of the car to personalise the Porsche! And it’s so perfect it looks like it was made that way.

Anyway, she’s a wonderful lady with a soul of gold who can weave anything so perfectly that it looks as if a machine has made it – amazing.

MO: How do you source your materials? What sets one yarn apart from another?

SG: Originally I was using this yarn from a place in South Melbourne called the Victorian Tapestry Workshop. They have the most amazing coloured yarn. It’s wild. Standing in their showroom looking at all the colours is pretty exciting. Anyway, that yarn is used to weave gigantic tapestries and is a bit scratchy and is not so soft for people’s necks so I went on the search for super soft yarn in great colours, which I found surprisingly hard.

As times have gotten tough and a lot of manufacturing is now happening offshore in places like China, the Australian knitwear and wool industry has shrunk substantially since the 80s. I couldn’t find the quality of wool I was after in a broad enough colour range in Australia, so I ended up sourcing a yarn from Italy that was 80% Australian Superfine Merino Wool and 20% Cashmere – which seemed crazy to me – to be buying back Australian wool from Italy, but that’s the reality of manufacturing knitwear in Australia on a small scale.

MO: What’s the process in designing and making your work? Is it quite meticulously planned, or is it more spontaneous? I know from experience it’s sometimes difficult to keep that creative energy going when you have to manufacture something with machines.

SG: This is pretty naive, but I really like colours – mostly pretty random colour selections that you find almost by accident. So usually in the months leading up to making a bunch of scarves, I’ll take photos and collect things that I see where the colour combinations are great. My camera and pockets get filled up with photos and scraps of everything and anything – heaps of stuff really – things from magazines and the internet, details of houses, snapshots from cooking, things in the park or street, friends houses etc. Then I start to get good feelings from certain colours and then they become the basis in my head of what I want to do in the scarves.

I usually want to plan everything but it never works out that way- the best stuff usually comes when I am relaxed and just going with the flow of what’s happening at the time.

The laborious process of weaving can be really frustrating as it makes it hard to quickly change your ideas if it’s not working out, but it can also be fantastic as it will make you stick with the colours you have chosen till you get them to sing along together. Get the colours zapping away with each other.

MO: Most artwork isn’t intended to be touched or interacted with besides being admired from afar. Yours is quite the opposite. Also, things like scarves are things that are often quite boring or not really thought of beyond their obvious function. Your work sits somewhere in between. How do you define your work, if that’s possible? What does it mean to you?

SG: I don’t think of them as art Max, I just see them really as a way for myself to be able to have access to putting together a whole bunch of colours in a way that can be surprising – that people can wrap around themselves, and each time it’s a little different. I think that hand making things for people is also really special and hopefully gives them a feeling of love and warmth every time they wear it.

MO: But it’s not just scarves, is it. Tell us about the blankets! Those things are amazing!

SG: No! There are blankets too! I am really excited about them. They only came about this year you can put them on your couch or bed or wrap yourself up in the biggest scarf ever – they’re made to order and again, can be really personal which I think is important.

MO: What other work have you exhibited apart from Weavie Wonders? How did WW come about?

SG: I did another scarf exhibition on a much smaller scale last year called Scarf-Ace. Weavie Wonders was originally going to be called Neck Up but then the blankets came along, and then a friend came up with the stellar name Weavie Wonders!

MO: Are you ever surprised at people’s response to your work? Do people bond with certain items straight away, then maybe sometimes you might create something with someone in mind, and they don’t feel it the same way?

SG: Yeah, I’ve been commissioned to make custom made scarves for people a bunch of times, which I enjoy. They give me a few of their favourite colours and usually specify how mixed up they want the design. Mostly people seem really happy when they receive them. On the whole it’s great because in solidifies the fact that everyone’s tastes are really different – what one person might hate, another will fall in love with.

MO: Tell me a bit about the installation for Weavie Wonders. Was all that wood in there already?

SG: Oh that all came together in the final hour. I originally wanted to hang all the scarves from bunches of helium balloons so that they were floating in the space like parachutes – but after a few tests we realised it wasn’t going to happen. The painter’s ladders actually came from Irene’s place and I was lucky enough to get a massive favour from the guys at my hardware shop to borrow the wood for a few days. Then a handful of lovely people came over and helped me pull it all together a few days before the opening.

MO: The coloured tin boxes are a nice touch. What was the thinking there?

SG: I think it’s good to mix up surfaces – the scarves are woollen and tactile and tin is the opposite – shiny and super bright. I got them powder coated in Preston and they turned out great, so you’ll be seeing them again soon I hope.

MO: Do you ever get tired of the weaving medium? Is it meditative? Do you work in other mediums?

SG: Hell yes! But I think it’s like anything that you do for a while you go through periods of wanting to change just to keep it interesting. For me it’s meditative, people say it’s a kind of therapy, which I guess is true. I’m just getting over having chronic fatigue for the last year or so and it has helped out a lot in that respect I think.

MO: Your studio is a mess, Sunday! So is mine! So is yours always chaotic, or is it just post-show opening craziness in there right now?

SG: Oh it’s soooo messy. Usually the mess builds up – then you have a cleaning session so you can think a little clearer and then the build up starts again!

MO: What other artists are you into at the moment? What other stuff are you into at the moment? What are you working on next?

SG: I bought a kaleidoscope a few months ago and have begun making my own ones and taking photos of colours with that which is really interesting. I have a few ideas kicking around to build some light boxes with moving parts inside them similar to old pre-cinema techniques, that I’m about to start. I was making a lot of pop up books out of old magazines for a while last year which I haven’t done since, so they’re back on the agenda too, possibly with a different function than the ol’ book. And I just did a little course to learn how to mould things with resins and the like, which I will try to get a grasp of in the next few months and see what happens…

Then of course more Weavie Wonders to come – scarves, blankets, baby blankets and possibly knitted ties – keep a look out!

Sunday Ganim

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Dan If You Do, Dan If You Don’t

tristan — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 02:23:38 +0000

Words: Michael Kucyk Images: Dan Moynihan

Every day is ‘project day’ for Richmond based artist Daniel Moynihan. When Moynihan’s not producing art in his studio, he’s hiding behind the counter at Bunnings Warehouse, toying with new ideas; cutting, shaping, painting and finishing. En route to and from the office, he’ll keep an eye out for building sites in search for materials and when he finally gets home he’ll put on a DVD for research purposes. Moynihan is one of those artists that never relents from their craft. He finds it hard to let go and is enslaved by an eye for detail.

TCB was the first to host a solo exhibition of Moynihan’s work in 2007. Typically based on a pun, One Step for Dan saw him construct a surrealist play on slapstick humour. A Moynihan clone was shown in the process of sawing a circle in the ceiling while obliviously cutting a hole through the floor simultaneously. This was then followed by Loose Cannon (Victoria Park Gallery, 2008) where a passion for the aesthetic of Styrofoam was explored, producing a life-size late-19th century cannon and a defensive wall built brick by brick. In the show titled Still Standing Still (2009), Moynihan transformed Utopian Slumps’ main gallery space into a larger than life freezer with a giant timber iceberg hanging in the ceiling. The iceberg’s hidden surfaces could then be viewed by a periscope hovering over a bathtub in the adjoining room. Most recently, Hell Gallery became the scene of the crime for his almost-too-easy robbery of a local supermarket

Moynihan’s complex installations and their use of space command total absorption in a high-involvement visual experience. As viewers enter his exhibitions via fridge doors or foam brick labyrinths, they immediately become completely surrounded by Dan’s world. Minds take a wander like flies free to roam and explore every possible angle of a scene frozen in time. Time is always captured just before the punch line, in an instant of tension and expectation, with milk cartons suspended in the atmosphere above a coffee cup mid-pour. As the characters and their related objects are profiled and collated with the shows’ infinite points of view, still comes to life where the vivid scenes are processed as moving images or filmic skits. From a flaccid cannon aimed and loaded, one can foresee that the imminent human cannonball is doomed and will miss its window to safety. The mental image depicted is both absurd and hilarious.

Given how Moynihan’s work unravels like a cinematic narrative, it’s no surprise to continually find this fanatic in cinema foyers. “I get ideas from movies; I like to watch a lot, though I’ve never thought of myself as a film maker,” he admits. Influenced by film’s near-believable projections, elaborate plotlines and its haze of fantasy and reality; Moynihan’s constructs explore grand scenarios that are ridiculous and commonly defy logic.

His recent exhibition In and Out, No Funny Business (Hell Gallery, 2009) entertained a soft spot for the formulaic nature of the heist genre; namely the Coen Brother’s remake of The Ladykillers and Spike Lee’s The Inside Man. He explains that the clichéd “heist film is always based on a bunch of guys with a big idea, hiring a spot next door or across the road, tunneling through and leaving without a trace”. After realising that one of the boundaries of the gallery’s backyard was a brick wall shared by Coles, a landmark in Moynihan’s daily ritual, the space became the perfect crime scene for a covert break in. In honouring the genre’s densely sub-plotted tale, the show stretched far beyond the confines of traditional gallery space with an outside garden shed revealing a chiseled hole leading to Coles’ cool room and a getaway van disguised as a removals business in the gateway. There is always more to his work than what initially meets the eye, much like the first viewing of a geniously intricate and layered film. Moynihan will use every nook and cranny to full effect.

Captured during the communal lunch break, In and Out is weighed with imagery of the working class – characters in generic work wear, utility vans, tool sheds, savory pies and pastries doused in home brand sauce and a discount flavoured milk. This ideology of tradesperson culture references Moynihan’s roots in Wollongong, a city with an extended history of mining and industry, boasting coal mines, steelworks and an industrial port. After leaving school in Year 10, Moynihan picked up a carpentry apprenticeship and trained for boat building, ship repairs and maintenance. For the subsequent years he alternated between working on the waterfront, building houses and appeasing his creative side through graffiti, unwittingly developing the skills he would later apply to his art. Moynihan’s background is also referenced in Loose Cannon in which he erected a styrofoam cannon that was a proportionate sculpture of the iconic cannons that have lined Wollongong’s coast since 1982.

Moynihan is never afraid to reveal himself in his work. He finds taking the piss out of himself gratifying, and loves to share his private joke with an audience. “The funniest thing is when you’re laughing at yourself. I laugh at my own jokes more than anything, I love my own jokes,” he explains. Regardless of what medium he’s working with, he’ll often be the character featured in his art. Flyers will be self-portraits, zines document a fascination with placing his face over other peoples’ and the dummies used in installations will be dressed head the toe in his everyday attire. Often clues are blatant while others, such as a comb hanging out of a back pocket of a bald character’s jeans, are only subtle innuendos. Moynihan recalls the opening of Loose Cannon where there was much confusion as to whether the human cannonball was a dummy, “I turned up half an hour late and people thought I was actually laying in there!” Mission accomplished; by insisting that his self-portraits are as realistic as possible, Moynihan maintains the work’s scale and helps transform the absurd into believable.

For his upcoming show Expert, Dan will compile pieces from One Small Step for Dan (TCB Art Inc, 2007) and Loose Cannon, as well as his contribution to the group show 17 Summers of Heideko Jones (Blank Space, 2008). The exhibition gives the artist an opportunity to adapt past creations to a new environment in which his original ideas have grown. Moynihan has also been tactical in his selection of works, opting to rehash some classics that best correlate with each other.

“I’m really happy to show the works side by side,” he says. “They each have elements of me, a sense of escapism, and an absurd way of doing things when you are caught in the moment. It’s funny to laugh at the characters but from their perspective, what they are doing is rational and innocent.”

Expert will show at Adelaide’s Greenaway Art Gallery from August 26 to October 4

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Outside In

tristan — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 02:23:14 +0000

Words: Joseph Allen Shea Images: Tim Roth & Kill Pixie

Mark Whalen is an artist and his world is a contradiction. An implosion if you like. As his audience gets bigger, his art just gets smaller. Beginning with large scale throw ups and pieces under the pseudonym Kill Pixie he earned his craft by working while you were awake and continued while you were asleep. With a relocation from Sydney to Los Angeles, his time is spent less on the sidewalks and tops of buildings as he envelopes himself in his narratives under his desk lamp. New themes of futuristic lost cultures and broken down societies, false gods,the illusion of money, terrorism and double-dealing Kill Pixie’s work has become more detailed as worlds open up inside worlds. The detailed ink work is so precise and intricate that it takes hours to even look at it.

Joseph Allen Shea: You recently moved to Los Angeles where a lot of the cultures you are interested in have grown. Surfing, skateboarding, certain styles of graffiti and art styles to name a few. Did these things inspire the relocation?

Mark Whalen: I think they inspired me to just live in a different place and see what’s going on over here. Of course it’s a much bigger country, so skateboarding, arts etc is going to be on a much bigger scale. It’s definitely great to be surrounded by a bigger art scene and witness it all first hand.

JAS: Can you tell us how your daily life differs from living in Sydney?

MW: It’s a transit city, so walking and skating everywhere does not exist, walking out the front door and going for a quick beer somewhere is out of the question. Apart from having to rely on a car it’s an amazing city to live in.

JAS: Has it changed the way you make art at all?

MW: It hasn’t changed the way I make art but living in different environments and situations definitely influence the narrative aspects in my work.

JAS: It seems you’ve been well received into the west coast scene with a sell-out show in June. Has it been as embracing as it appears?

MW: It’s been embracing for sure but its definitely not easy, I’m really appreciative and stoked to receive such a great response. Being around great people to work with has made it even better.

JAS: Your work has contained more narrative elements recently. How has the need for story telling developed?

MW: There’s always been a lot of things I’ve wanted to include in the narrative side of my work, especially with my last show. I basically just really made work that i wanted to make, and express what I wanted to say without holding back.

JAS: Working on back-to-back shows for galleries in Europe, America and Australia must mean there’s little time to work on the streets. Is this something you are still interested in or is moving into the studio just part of the progression?

MW: I’m still interested in graffiti and check it out everyday but I’m working so much in the studio that there’s not time [to paint on the streets]. I do a lot of hours every week [in the studio] and by the time I’m done there, I’m spent. Moving more into the studio is something I’ve always wanted to focus on, it’s where my main interests are.

JAS: Obviously the audiences are going to differ from working on the street to the gallery. Does it matter to you who is looking at your work and have your messages changed to engage whoever is looking?

MW: It doesn’t matter to me at all, I’m not going to adjust what i make to please a certain crowd. I make what I’m feeling in the moment and how I’m feeling in a period of time.

JAS: Your new paintings depict a broken down society that is clinging to false gods and the illusion of money in a state of terrorism and double-dealing. Is the world really that treacherous?

MW: Ha. It can be if you want it to. I wouldn’t say it’s really that treacherous, but I like to take these ideas and issues that cause controversy between people in society and make humor of it. While there are still messages, both conscious and unconscious, that I want to put across and include in my work, I like to have fun with it at the same time. There’s so much much postive and negative interaction between humans, it’s interesting to turn it into a life study.

JAS: What is it with your unfaltering preoccupation with footwear?

MW: The footwear is just an aesthetic thing. If I’m going to depict narratives of mind games, illusions and false hope, they’re [the characters] going to be naked and wearing dope slippers.

JAS: From large and fast works on the street and broad strokes on canvas, your work has been getting smaller and more detailed. The intensity just keeps amplifying as if the work is about to implode. Is that a result of art responding to high rents and smaller studios?

MW: I wouldn’t really say it’s a result of that. The one thing that got me into detailed work in the first place was making everything with big lines and strokes; I got quite bored with it. If I had the time I’d spend six months on one piece. Details are really fascinating to me, I’m so obsessed with making intricate work and what i can do with it. It probably will implode at some point.

JAS: And it’s a very Hollywood story but members from Led Zeppelin and also Tim Roth are now fans and come to your shows. Tim Roth has shot your portrait and studio, he’s big into art and photography, right? Does rubbing shoulders with celebrity just come with the territory?

MW: I’m not really sure to tell you the truth. I met Tim through a friend of mine and really loved all his photographs, I had no idea that he was so involved in photography and he has a massive archive of photos from his travels round the globe. He wanted to come around and shoot the studio; I was really psyched to have him shoot my spot. And yeah, he loves art.

JAS: You have a new print with Pictures on Walls about to be released and a new book coming out with ROJO that we are working on together, can you tell us about these projects and the need for multiples/accessible art products?

MW: Pictures on walls is a two print release that is happening soon and ROJO magazine invited me to make a pocket size 160 page book with them this year. The need for books? Books are fun. I think prints are great because it gives everyone a chance to enjoy art and collect something.

JAS: You have been using your real name attached to art shows recently rather than just your alias. Why the unveiling of your true identity?

MW: There’s no unveiling nor anything to hide. Since I’m not doing graffiti I don’t really feel the need to keep using the alias all the time. It makes more sense to use my name.

JAS: Any plans to return to old Sydney town?

MW: Whenever I get kicked out, I’ll be back.

Kill Pixie’s exhibition with Cleon Peterson The Mirror Stage opens at Monster Children Gallery in Sydney on August 20 from 6pm.

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The Eyes Have It

tristan — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 02:22:33 +0000

Words: Louise McClean Images: Tristan Ceddia

Eyewear overlords COLAB are like the cool kid at school, they follow their own rules, with no particular intention of pleasing others. But, somehow they manage to do exactly that and in the process round up a legion of devoted followers.

They’ve brought forward and revolutionised concept in an almost neglected element of fashion – the selective enlistment of artistic talent who change from season to season and are given the task of applying their own uninhibited, creative ingenuity to make something truly different.

COLAB’s prolific pairings have seen sunglasses made by some of the most distinctive creative heavyweights both locally and from afar – D-mote, Perks and Mini, Marok and Kidrobot to name a few. With two strong seasons already behind them, a new team is stepping up again for the third range of collaborative eyewear. Louise McClean found out from mastermind Dave Allison just how he pulls the whole project together.

Louise McClean: COLAB is not only the name of your label, but also the fundamental idea and ethos behind it. All your eyewear has been a product of collaboration with a diverse array of impressive artists and designers who are at the top of their game. How do you decide who comes on board for a collection?

Dave Allison: We like to keep our fingers on the global pulse and are always on the lookout for artists and designers who are really shining. We particularly like edgy creatives who are not afraid of pushing the boundaries and trying something new. Australian artists who have recently broken the international market are amongst our favourites, as are artists and designers from abroad such as New York. I was recently over there photographing COLAB’s new collection and blown away by the place. I hadn’t been there for a few years but the place is always such an explosion of talent.

LM: For this collection you’ve teamed up with Mike Perry, Will Sweeney, Deanne Cheuk, Chris Hopkins and Jonathan Zawada and The Presets. Have you noticed marked differences in the way each approaches their work?

DA: Definitely. As each designer/artist designs in a method true to their personal style and identity it’s always different. Everyone always has different routines, styles, and obvious aesthetics that work best for them, and everyone communicates in a different way. And this is what makes COLAB so unique. Every season adds a completely new flavour to the mix. I’m lucky enough to be able to work with these artists that work in different mediums and have different philosophies and aesthetics, I think for both of us it’s a good thing. The artist working on a unique accessory such as sunglasses and putting their name to a product. And for myself being able to work with these pretty clever cats.

LM: You also have a mystery designer for your third collection. Why have you chosen to involve a guest artist whose identity will never be revealed?

DA: No one likes routine, predictability or banality do they? Instilled deep within COLAB’s ethos is the desire to shock, confront, distort and challenge preconceived ideas – like the artists we work with daily. It also gives us another element of mystery and intrigue.

LM: It’s probably safe to say that although the artists you have recruited are pretty versatile, most of them probably have not dabbled in eyewear design before. When you look at the end result does the artist’s style and creative energy usually manifest itself in a similar way to their known work, or is it quite different because of the nature of the product?

DA: I hope so!! It isn’t any easy thing to achieve by any means… Some artists obviously have this in mind when collaborating, and others just plain and simply wish to create their favourite pair of sunnies. So yes, my plan to be both sympathetic with their integrity and desired outcome. COLAB tries to be the facilitators of function for the artists, and for the people, the purveyors of taste. In the end it’s all about personal style and expression. Working with a niche accessory is something attractive to most creatives who in the past, may have been limited to a two dimensional palette.

LM: Are you ever surprised with what they come up with?

DA: Yes! Of course – always – and to me, this is the charm of the design process we adopt. Like a naive student in art school – the rules and preconceived ideas of what you can and can’t do are thrown out the window and we start from scratch mostly. Sometimes the artists’ alter-ego’s come out and they come up with something that I totally wouldn’t have expected. Sometimes little things such as functionality are compromised for the ‘look’ so then it’s back to the drawing board. I can never forget how amazed I was when working with Rockin’ Jellybean and he hand sketched all the frame shapes and coloured them with a pencil, he then scanned each sunglass image and photo montage it (to approximate scale) onto a photograph of himself. Genius! Though the actual dimensions were hard to work out…

LM: Collaborating is an ideas driven process, in saying that surely there are a multitude of ideas flung around at the drawing board. Is it challenging to work with so many different artists at the one time?

DA: Again this is the charm of the process we adopt – I guess the most challenging part of this is in the end product. I need a collection of sunglasses that are delivered seasonally. And like other designers, we have deadlines! Sometimes these deadlines don’t always fit in with the schedules of the international artists we’re working with, that to me is the most challenging thing – the timing and delivery.

LM: I know that creative freedom is paramount and unrestricted for anyone who has designed eyewear for your collection, but have you ever worked with someone that had the most insane idea, something like solid gold glasses, and you’ve had to say no?

DA: Yeah we’ve had a lot of crazy stuff like the ultimate wraps that Rockin’ Jellybean designed that were almost verging on a headband that’s over your eyes with a mirrored lenses where the actual sunglass was yellow. That’s verging on costume jewellery! In saying that everyone wants to design a pair that are classic with a twist, or just make some that are cool. So yes, but rationality prevailed!

LM: It’s a distinctive concept behind COLAB sunglasses, having a unique character which embodies its creator, although it may not necessarily appeal to anyone, as the purpose of their design is not to please any particular target market, but to unleash unbridled creativity. How important is this philosophy?

DA: It is very important and that is why our ethos shall remain – There’s no constraint, no rules to follow, no target market to appease. We leave the design to the designers and then turn their vision into something tangible.

LM: Your eyewear is extremely exclusive. Only 1000 pairs of each style in the whole world, serial numbers with the artists. What are your reasons behind making COLAB sunglasses so restrictively available?

DA: The limited nature of COLAB glasses ensures that they remain as art rather than a mass produced, readily available consumer product. They are collectibles and we want people to purchase them, and love them as such, but we don’t want the edginess of them to wear thin when every store, magazine and Joe Blow is seen with them. Each edition is as unique as the person drawn to them, so it’s a novelty to own a pair.

LM: You’ve created three successful collections of eyewear. Do you plan to broaden your horizons with the Colab label in the future or will it remain strictly sunnies?

DA: At this stage we are content in trying to perfect this craft. Though, this season we’ve released an optical line, which we are all really happy with. The demand was very high, and so many wearers were buying two of the same style and turning one pair into opticals, it just made sense. The response has been phenomenal bordering on overwhelming. There are always ideas in the pipeline, though for the most part, we like to take one thing at a time…

Latest offerings from Colab

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Vanilla Themes

tristan — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 02:22:15 +0000

Words: Kat Hartmann Images: Bill Cotter

Spent any time making the news lately? You might find an appropriation of yourself in Bill Cotter’s debut novel, Fever Chart. Cotter is fond of basing his characters on people he sees in the news. You may not recognise yourself though; he tweaks said characters just enough to make them his own.

After completing his debut novel, Fever Chart. Bill Cotter became something of an enigma to me. The online medium divulged nothing of his secrets. It housed little more than a few hundred of his written words. The sum total of this man was – unbelievably, in the cyber age where anonymity has become so very 2005 – no more than a few hundred tangible pages of impressively written words (read: a book). Until, that is, opportunity arose.

Before speaking to Cotter for the first time I struggled to rationalise the mental image of a man who, it had been hinted to me, was intimidated by much of the world beyond his own front door in the garishly oversized Central American state of Texas. As if to add to my mental-picture disparity, I discovered Cotter converses sans twang and owns no guns to speak of – despite the fact that no state licence is required to possess a rifle, shotgun or handgun in Texas. Guns to Texans are what dogs are to Vancouverins – everyone has at least one.

I had the impression that Cotter is not a man that would sit happily with the confines of any one stereotype. Fever Chart is certainly not your average debut literary offering. The book deals with mental illness, institutions, homelessness, madness, obsessive love and hopelessness as if they were all Sunday-dinner discussion topics. Or, in Cotters words: “Vanilla themes.”

When I reach Cotter on the phone it’s late afternoon in Austin. He reveals he’s a little nervous about our interview but quickly finds his stride. A few minutes in and he’s handling it like a seasoned media coach. It doesn’t take long for my suspicions about him avoiding stereotypes to be confirmed – approximately the time it takes me to digest his answer to one of my earlier questions and the honesty it was imparted with: no spin here. I ask what inspired some of the particularly confronting sections of the novel, the ones set in various mental facilities. He openly admits that many of the book’s protagonist, Jerome’s experiences are based on his own.

Says Cotter, “The book was [written] mostly from personal experience… The ‘evil’ New Orleans Hospital was based on a hospital in Massachusetts. One of the earlier hospitals in the very beginning of the story was related to one I stayed at for about two and a half years.”

At no point during our conversation does he try to avoid questions about mental health issues – a subject matter still skirted around by many and considered quite personal, even taboo, by more still. In fact, the opposite is true. When quizzed about what inspired the writing of the novel Cotter delves further in to the cathartic motivation behind the book.

“I would say it was a kind of a deliverance from just a process.” He offers. “[There was] so much I needed to say; so much of the history of mental illness in general. In terms of how public institutions administer it [mental health care]. I don’t know any other way of putting it. I had so many bad experiences in the system that I just wanted to take some real stabs at it.”

Unbelievably, Cotter seems apologetic for his motivation. “It’s kind of vindictive really.” He says by way of acknowledgment. “I’m kind of embarrassed by that. I took some shots at the psychiatric system in the US.”

It’s refreshing to find yourself in conversation with someone as honest and forthright about the darker parts of their life, as they are their successes. It’s an honesty that makes his work so readable and, in turn, some of the events of this fictional novel so disconcerting. You can’t help wondering if perhaps the mental health system in the States would benefit from finding itself at the receiving end of a few more poignant shots.

Until late last year, Cotter’s work was just another unpublished work in a pile of many – very, very many – waiting to be perused by one of the editors at McSweeney’s. Prior to that, the aforementioned manuscript had done the round of its fair share of publishing houses; receiving an equal amount of rejection notices. Then that storm hit. Considering the better part of the book is set in New Orleans Cotter began to rethink the process.

“Originally, it was when Hurricane Katrina hit that I planted the finished Fever Chart manuscript in a drawer – actually a cardboard box that later was invaded by pretty gnarly carpenter ants – hungry, apparently, for bad writing. It seemed arrogant and insensitive to flog a book about New Orleans without mentioning its most devastating storm.”

The aspiring author decided it was time to lay the then-titled The Bloodletting Calendar to rest. Clearly his girlfriend, poet Annie La Ganga, was not so resigned to this gloomy fate. She discovered that Picador, Chronicle Books and McSweeney’s all accepted unagented manuscripts. A year later a rather salient email arrived in his inbox – the little San Francisco bay area publishing house that could (make literary successes) wanted to publish Fever Chart.

McSweeney’s have a knack for plucking authors from obscurity and helping them rise to success. Some equate the secret to their success with the publishing house’s ability to print established authors along side the up-and-coming they’re known to champion. The late, some-toted genius of our literary generation, David Foster Wallace was no stranger to the McSweeney’s printed page. Nor are Stephen King, Zadie Smith, Nick Hornby, Miranda July and the prolific Joyce Carol Oates.

Others equate it to a kind of sixth sense when it comes to selecting work from their ever-increasing – but never ignored – pile of submissions. My money is on a little-bit-of-column-A-little-bit-of-column-B scenario.

Cotter’s sincerity and frank approach to his mental-health history carries over into discussion about other areas of his life. Up until recently he has been providing McSweeney’s Internet Tendencies, the online arm of his multifaceted publishing house, with weekly written accounts of his bankruptcy proceedings. As proceedings wrap up so, he admits, does fodder for the weekly instalments.

The antecedently mentioned bankruptcy centers on a book restoration business that, up until recently, Cotter ran in his now-home town of Austin, Texas. It’s a self-taught trade he’s still very passionate about. The “shameful” process has not quashed his enthusiasm for the avocation. It’s still palpable in his explanation:

“I was very lucky in that my first customers were rare book dealers.” He elucidates. “They dealt in 15th, 16th, 17th century books – mostly printed books instead of manuscripts. I got to hold, and work with, books that I never would have seen outside of a rare book room in a library”

It’s an endeavour he’ll return to – once the nasty business of declaring bankruptcy is finally put to rest (any day now he assures me). And one he’ll also be incorporating into the publishing of Fever Chart. The plan is to create three one-off, author-bound copies of the book. The binding of one will consist of his canceled credit cards (a product of the bankruptcy), another of pennies (a on-going theme in the novel) and the last, a straight jacket. Upon competition Cotter plans to hand them over to Eli Horowitz, his publisher and Senior Editor at McSweeney’s, to utilise in whatever manner he deems fit.

There’s already a second novel nearing completion, tentatively titled The Instant of The Mothers. The premise of which is a departure from Fever Pitch. Apparently, “It’s more character driven.” He says. Upon release of Fever Pitch Cotter and La Ganga plan to commence a rather impromptu book tour of parts of the USA and Canada. By a delightfully romantic twist of fate the couple’s books are both set for release this month. Details of the tour are still in the works… It’s rumoured to include couchsurfers.com, Vancouver and a McSweeney’s event in San Francisco. If you can get yourself to one of the stops of that book-based touring bandwagon, do. Buy a book; get it signed ‘With love, Bill Cotter’. Take it back to the old school.

Fever Chart will be available in bookstores across the USA later this month. It can also be purchased online at the McSweeney’s store.

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Get Modern

tristan — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 02:21:56 +0000

Words: Gabriel Knowles Images: Daniel Boud

It’s a strange thing to consider, but at a ripe old median age of 26, Dappled Cities are a product of a nearly bygone era. A time when hours were spent meticulously aligning tapes to record just one track, when only the labels owned Pro Tools and you had to accept your first real gig might be supporting an entirely inappropriate band.

“We played two gigs in high school. One was a battle of the bands and we lost and the other we supported a death metal band called Segression and we got called ‘fucking pansies’ and finished the set early.” Co-singer Tim Derricourt recounts. Not exactly surprising considering they were called Periwinkle back then and definitely not the stuff dreams are made of but a good ten years on and Dappled Cities have moved right on.

With their third album Zounds about to hit record stores the gents from Dappled are being hailed as one of Australia’s most solid bands of recent times, both live and in the studio. Considering founding members Derricourt, Alex Moore and Dave Rennick have been playing together since 1997 before Alan Kumpulainen and Ned Cooke joined more recently it’s no mistake they’re tight.

“We literally spent three years recording into a tape machine!” Derricourt laughs. “The bands we really respect even though we’ve diverged from them musically like Weezer and Modest Mouse, spent years making recordings before they had any success. That’s why a band like The Drones are doing so well now.”

Despite their status as one of the last bastions of the analogue age Zounds is very much a progressive record, so diverse that it’s hard to place a finger squarely on where their latest offering sits. The fact they used three producers to finish it off – Chris Coady (TV on the Radio, Yeah Yeah Yeahs), Wayne Connolly (You Am I, The Vines) and Scott Horscroft (The Presets, Silverchair) – could have a little to do with that.

Three producers might seem a touch excessive but the Dappled lads have never been afraid of their ambitions, so much so that their relationship with the big name Coady wasn’t exactly a smooth one. “He was the biggest name we’ve worked with and he knew it, so a lot of the recording process was injected with clashes. But maybe we just knew, and expressed, what we wanted so strongly that it may have been tough for others around us to take at the time who knows?” Rennick said afterwoods.

Of course there are the obligatory tips of the hat to times gone by and preceding tracks but as Derricourt explains they’re very much rooted in the subconscious.

“I think that’s the best part of putting out an album when people say ‘obviously you really like this band’, and you’ve never even heard that band. Or when they say it sounds like Ian Durie and The Blockheads and you say well that’s a band my parents used to play on record when I was seven and I haven’t listened to it since but it must have been stored in there somewhere. I find that fascinating because when you’re writing songs you don’t think about the influences.”

“With this album I feel that it’s very considered, not so much as in the influences but that it’s modern. We wanted to make a very modern sounding record. There are so many amazing bands doing that like Grizzly Bear, Gang Gang Dance and even the Flaming Lips still and I think the album is a response to wanting to keep up with those forward thinking bands.”

Not content with just releasing an album with the standard showcase featuring a performance of the likely single and a press offensive they put together an exhibition and played Zounds front to back.

“That was just an idea we had, we wanted to have an event where we could really put the album in people’s hands. Not at a big club and not at a little pub. We decided to have artists curate work inspired by the album, so we sent off the tracks and got some amazing responses. I was genuinely shocked by the response because obviously we’ve never had an exhibition before.” Derricourt continues.

“It was really diverse. There were moment when I was really emotionally affected by what I saw to be the representation of the song. As a band the main way you represent a song is by a video clip and generally because of the budget you have you can only do it with one or two songs an album. I mean you can make your own little clips but they’re never that great. But seeing an artist create a visual representation of your work like a video clip is just as strong, it made me realise I want to see a visual representation of all our work.”

Are they aiming to be Australia’s answer to David Byrne. “Yeah, we want to become the cultural ambassadors of Australia!” Says a tongue-in-cheek Derricourt.

Zounds is out on August 15 through Speak n Spell. Dappled Cities are touring nationally from August 13 until September 5.

For your chance to win a copy of Zounds when it’s released on August 14 just email prize@theblackmail.com.au

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Every Picture Tells A Story

tristan — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 02:10:21 +0000

Words: Tristan Ceddia Images: Craig Redman

The digital age that we live in paired with the increasing capacity of the world wide web sees literally millions of images making their way online every day. That’s not to say all of them are amazing, but the critical mass of the image is surely undeniable. So undeniable, that these days humans have the opportunity use images in place of words to tell a story or send out a message. Craig Redman from Rinzen debuted the blog Darcel Dissapoints just over a year ago as a personal diary composed entirely of illustrations. Drinking, skateboarding, exhibitions and the general day to day are all used by Craig, via Darcel, to bring the life and times of New York City to the world.

Tristan Ceddia: Darcel popped up on the internet just over a year ago now. Was Darcel around before this time? Why was Darcel born?

Craig Redman: I started a small animation called ’5 Disappointing Moments’ about five or so years ago (don’t ask, it’s still not finished) and I needed a character to play the lead role, to act out the “moments” as it were. The “moments” in the animation were non-descript every day things, like your iPod battery going dead during a favourite song (hey, they were cool back then). I wanted the character to be super simple, a kind of blank canvas where the incident, and not the character, became the focus. Hence Darcel was born. I was also obsessed with my friends constant reference to everyone as “eggs on stilts” (skinny jeans, developing beer gut) at the time, so I guess that makes Darcel self referential as well.

The blog is an extension of the idea of the animation, except this time Darcel is the focus. I didn’t want to forget any of the small observations I had when I moved to New York and since I’m no Hemmingway I decided to start an illustrated blog rather than attempt to pen my thoughts.

TC: For the reader who isn’t familiar with the world of Darcel tell us a bit about him.

CR: Darcel is a miserable hipster who skulks around New York casting an cynical eye (singular) on himself and the stuff that surrounds him. They can be quiet moments alone or self deluded grand observations while plum drunk at openings.

TC: You’re an illustrator, graphic designer and head up the internationally-spread collective Rinzen. Is Darcel you having some fun blending life with illustration or is he something more? What’s your relation to Darcel? Is he a direct representation of you as character? Does Darcel come under the Rinzen umbrella, or does he appear more as a side step?

CR: Almost everything Darcel does I do, although he reacts to it in a more exuberant or exasperated way. It’s fun to be able to record everyday activities into a vector “snapshot” that captures a small moment in time, something that alludes to a grander story.

Instead of treating illustration as something reverential, I want to use it to explore the banality of these everyday moments. Around the time I started doing Darcel, the commissioned illustrations I was doing were more complex, so my blog posts were an effort to simplify things, to clean out some space in my head. It’s me letting go a bit, not being so uptight about my designs. The posts are spontaneous illustrations that I can execute quickly, rather than labour over for days.

Rinzen is a party of five, spread across Brisbane, Sydney, Berlin and me in New York. We’ve been together just short of 10 years now so it’s inevitable that we all have our own personal interests, thou these outcomes really are just an extension of the magical world of Rinzen. Steve paints a lot, Karl does The Pop Manifesto, Rilla collects and displays her illustration finds on Flickr and Adrian dabbles in the comic world, collaborating with people like Paul Pope.

TC: As well as running through the motions of the day to day, Darcel Disappoints offers an interesting social commentary on aspects of life in New York City. Art shows, boutiques, restaurants and bars, fashion, anxiety. At the best of times, Darcel seems a little depressed by all of this. Is it living in New York or life in general that gets him down?

CR: Darcel isn’t really depressed (although I might need to talk to my psychiatrist about that… if I could afford one), occasionally miserable yes, but not depressed. He just has certain expectations for things and is consequently let down when they aren’t reached. Like it sucks to go to MoMA, one of the best art institutions in the world, and be disappointed with a show. Or to walk outside your building and see 10, 000 Alife stickers plastered over a stop sign, you’re like “Okay, okay, I get it. Enough already!”.

TC: How long have you lived in NY? Is the Big Apple still rotten?

CR: I’m still fresh! I’ve been here two and a half years or so now.

New York is a shiny red apple with a rotten interior. I don’t mean the people but rather the city itself. The streetscape and buildings look so grand and then you chip away a little at the paintwork and find it’s all held up by crackly old sticky tape, layers of new hastily stuck over the old. Everyone is living in these expensive dumps but no one cares, everyone’s super friendly because everyone is just so happy to be in New York. People work really, really hard here which is great because it forces me to be more productive. If you stop moving you’ll get trampled.

TC: Darcel keeps in good company toting ongoing collaborations with some of the words best young designers including Alex Trochut, Ryan Cox and Eric Elms. Are these collaborations part of Darcel connecting with his peers, or are they more about jamming out with friends?

CR: A bit of both I’d say. A lot of the people involved are friends, in either an email or physical sense, but it also gives me an opportunity to approach people I really respect, designers I hold in such high regard it’s quite flabbergasting to receive their files and dig through the vectors (or pixels). Rinzen was built on the idea of remixing each others works so sending out files for people to stamp in their own way comes pretty naturally. The original concept was for other people to invite Darcel into their world and I like seeing how designers interpret (or mis-interpret) that basic idea. Some people use it as a platform to have their say on a particular issue, others just pour beer on Darcel’s head – either I’m fine with.

TC: You recently produced some lighters with the Parisian boutique Colette. I spoke to Jonathan Zawada last month about how dissatisfaction with real work often leads to the pursuit of more satisfying personal projects, which can often come full circle and evolve into more enjoyable work. Is Darcel proving this to be true or is he more of a hobby?

CR: Totally. You do new work off your own back for no money while you’re working on paid client work that references your old work. The new work eventually reaches the masses and people/clients start asking for that style. If you don’t keep pursuing new ideas then you just keep doing the same old thing over and over, then your work starts looking like a knock-off of your own style. Does that make sense? That was a mouthful…

TC: What adventures does Darcel have coming up?

CR: The next collaboration coming up is with Steven Harrington, very excited about that one. September is with Mario Hugo who is super amazing, I can’t wait to see how his fluid style gets mixed in with Darcel’s snap-to-grid symmetry. I’m doing some Darcel vinyl wall art with Bodega, The site launches sometime in August, they’ll also be releasing work from Barry McGee, Surface to Air, Wood Wood, Dalek and a few others.

More on life in NYC from Craig/ Darcel here

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Please Be Seated

tristan — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:06:55 +0000

Words: Caroline Clements Images: Benjamin Lichtenstein

If there is one thing you can’t live without, it’s a chair. Imagine life without the chair at your desk, the seats on the bus, and the stools at the bar of your local watering hole. Life just wouldn’t be the same. And there’s one man who knows that better than most.

A trained furniture maker by trade, Nicholas Barratt, is not only the head of sales in Melbourne at European chair makers, Thonet, but is also the owner of a large cactus garden, a greyhound named Tahini, and influenced heavily by the design style of a protestant religious sect called the Shakers.

In Italy on holiday a couple of years ago, Barratt stumbled into a humble little restaurant to refuel after a long day traipsing the streets of Florence. Resting back in to the comfort of his chair he noticed it’s familiar design – a classic and original Thonet design – the chair was a simple No.18 bentwood chair made of beech wood and ply, and considered the ‘signature’ Thonet chair. Seen in cafes and restaurants around the world, this timeless classic is one of the most successful chair designs ever made.

With a European Beech frame and plywood seat, this simplicity of the Thonet No.18 encapsulates the elegance of bentwood furniture. The process of bending wood is one that had been mastered over centuries, but one that is particularly familiar to the Thonet trademark. This procedure involves soaking the wood before putting it into a pressure chamber and then steaming it. “The process of bending wood in the factory is an archaic one and cannot be replicated simply. Using three men to bend the timber around the forms, the actual movement is ballet-like,” says Barratt. Pronounced Ton-net, Thonet is originally a family owned furniture brand from Vienna Austria that began in the 1800s. The original company has since disbanded but the Thonet brand is still true to its heritage for fine furniture, specialising in tables and chairs.

It is a version of one of these original Thonet chairs that Barratt will be launching at Saturday InDesign in Sydney later in the month. “We are unveiling a couple of new chairs from our reissue edition there, one of which has taken me over a year to develop. Another of these is a new rocking chair that I created from an existing chair. It will be a limited edition and come in some bright colours.” Also on display will be the new colour range for Thonet’s Planar chair and new models from Max designs recent appearance at Salon Internazionale del Mobile Milan.

As is the case for those whose profession is a labour of love, Barratt himself has too been seated in the furniture industry for some years. As a young chap trying to make a penny, Barratt was regularly found at Sydney markets peddling handmade goods constructed from recycled timber, before opening his own shop in Annandale. Influenced by the religious sect the Shakers, developed from the Quakers, one of the main attributes of the Shakers was to build. This belief has since generated a unique culture and way of life that has enriched cultural history and inspired many modern fields. After then completing his studies at the Sturt School for Wood in Mittagong, Barratt began selling his own designs to the likes of Orson & Blake. These included storage units, tables, and sculptural pieces. All this before moving down south and eventually started working at Thonet headquarters in Fitzroy three years ago.

In this time Barratt has garnered a rather impressive chair collection of his own. “I started collecting chairs around 15 years ago. One of the first chairs purchased was an American Ladderback circa 1820.” Over the years his collection has evolved into an eclectic range of chairs with my main focus being on Mid Century designs from a mix of both international and local collections such as Arne Jacobsen, Harry Bertoia, Charles & Ray Eames, Grant Featherston, Douglas Snelling and Clement Meadmore, amongst a number of other treasures. With around 85 chairs and stool in total, Barratt’s chair collection spans decades of radical innovation in furniture design.

His top five favourites chairs are broken down into categories:

Plywood – Jacobsen Ant Chair (original 3 leg early 50’s) & McClay Kone chair
Steel – Bertoia Bird chair and foot stool
Fibreglass – Eames Rocker
Upholstered – Featherston 1953 television series

And while he spends most of his time on the sofa, it is his Danish rocker that is his favourite chair to sit in.”My motto however is ‘chairs are for viewing not sitting’. I really do consider them as sculptural pieces.”

While the basic technique of making furniture from bent materials has not changed significantly since the 19th century, “the reason that a brand like Thonet is so popular is that it is a trusted brand that make simple and graceful designs at a reasonable price,” Barratt states. “We are by no means making luxury items here, our main clientele is the hospitality industry.” With that in mind, I look below and inspect my current seating arrangement. They can be found at restaurants such as Culter & Co and Ladro in Melbourne, and Rockpool and the Ivy in Sydney. So next time you’re perched at your local café you might consider where you’re resting your rear, could just be one from the Thonet range.

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Family Ties

tristan — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 15:06:33 +0000

Words & Images: Matilda Brown

It was a long time ago when my mother sat down at her computer, blew the dust away from the worn-out keypad, took a deep breath in and began her first draft of Beautiful Kate. Originally set in the 70s in Idaho, she’s adapted it to work in contemporary outback Australia with flashbacks to the 80s. It’s a gothic love story, a redemption story, a story about a family dealing with the past and struggling with the present, it’s about growing up in isolation, awkward sexual encounters, forgiveness and grief. But don’t write it off as another depressing Australian film because it’s not. It’s handled with a deft touch and as a result it offers and delivers on a plethora of themes.

I bore witness to the arduous struggle through the two-year writing process. Mum, cooped up in her office emitting disparaging sighs well into the night as she wrote and re-wrote draft upon draft. There were mornings when mum, suffering from a brain-too-switched-on-to-be-switched-off lumbered down the stairs ranting about another sleepless night spent devising conflict between siblings Kate and Ned, procuring a love/hate relationship between the dying Bruce and provocative Toni or inventing a fantasy life for loyal old Sally. There were problems with dialogue, the weaving together of past and present (Beautiful Kate is a parallel narrative), adaptation dilemmas, not to mention the contentious issues that make the story worth telling.

“Audiences are more cynical and demanding than we were in the 70s but given original obstacles to thwart our lovers, its not easy living in our permissive world and given contemporary moral quandaries, there is no doubt that audiences still want to be romanced and still want to be transported to exotic locales with beautiful alluring characters.” She’s talking about Kate, Bruce, Ned, Cliff, Toni and Sally – the characters I developed an aversion toward because they had my mother’s unwavering attention. Another year passed and albeit feeling a little neglected, I watched on in admiration, as mum, even when champing at the bit, void of sleep, and faced with us demanding lot, kept the pedal to the metal. It was bitter sweet when she finished the script. Soon after I learnt that she planned to direct it too.

After what seemed like a lifetime of waiting, dad, as producer, who also plays the dying Bruce and co-producer Leah-Churchill Brown finally secured budget. With the green light shinning bright, the writer was transported from the dark office to the Australian outback where she became the director. So seventy odd cast and crew headed off to freezing South Australia, (spare a thought for Sophie Lowe and Maeve Dermody who both reveal a bit more than their fabulous acting abilities). We listened to mum make her pre-shoot speech. “If you’re not having fun or if you have a problem with something, come and talk to me. I want this to be a great experience for everyone.” And she meant it to. She doesn’t say things she doesn’t mean.

As part of the press team I interviewed all of the main cast including Ben Mendelson and Rachel Griffith along with the other cast and the producers, director, cinematographer, set designer and the costume designer amongst others. For six weeks I watched on through the lens of my own camera as I filmed behind the scenes, recording everything from the gutting of road-kill to helicopter rides above Lake Eyre. But it was mum in her element as a director that impressed me most. Because even though I’d grown up on film sets it was very different to see a mass of humble, grounded people working together to create someone’s vision. It was an absolute privilege to see someone make everyone feel important and in safe hands. “I loved working with Rachel as she’s a fearless director, which is the kind of director that you hope to work with. She’s written it and is directing it, but at the same time, she has a distinct vision. She’s definitely not locked into a particular thing and very open to the way that things unfold and the ideas that come from other people.” Director of Photography, Andrew Commis told my camera toward the end of the six-week shoot.

The outback is a strange place where isolation, clear air and wide-open starry skies make for incredibly vivid dreams. Everyone had them. Except for mum, who according to dad tossed and turned each and every night on set. Even after the shoot with Beautiful Kate ready to be unveiled, still it seems, the woman cannot let her sleeping dogs lie. And I wonder if she questions if it’s all been worth it.

“That was the best bit of the whole thing, it being a family affair, working with my daughters and nephew and the fact that Bryan and I could do it together was so fantastic for us. To be married for 25 years and then to make a film together, I highly recommend it. To have your daughters working on the film doing such a great job and being so proud of them. I hope they like the process, I hope they’re part of the industry because it’s a great industry to be a part of when it goes well and when we’ve had as much fun as we’ve had on Beautiful Kate with as much hard work, creativity, and laughs you couldn’t recommend it highly enough. We’ve had a great time together.” And from that response, I suppose I might have to concede it was.

The journey has reached its zenith and it’s now completely out of her hands. To her surprise the reviews have been consistently outstanding. And as if to mark my words she appears grinning from ear to ear and reads aloud the end of a review by Moviehole’s Clint Morris, which states that Beautiful Kate is “Easily one of the best films of the year, and quite possibly one of the best and most important Australian films ever made,” and with a childlike squeal, she slaps me on the leg in excitement. “He’s talking about my film!” she says, prouder than punch.

But that night while I slept, apparently Mother didn’t. While dad’s hanging the clothes on the line mum lumbers down the stairs ranting about characters from the new book she’s adapting into a screenplay. “Did you sleep last night mum?” I ask, genuinely concerned that my mother is turning into a crazy woman. Her response is predictable. “Not a wink. I’ve been struggling with the conflict between Deb’s internal need verses her external want… Is this for me?” she asks, as she grabs my cup of tea and disappears again.

Beautiful Kate is in cinemas from August 6

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