93. Astra Howard | The heightened drawing project

The concept for the Heightened Drawing Platform (HDP) project was inspired by 13th Century Byzantine iconographic artwork that Astra Howard chanced upon during a visit in 2008 to the National Gallery of Art on the Mall in Washington DC. The icon figures depicted were framed by triangular or ogival shaped golden archways, which illuminated their face and torso creating a heightened sense of poise and stature. The characters within these ethereal painted spaces appeared to look out to the audience from the security of their contained cloistered environment, having witnessed and accepted centuries of observers watching them, some even reproducing their image in pencil and paint.

The ‘icon’ in the HDP project, comes to life, embodied by the Action Researcher/Performer sitting inside the vehicle observing and being observed by passing members of the public. In this case, the ‘icon’, herself adopting the pen (or brush) through the act of drawing, reveals the ‘other/outer’ side of the picture, what is otherwise hidden, in the surrounding environment of the work. The mirrors on either side of the central viewing space are simultaneously used as devices to gain further ‘unseen’ perspectives or to witness 

momentary acts, reflected back into the delineated images of the city. 

Necessarily the Action Researcher/Performer works quickly, moving the whiteboard marker across the internal perspex surface at a pace in order to capture the dynamic and ever shifting view outside. The linear markings change in direction, dimension and relationship to one another depending upon the position of the vehicle at each location and the reflected overlapping elements viewed through the mirrors. 

The design of the HDP form also took inspiration from Astra’s 2009 visit to the renowned Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. The vaults in this cemetery were typically tall and slender in their construction with triangular and/or ogival shaped archway detailing. Each of the vaults appeared weather worn in grey and black subdued tones, the porous stone and water stained copper, blurring the fine marble work and inscriptions into uneven patterns and crevices. 

In the contemporary adaption of these images and forms, the HDP uses aluminium fabrication techniques, stainless steel and alusheet paneling. Built on wheels, the recording device can be moved to any street corner in a particular suburb, or wheeled across an entire city, or taken to a range of countries and cities around the world. 

In Redfern, local residents stopped in their tracks as they came across the HDP on their otherwise familiar footpaths, with those standing still long enough, witnessing themselves being drawn into the local urban scene. Others assisted holding the mirrors in strong winds, a few describing the form as a ‘time machine’ or a ‘birdcage’ for a rare human species, indeed, inhabitants from another time. For others, it was a catalyst for discussion about the changes they were observing in the local neighbourhood of Redfern, the gentrification and removal of Indigenous peoples being significant subjects of heightened concern. 

Astra Howard

Garry Trinh became a local Redfern resident in 2012. Within Walking Distance is Trinh's exploration of his new environment. Using SLOT as a starting point for a series of walking adventures, these photographs are the result of Trinh's exploration of Redfern and its surrounds. 

Through internal dialogue and curiosity, Trinh's photographs express a heightened visual awareness. They demonstrate that the most common subjects, approached with straightforward techniques, can be made 

beautifully new. They are enable a way of seeing and appreciating whatever is within walking distance.

Garry Trinh

“Are we and our junk reaching critical mass? If all our junk is made in China, we will have nothing worth digging upon the future. The trivial and shallow now represent the peak of Western civilisation. The internet brings the entire history of human achievement into our homes, but are we watching reality TV.

Welcome to the age where nearly everyone grows old, hates the young and is so busy being scared of dying the they have forgotten how to live. Stop, take a deep breath and step back.”

Will Coles

Not only biologically sound and environmentally safe, but also socially and aesthetically acceptable. 

"Farmers already loose up to 30% of some crops as a result of birds. Some bird species will double their population in the near future, which will have a dramatic effect on food security worldwide, and as you know food shortage is already a disturbing global phenomenon."
 

“Wildlife scientist and bird expert Kevin Shaw. The “Pet bird deterrent” borrows its form from the visual language of Bauhaus and Minimalism. It is marked as a tool for the protection of crops, thereby ensuring food security for the earths human population. But can an art work really save the world.”

Kenzee Patterson

The idea for this work was inspired by a collection of Jacob and Co. watches titled Epic Tourbillon. Marilyn Schneider is interested in this title because the billon part of tourbillon could easily be mistaken for billion and this word combined with epic suggests that these luxuries offer some form of abundance.

As these ‘excessories’ are usually decorated with hundreds of diamonds, the title implies an extensive display of conspicuous consumption fro the wearer, although their inevitable small scale undermines the use of language that promotes them.

Using the idea of a ‘face’ as a farad that exhibits excessively ambitious presentations of wealth, Schneider utilises sculptural installation to create a collection of replicas that reinterpret the glamorous norms of representation that emulate luxury and status.

I was between Tonga and Easter Island when I heard the Australian poet Rosemary Dobson had died. Martin Gascoigne emailed the news from Canberra, 2 July 2012. I had corresponded with Rosemary briefly in 2004 while curating an exhibition of work by her very close friend Rosalie Gascoigne for City Gallery, Wellington (NZ).

In the small world of things, my father had known Rosemary’s late husband Alec Bolton, a hand-press printer and renowned publisher at Brindabella Press. Between my farther and my brother Brendan, our family owns a complete set of every Brindabella book ever produced. In her heyday Rosemary Dobson would drive Rosalie Gascoigne around rural Canberra collecting road signs and old soft drink crates for her assemblages. These two exemplary figures would careen around the rolling country, riding the soft suspension of their hulking Holden station wagon, often reciting Romantic poetry.

When I heard Rosemary Dobson had died, I decided I would have an imagined last conversation with her. And the best place on the planet I could think of for this dialogue was the very remote Raoul Island, in the Kermadec Group, 1000Km north of New Zealand. Rosemary would enjoy such a Romantic setting. We would time the conversation so that it occurred on 8 October, which is the day the migrating whale population in the waters around Raoul Island is surveyed by the Department of Conversation workers on the island. Last year 126 whales were recorded during one four hour period. Hence “Whale Survey, Raoul Island, with Rosemary Dobson” a poem based on Rosemary’s “Poems for Wang River”t. This is how we leave things. Two poets talking, immersed in land and sea and sky, counting whales basking in the wonder of it all, now and for all time.

i.m. Rosemary Dobson 1920 - 2012

Whale survey, Raoul Island, with Rosemary Dobson

Gregory O’Brien

Two poets on a headland, mid-survey

might pause suddenly and say

will this be your whale, or mine?

Moving, accordingly from one observation area

to the next, a whale is ‘handed over’

Please take it. No, you first

Early morning spent ‘getting the eye in’

the velocity of clouds, sea conditions noted.

Breaching, logging, travelling, the Pacific

divided between Coral Bay and Tropic Bird Face

Bomb Shed, Hutchins Bluff and Blindspot. Later

Rosemary observed to a friend

from the sharpest point of her triangulation

of ocean: If I stand still enough, I can see

Wolverine Rock, a water spout and westerly,

one cow and calf

This installation suspends ‘Neg files’, plastic sleeves designed to protect and store film negatives, in columns of light, movement and colour. These relics of an era superseded by digital photography now houses fragments of Judy’s prints and drawings - re-assembled into a single work that documents her past works in a manner that is parallel to photography.

This project had a long gestation period and as it evolved Alexander moved from Australia to Europe, necessitating a development in how he approached the work from a physical and conceptual perspective. In addition to fascinatingly detailed instructions on installing his piece he provided these notes -

“From the beginning the motivation of this work, starting with our initial conversations about what might be shown in SLOT was to grapple with the concept of the window gallery itself. Focusing on it as space that one encounters from the street and at the same time being a space bringing the artwork into the public arena whilst still remaining a conventional form of a gallery space (white cube/non-interactive).

These original ideas focused on dealing with the very volume of the slot gallery in some way. First thoughts were to build a construction that did not fit into the space but was to be inserted any way. Ideas such as these were trying to engage the curiosity of passing pedestrian by creating a work that performs within the space itself and at the same time making it a foreign concealed object. 

The work then moved towards a direct interest in the actual SLOT window space, and was to replicate the volume into plywood. Made to look as though it had ‘turned’ within the confines of SLOT, appearing to have crumpled in on itself. 

These ideas remained attractive but unrealistic, especially if the installation was going to be shipped from Europe. The challenge was to take this thinking process towards something that could be installed by others via instruction. 

What developed from here was a work that challenged the concept of the window gallery and arrived at a project that covers the glass with images documenting the artist trying to fit something (a scrunched mattress) into a space it would not normally be seen in. This was an attractive move as it would also involve the passing viewer, creating an invitation to remove the posters, so as to reveal the scrunched mattress inside SLOT. 

Now the work is as much about interaction as it is about making art at a distance but also sticks to the original proposal to make an artwork that is present to the urban character of Redfern as a surrounding environment.”

Alexander Jackson Wyatt