Ken Unsworth’s monumental tribute

Ken Unsworth, Toyland Fever

The Ken Unsworth extravaganza in the Turbine Shed on Cockatoo Island has extended its stay and will now be on show until Sunday 2 August.

Conceived as a tribute to his late wife, Elisabeth, who died in December 2008, the exhibition is one of the largest self-funded projects ever mounted by an Australian artist.

The four large-scale installations are collectively titled A Ringing Glass (Rilke), a line from Rainer Marie Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus:

Be here among the vanishing in the realm of entropy,
be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings.

Another space is occupied by the specially built ballroom that hosted an opulent event when the exhibition opened on 28 May. The 160 guests enjoyed a four-course dinner, a live orchestra and, thanks to the two lessons they all had to commit to, dancing. Footage from the night is being screened in the ballroom during the exhibition.

Entry to the exhibition is free, and it’s open every day from 10am to 5pm. Sydney Ferries stops at Cockatoo Island on the Balmain/Woolich and Parramatta routes – more information here.

Two from 30×40: Erin Flannery and Ben Rak

30×40 is a group exhibition currently running at United Galleries Sydney in Darlinghurst. The title refers to the size of all the works in centimetres. With 53 works commissioned from 31 artists, there’s a good mix of styles and media.

Two young artists, showing two works each, caught our eye.

Erin Flannery Monday Morning Latte Line Up

Yes, that is a peg leg in the middle. Erin Flannery says she is “highly amused by ridiculously over-sized bags and jewellery, flashy brand names, killer heels and killer trends”.

The women in her work might look cool, at first glance, even when they’re missing an arm or sporting a wooden leg which, Flannery says, will be the next big trend: “Get in before the rush.”

A self-taught artist, Flannery lives in northern NSW.

Ben Rak Decoded (All star)

Printmaker Ben Rak is showing two prints: the basketball sneakers show here and a pair of Rayban Wayfarer sunglasses on a yellow background. In these screenprints, the image is broken into vertical lines of different thickness, like the lines in the familiar scanable barcode.

Like a barcode, the lines are not random. A regular pattern can be seen repeating across the work. Intriguingly, the pattern is the same in both works, which suggests that it could be decoded, as the titles suggest. It doesn’t matter what the product is – the code remains the same.

You can see more of Rak’s print work at his website, here.

http://www.benrak.com.au

30×40 is running at United Galleries Sydney until 25 July.

http://unitedgalleries.com.au/

Image details, from top:

Installation view, 30 x 40, United Galleries.

Erin Flannery Monday Morning Latte Line Up. Aerosol, acrylic, pencil, cotton thread on linen. 30cm x 40cm.

Ben Rak Decoded (All star), 2009. Screenprint on paper, edition of 9. 30cm x 40cm.

30×40 is a group exhibition currently running at United Galleries Sydney in Darlinghurst. The title refers to the size of all the works, in centimetres. With 53 works commissioned from 31 artists, there’s a good mix of styles and media.

Two young artists showing two works each and both, coincidentally, about aspects of consumer culture, merit a closer look.

Erin Flannery Monday Morning Latte Line Up

Erin Flannery says she is “highly amused by ridiculously over-sized bags and jewellery, flashy brand names, killer heels and killer trends”.

The women in her work are arranged like models in a fashion image. On closer inspection, you see that they’re missing an arm or sporting a wooden (table) leg which, Flannery predicts, will be the next big trend: “Get in before the rush.”

A self-taught artist, Flannery lives in northern NSW. You can see more of her work at her website, here.

Ben Rak Decoded (All star)

Prick up your ears for Liquid Architecture

Sydney’s cavalcade of festivals just keeps on coming. Hot on the heels of the Sydney Writers’ Festival, the Sydney Film Festival, the inaugural Creative Sydney and Brian Eno’s Luminous festival comes Liquid Architecture, a four-day event devoted to sound.

Now in its 10th year, Liquid Architecture brings together music, sound art, noise and other listening pleasures as performances, installations and broadcasts.

It opens on Wednesday 24 June with an exhibition of sound-based installations at The Performance Space that will run through the festival. The opening night also includes live performances by Ruark Lewis, who uses language as sound, and Rik Rue, who works with the recording medium itself as an instrument.

German media artist Thomas Köner headlines the Concert One program on Friday 26 June. Here’s a video of Köner’s work Terrain Vague, recorded at the Dis-patch Festival in Belgrade, Serbia, last year.

Answered prayers

Jackson Slattery, Our Plastic Everything is Broken

Congratulations to Jackson Slattery, who picked up $40,000 today in this year’s Metro Art Award, Australia’s richest art prize for emerging young artists.

He won with a small watercolour of Hajj pilgrims praying called Our Plastic Everything is Broken. Slattery, who is 25, is currently a studio artist at the Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, and you can see more of his work here.

Another prize of $10,000 for the public’s choice was won by Victoria Reichelt for her self-portrait, presented as shelves stacked with books.

Victoria Reichelt Self Portrait

Also catching Kollektor’s eye were a photo-realist painting of recyclables by Peter Tankey, and Dane Lovett’s introspective self-portrait, below.

Want Longer Lasting Art? – Alasdair Macintyre’s ‘Playtime’

Art about art can be a risky business; art about art that is also engaged with current events even more so. In Alasdair Macintyre’s latest body of work, Playtime, art history and pop culture come together, rescued from navel gazing by his razor-sharp wit.

Jab 2009

His small-scale sculptures function like editorial cartoons in three dimensions, instantly accessible, engagingly strange and always funny, even when their intention is more serious.

Signifier/Signified 2009

How is Bambi formed?

Ben Frost, Self Regenerating Bambi 2009

Sydney artist Ben Frost, known for his paintings that mash up pop culture, media and advertising, has a new print available through Zero Cool, a new online gallery based in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Yes, if you live in Australia, it’s the long way round to get one.

“Self Regenerating Bambi” is a four-colour screen print with spot varnish in an edition of 75, signed and numbered by the artist. 60cm x 60cm.

It’d make the perfect gift for the next baby shower you’re forced to attend invited to. Yours for £75 here.

Folding time and space

Jennie Nayton, Triple Helix (detail) 2005

Jennie Nayton stops time in her photographs of natural, fluid forms like water and clouds, then expands the captured moment into three-dimensional space by cutting and folding the print itself.

The pattern of the folds relates to the images: waves break across the paper in undulating steps, ripples of repeated folds appear in the surface of a shallow pool, a waterfall seems to flow in a cascade of pleats down a wall.

Jennie Nayton, Wave Helix 2005

This is intricate, fascinating work. While Nayton identifies as a photographer, her works’ sculptural aspects compels our attention, constantly changing as our point of view changes.