14 October - 12 November 2020
Perspectives: shaping the world through visual culture
Presented by The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre, ACE Open and Guildhouse
The first talk of the program was be led by writer and Arts/Fashion academic Alison Kubler (Wednesday 14 October). A recording is available to watch here. Alison has worked extensively across Australia spanning public art, curatorial, publishing and fashion and is currently Editor of Vault Magazine. Alison will present an informed exploration on the intersections between contemporary visual art and fashion.
David Capra (Thursday 12 November) articulated how his work promotes joy and hope through performance and participation. A recording is available to watch here. David is a multidisciplinary artist who is perhaps best known for his work inspired by his muse, dachshund Teena. David and Teena have a long-standing history of creating socially engaged projects that make the world feel a little less lonely. Their work traverses hopes, loves and fears; from a room-sized zig-zagging sculpture of Teena dealing with her bath anxiety (Teena’s Bathtime, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2015) to a big floral Teena fashioned from people’s messages of love and happiness (Puppy Love, Kaldor Public Art Projects, Art Gallery NSW, 2019).
Unable to present his scheduled event in March, New York-based artist Jes Fan, delivered his lecture titled Leakages, Puddles, Discharge, Infections and Bubbles... online. Jes Fan’s trans-disciplinary practice emerges from a sustained inquiry into the concept of otherness. Jes Fan is exhibiting in Australia for the first time as part of the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, showcased in the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) until September 2020.
Speakers from the 2019 Program include, Ema Tavola, Adrian Franklin and Hoda Afshar. The 2021 Program presented, Hayley Millar Baker, Lisa Havilah and Hannah Presley.
Access Video HERE
Performance artist David Capra is known for his collaborations with dachshund Teena. Gain insight into what it takes to work in collaborative practice with a dog. Learn about the beginnings of their work together, philosophies that govern their work, and how their projects have traversed the gallery, community sector, media and general public audiences.
In 2016 David and Teena appeared on the 9 Network's Today Show to promote their fragrance, Eau de Wet Dogge. In 2015 Teena's Bathtime was launched at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia's Jackson Bella Room, where visitors related to Teena's experiences around anxiety - Teena doesn’t quite enjoy bathtime. In 2018 They performed The long and short of it: Life lessons from art-dog Teena to an audience of 5000 at TEDx Sydney and answered the question "What makes a dachshund the perfect muse?" in an article for the Guardian newspaper. The two featured in Genevieve Bailey’s documentary Happy Sad Man (Melbourne Film Festival) following the lives of 5 men managing their internal worlds. Last year David and Teena collaborated with Kaldor Projects, producing a series of "Teena Takes on..." educational videos and Kaldor Studio project at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
More Information
Instagram:@davidcapra
Teena's Bathtime, Museum of Contemporary Art
Teena's Tedx Talk
Sydney artist David Capra and dog Teena collaborate on pooch perfume Eau De Wet Dogge
On the Today Show with Eau de Wet Dogge
Teena's Bathtime: Eau de Wet Dogge Infomercial
What makes a dachshund the perfect muse? The long history of sausage dogs in art
Artist David Capra bares his psyche and cinema obsession in eclectic exhibition
Join writer, editor and arts consultant Alison Kubler as she examines the complexity of art and fashion’s interrelationship and its effect on visual culture.
Art and fashion’s twenty-first century dalliance has serious economic and cultural repercussions. The global fashion industry has looked to the art world increasingly as a source of inspiration and content. Importantly too, fashion has emerged in the 21st Century as an economic force in its own right. Fashion is given considerable column space in leading financial journals as well as mainstream media. Fashion and art go hand in hand at the big end of town; art collectors wear luxury labels, and fashion houses acquire major artist’s work. It’s a mutual admiration society with economic benefits.
While contemporaneously art and fashion are economic and cultural bed fellows it wasn’t always so. On the face of it, art and fashion are philosophically opposed. Where fashion is understood to be fickle, transient and constantly in flux, art is understood to be more considered, intellectual, even elitist. Art aspires to a cultural longevity that fashion by its very nature seems designed to negate. The natural condition of fashion is to usurp itself, to change and render redundant what has come before. Fashion too has a commercial imperative whereas art, philosophically, does not, although in the 21st century we understand that art and fashion are economic systems in their own right.
Art benefits from the intense gaze directed at fashion and fashion in turn garners the longevity it craves, In short, art needs fashion, and vice versa.
Alison Kubler has a double major in Art History from the University of Queensland, Australia, and a Masters in Post-war and Contemporary Art History from Manchester University, England.
Alison Kubler has over 20 years experience working as a curator in museums and galleries in Australia. She worked as Arts Adviser to the Federal Minister for the Arts and Sport, she has held full-time curatorial positions at QUT Art Museum and Gold Coast City Art Gallery, worked as Associate Curator, the University of Queensland Art Museum and in a freelance capacity developed programs for Art Gallery of South Australia amongst other institutions. Alison is a Member of the Council of the National Gallery of Australia, and an Ambassador for the Institute of Modern Art. Alison is a regular contributor to art journals and magazines on the subjects of art and fashion. She is currently the Editor of Vault Magazine
In 2013 a book she co-authored with Mitchell Oakley-Smith entitled Art and Fashion in the Twentieth Century was published by Thames and Hudson UK, and has subsequently been translated into German and Japanese. She has worked as curator on major public art commissions such as the refurbishment of the Brisbane International Airport and as curatorial advisor to Urban Art Projects on the public art for the major Queens Wharf Brisbane Redevelopment. She has been a regular external assessor for the Australia Council Visual Arts Board, and a sessional academic at QUT in the fashion studies department. Alison also sits on the Advisory Board of the Sherman Centre for Culture and Ideas (SCCI).
More Information
Instagram:@alikubie
Twitter: @AlisonKubler
Vault Magazine
A recording is unavailable for this presentation.
Speculating on the fraught intersection between biology and identity, Jes Fan’s trans-disciplinary practice emerges from a sustained inquiry into the concept of otherness. Primarily working in the field of expanded sculpture, Fan navigates the slippery complexities of identity as guided by the tactile and material histories of his chosen media between contemporary visual art and fashion.
In Fan’s work, he incorporates materials imbued with erotic and queer signifiers, such as silicone, soap and glass, as well as biological substances such as estrogen, testosterone and melanin.
Jes Fan is a Brooklyn-based artist born in Canada and raised in Hong Kong. He is the recipient of various fellowships such as the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant, Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, Van Lier Fellowship at Museum of Arts and Design and John A. Chironna Memorial Award at RISD.
Fan has exhibited internationally; selected exhibitions include Kiss My Genders at Hayward Gallery (London/UK), Mother is a Woman at Empty Gallery (Hong Kong), An Opera for Animals at Rockbund Museum (Shanghai/CN), In Search of Miss Ruthless, Para Site, (Hong Kong), Paradox: Haptic Body in the Age of AI at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh/US), and Disposed to Add at Vox Populi Gallery (Philadelphia/US).
Fan's work has been featured and reviewed by Artforum, Hyperallergic, Art21, AsiaArtPacific, BOMB, Frieze, and others. Fan's artworks are currently showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), until September 2020.
More Information
Website: Jes Fan
Selected Press
YouTube: Jes Fan In Flux, Art21 "New York Close Up"
Frieze Article The Miracle of Creation: Jes Fan and the Craft of Engineering Kinship
Image credits: Artwork, Jes Fan
Image credits: Above: Artwork by Jes Fan, LEFT: Visisble Woman (2018), MIDDLE: Poke, Animacy Arrangement (2017), RIGHT: Diagram I
Presented by The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre, ACE Open, Guildhouse
The copying and reproduction of any transcripts within The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Centre public program is strictly forbidden without prior arrangements.
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