JOIN THE LOST TRAIL FOR DRIFT'S FINAL DAYS

The LOST Trail this weekend is Leichhardt Council's answer to Marrickville Council's MOST trail last weekend.  Download the LOST map here - Articulate project space and studios are #6. See it on Google maps here.  Open 11am - 6pm Sat - Sun 23 + 24 March. 

DRIFT finissage is on Sunday, 24 March from 3pm

DRIFT ARTISTS' & CURATORS' DISCUSSION

DOWNLOAD the DRIFT catalogue

DRIFT artists and curators discuss the exhibition and the place of flânerie in art.

DRIFT artists/curators' talks Sunday 17 March at 2pm

DOWNLOAD the DRIFT catalogue

You are invited to  DRIFT artists' & curators' talks on Sunday 17 March at 2pm -  with Judith Duquemin, Marlene Sarroff and Anke Stäcker. 

Per Formo Untitled 2012 (detail)

From An invitation to drift… 

Curator's essay by Judith Duquemin

The purpose of this exhibition is to highlight aspects of flânerie that relate to acts of creativity in contemporary visual art because the artist as flâneur/ flâneuse is an intriguing and complex individual in a global society. Aspects of their identity are revealed in this exhibition of photo-media, painting, print-media, digital art, multi-channel video, and sculpture and installation, by six established artists from Norway, UK, USA, and Australia. 

Flânerie from the C16th simply referred to acts of strolling or idling. With an interest in modern city life, the French Romantic poet, Charles Baudelaire (1821) portrayed the flâneur as a gentleman stroller of the streets, open-minded and unprejudiced, wandering without aim, a reflective observer of circumstance, a lover of the crowd. ...

The subject of flânerie has inspired many writers, artists and philosophers since the last century. For example, the spectator was a central figure of modernity strolling around the iron and glass covered arcades of 19th century Paris (Walter Benjamin); the man who strategically shelters himself within the crowd (Edgar Alan Poe); the surrealist devising random chance situations that reveal the real nature of the city; the flâneuse with her own private experience of modernity (Janet Wolff); the traveller directed and informed by aesthetic encounters arising from the urban terrain, a process known as dériving or drifting (Guy Debord)i. Within the arts the writer and philosopher Susan Sontag saw parallels between the flâneur and the photographer.  ...

essay continued

Please also come to the DRIFT finissage  on Sunday, 24 March from 3pm.

You are also invited to follow Leichhardt Council's LOST trail on Saturday 23rd and Sunday 24th March - DOWNLOAD LOST FLYER & MAP 

DRIFT - THE EXHIBITION

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Exhibition: DRIFT: Flânerie in Contemporary Art. Curated by: Judith Duquemin and Anke Stäcker 

Milein Cosman (UK), Judith Duquemin (Aus), Per Formo (Nor), Marlene Sarroff (Aus), Anke Stäcker (Ger), Vagner M. Whitehead (USA) 

28 Feb – 23 Mar 2013  

We sat on the sandy concrete steps at Dee Why Beach in the inescapable January heat and discussed our devotion to travel and art. One a painter, one a photographer, flânerie, we agreed was a subject that linked our practices…As it turned out, the exhibition Drift was organized on different continents in the cities of London, Sydney, Hamburg, and Paris over twelve months, culminating in March, 2013, both of us communicating through Email, Skype and Drop Box, until everything came together one year later at Articulate project space, Leichhardt, Sydney.  Judith & Anke  ...cont

above background: Per Formo Untitled 2012

above/below: Milein Cosman Rhein Wanderer 1955

above foreground: Judith Duquemin 

Painting for Reconstruction: Spectral Trapezoidal Icositetrahedron 2013

 below & foreground above: Marlene Sarroff Random Accumulation 1 2013

Vagner M Whitehead Silver Code 2010/12

below & foreground above:

Marlene Sarroff Random Accumulation 2 2013

left: Anke Stäcker Gerda: Berlin Revisited 2012 

below: Anke Stäcker Gerda: Berlin Revisited 2012 (detail)

Judith Duquemin Reconstructed Painting: Red 2013

 Marlene Sarroff Random Accumulation 1 2013

Judith Duquemin Scottish Encounters 2010

 foreground:  Anke Stäcker Gerda: Berlin Revisited 2012 (detail)

photos by Anke Stäcker, Judith Duquemin and Margaret Roberts

Download DRIFT essay by Judith Duquemin

DRIFT: Flânerie in contemporary art - Opening event Saturday 2 March 2013, 4 to 7 pm

DOWNLOAD the DRIFT catalogue

Per Formo, Vision 1, 2001, acrylic on canvas, 190 x 275 cm

Articulate project space, Sydney

497 Parramatta Road, Leichhardt

Gallery hours Thur to Sun 11 - 6pm

Opening: 2 Mar 2013, 4 - 7 pm
Exhibition dates : 28 Feb to 24 March

DRIFT

Milein Cosman (UK), Judith Duquemin (Aus), Per Formo (Nor), Marlene

Sarroff ( Aus), Anke Stäcker (Ger), Vagner M Whitehead (USA)

Curated by: Judith Duquemin & Anke Stäcker

Written by: Dr Judith Duquemin

Drift is a multidisciplinary exhibition about flânerie in contemporary art.

The flâneur, first postulated by French poet, Charles Baudelaire in the late 19th

century was a city stroller and urban explorer. Saunterer, wanderer, drifter, the

deliberately aimless pedestrian, has other guises in a post-industrial age.

Duquemin and Stäcker are professional artists who assign a large amount of

research time to international travel, interpreting and documenting the city and

adjacent territories, within their respective fields. They have come together on

different continents to curate Drift at Articulate project space in Leichhardt, Sydney.

For Vagner M Whitehead, the mind’s wanderings are as important as the body in

motion, providing a greater understanding between space and self, and, city and

identity. Originally from Brazil, and currently Associate Professor of Art - New Media

at Oakland University in Rochester, USA, Vagner works with time-based and

traditional media to provide a parallel interpretation of the urban observer. Silver

Code is a multi-channel video presentation about aspects of the artist’s life.

Refuse from the street, industrial material, elastic, rubber, paper… , the ordinary

becomes the extraordinary in Marlene Sarroff’s, Random Accumulations 1&2. They

are freestanding 2M high stacks made up of wrapped personalized tablets that have

been subjected to a series of ‘process actions’! Each stack appearing similar though

made different to resemble life’s little metaphors.

A grown up doll takes a walk in Berlin… for the series of photographs by Anke

Stäcker, titled: Gerda: Berlin Revisited. She constructs a personal imaginary space

within the urban landscape in her images that is informed by memories, research,

oral history and legends from her childhood in Germany in the early 1950s.

Milein Cosman was born during the time of the Weimar Republic (1919). She

departed Germany three weeks before the outbreak of WW II to attend the Slade

School of Art in England. There, and later in London she met and drew many leading

artists, writers and musicians of the 20th century including Igor Stravinsky, Wilhelm

Furtwängler, Yehudi Menuhin, Francis Bacon, Ernst Gombrich, Iris Murdoch, Barbara

Hepworth, TS Eliot and, her husband Hans Keller… The etching Rhineland

Wanderer (1955) is an evocative portrayal of her father walking along the Rhine.

On the physiology of looking and seeing, Per Formo used simple rules and formal

structures applied to abstraction to create the large digital image Vision 1. He refers

to these as visual situations that disturb the automatism of visual perception, by

leading the eye to look closer and longer and differently, perhaps as a result of

illusionism, complexity, intensity, surprise, strangeness, repulsion. Visualizing he

says, is not a given. Per resides in Trondheim, a 1000 year old city in Norway.

Travelling between the hemispheres to observe differences in atmospheric light and

colour has been a pre-occupation for Judith Duquemin since 2009. She has applied

her observations to the digital projection titled: Reconstructed Painting: Red.

Diagonal grids navigate colour and light to form compositions that creatively explore

optics, using experimental processes that combine abstract, geometric, colour-field

painting with digital image making.

The narrow street-like interior of Articulate project space offers the art observer a

conscious and thought provoking opportunity to enter into the role of the flâneur/

flâneuse to appreciate how flânerie applies to multi-disciplinary visual arts practice in

contemporary art.