12 Sep 24
9 Sep 24
update 04/9We asked artists to rank Tabs by these priorities. Would you use it for:
1. Finding/posting resources (communal explore)?
2. Archival online space (bookmarking tool)?
3. Portfolio/custom space (personal page )?
2 and 3 hold highest merit - while 1 is appreciated as the result of a widely used, networked product.
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We’ve found users have a cathartic (release) feeling posting on Tabs. It’s a small test group, so people often feel free to ‘dump’ stuff (URL’s, photos, notes) intuitively. It can feel good to contribute to an internet that often ‘takes’ so much (time, energy, thought). Keeping it low stakes feels important.
Nailing the basic components - upload, post, edit, has been our goal for EO August. ‘Offer artists a simple to upload, visually striking, portfolio to archive research amongst others.’
update 8/26Introduced Tabs to a few new artists - who were able to comprehend the site more intuitively. The concept require less direction (mumbling). Better site navigation overall - though still not enough handrails. Post uploader allows more custom control. The whole thing reads better.
Wolfie broke the site with a cool text thing. I liked it. Scared Jack a bit. Luke screenshotted it - THANK GOD.
We’ve currently got a Macy’s Parade of content - the content is an aesthetic float. It keeps it up. All puff pastry. But it means not much without organizing keys and tools. The images still feel really abstract - no inherent meaning. But they feel to busy when you add all the context.
Q. How much information does any really need/want?
latelywe’ve been in artist’s studios workshopping designs for a new web approach. our aim is to add new dimension to artistic practice - by surfacing online research and sharing material. we’ve been inviting artists to embed PDF articles & YouTube videos, Reddit threads & JSTOR essays, Spotify songs and iPhone recordings into personal pages - akin to online ‘studios’. with interesting results…
We recently submitted a grant application for the ‘Creative Australia: Development Investment’ - centred on developing new Australian ideas and artist storiess. For example:
Please provide a brief overview of your project
Operating dither_, we found exhibitions to be singular touchpoints for connecting practice. Yet research, process, community & conversation make-up widely relatable narratives worth telling. We call this project ‘Tabs’. Leveraging existing infrastructure, Tabs invites Australian artists to archive their online research for audiences to bookmark, share and build knowledge upon. Our outcome is two fold: build tooling that helps artists embed, annotate and archive URL links; and network those resources across topical communities of interest. We’re engaging emerging artists and local institutions via in-person workshops to collaborate early prototypes. Whereafter - we will scale artists stories nationally through partnerships that accommodate niche and local differences.’
Stay posted.
thomas_
30 Jul 24
Artists Wanted!Three Doors Gallery exhibits once a month, scan the QR code to submit works or share with your friends!
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17 Jul 24
Do you everDo you ever just be unemployed because your old workplace which you loved fired you for being too slow even though you tried really hard and wanted to help their company get better
6 Jul 24
'Unruly Edges' (2024) ReviewThe lighting fixtures in 'Unruly Edges' (2024) flatten all hues to a primordial turquoise. Within the walls of First Draft, it becomes an ecotone of submerged dialogues that delve into environmental precarities. The exhibition drifts between the shifting photographs of Ellen Dahl, the materially embodied sculptures of Emma Pinsent, and the anthropomorphic surrealisms of Eduardo Wolfe-Alegria.
Light is the activator of photography, and the turquoise illumination of 'Unruly Edges' reads like an inversion of the red darkroom for Dahl. Here, she blends photographic processes with layering and montage. The video loop of 'Flow' (2024) punctuates the gallery with the trickling sounds of various waterways as the floor-based video blends upstream rivers and colourful copper tailings from a currently inactive mine in South Australia.
Material considerations by Dahl, like the sublimation print on fabric for 'The Edge (detail)' (2024) and the eco-solvent pigment print on cotton rag for 'In the Balance' (2024), further examine the transformation of substances through photography. The colours of 'In the Balance' are subdued and flattened by the lighting conditions, where the murky spectrum of browns and greens give the impression of adjusting your eyes under moonlight.
In 'At the Mountains of Madness' (1936) by H. P. Lovecraft, a geologist uncovers a lost alien civilisation in Antarctica dubbed the “Elder Things”: a non-human sentience from a bygone era sometime before humans existed. As the geologist delves into an icy chamber, he comes across an archaic eyeless species of penguin 6ft tall with albinism. When I encountered the fungal growths and bits of human parts in the contorted sculptures of Wolfe-Alegria, the story immediately came to mind. Unlike a Cthulian nightmare, these anthropomorphic forms seem serene among the eerie trickling of waterways by Dahl.
Constructed through 3D printing and other synthetic materials, the sculptures 'Mother' (2024) and 'Spawn' (2024) further allude to plastics and unnatural/natural binaries. At the basin of 'Mother', resin glistens like the still water of a cave as mushrooms grow from the porous recesses. The sculptures are masterfully constructed, which further alludes to the uncanny. There seems to be a logic to how these forms would live and move, bringing an unsettling feeling to their apparent stillness.
Meanwhile, Pinsent creates sand casts with plaster and impressions of shells with lost-wax methods that she scatters along, under, above, and around the works of her collaborators. From the ceiling, salvaged float glass twists precariously as their uneven surfaces shimmer like the suspended surface of the ocean.
In 'infill (movements)' (2024), plaster is cast over holes in the sand of the Arakwal beaches. These beaches were known for their mineral-rich black sands, mined for refractory industries in the 1930s to 1960s. The mineral rutile was extracted from the beach to make titanium dioxide, used in the white paint continually layered over gallery walls during install cycles. Similarly, the ability of zircon to withstand high temperatures sees its use in the ceramic shell negatives of lost-wax bronze foundries. Pinsent produces pressed wax impressions of shelled mollusc remains in 'tailings' (2024), which are then turned into nickel bronze. With the hidden lives of molluscs being part of the destroyed matter from sand mining, these works remediate histories of extraction and glance at the art world’s entanglements within these industries. Here, Pinsent’s remediations are a form of speculative alchemy.
[Expanded review, originally published in Booker Magazine Issue 3]
