JILL SORENSEN

Resisting Societal Norms

As part of Put Up Your Dukes! Gabrielle and I made a series of three books extrapolating upon and extending the thinking behind the project. Resisting Societal Norms provides background to the work in this project but also maps much of the territory that I am deeply interested in researching further. As such it provides a research handbook; ideas posited and awaiting development (and contestation, complication and repudiation).

I will post this book in sections over the next days/weeks in the lead up to the second part of Put Up Your Dukes!, a book launch and exhibition of plan B’s and also ran ideas generated by, but not used in, from the Blue Oyster show. It will be held at Pearce Gallery, 130 St Georges Bay Rd, Parnell, Auckland New Zealand, on Monday 7 October.

Book 1 Resisting Societal Norms reworked notebook — Book 1
Resisting Societal Norms
reworked notebook

Resisting Societal Norms page 1 — Resisting Societal Norms
page 1

Resisting Societal Norms pages 3 & 4 — Resisting Societal Norms
pages 3 & 4

Resisting Societal Norms pages 5 & 6 — Resisting Societal Norms
pages 5 & 6

In the first pages of Born Losers Scott Sandage reminds us that our modern preoccupation with weighing up our lives, deeds and endeavours on the scales of success and failure is exactly that- a modern construct revealing the darker side of the American Dream.

I am currently reading (and hugely excited by) The Queer Art of Failure by Judith Halberstam[1], in the introduction to this text Halberstam touches on the same territory

excerpt from The Queer Art of Failure by Judith Halberstam page 3 — excerpt from The Queer Art of Failure by Judith Halberstam
page 3

[1] Halberstam, Judith The Queer Art of Failure, 2011, Duke University Press

New Hairy Object

I made a new hairy object today. I was tidying up the studio and decided to re-crochet a failed carrot trial into an upright object with a base to fit a recommissioned trolley that was also waiting for a home.

Guidelines for the undertaking were: taller than it is wide but remaining self supporting, with base or ‘skirt’ to fit the trolley bed as closely as possible. It was not intended to be phallic, but even I have to admit that I could be conceived to have some resemblance to the male body part. But then it can be (and in the 90’s regularly was) argued that anything taller than it is wide could be considered phallic.

I could title it “Retro Crotch(et)* Trolley” or maybe “Postmodern-Chic (trolley)”.

*remember when every(thing)/idea(s) was in brackets? Ah, post modernism, who would have thought it would look so quaint from here?

Put Up Your Dukes!

Blue Oyster Art Project Space, Dunedin 18 June – 20 July 2013

the latest Achronological Manor project is Put up your Dukes! an exhibton/pulicaton/performance played out as a visual debate between Gabrielle Amodeo and myself. The project utilised the structure of the Douglas-Lincoln debate format used in the campaign for the Illinois senate in 1858 between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas as the structure for a counterintuitive mode of collaboration.

The moot: In art, as in life, we occupy an ad-hoc middle ground in which the only certainty is the impossibility of certainty.

Put Up Your Dukes! Was played out as an elaborate standoff in which each of us (over)stated our case and elaborated on a claim to common territory. In the build-up to this exhibition new works were developed in a call/response fashion using the idea of nature as a foil, a subject matter and directive, but the debate itself centres around our different methodologies.

Sorensen states:

I am interested in the territory where art abandons good-sense to joyfully embrace the vernacular of the stupid, the obvious, simple, pointless, pleasurable, silly, excessive, lazy, expedient and useless.

Amodeo Proposes:

Labour as it’s own reward / the person who cuts his own firewood warms himself twice / validation through accumulation (being able to cite a big number validates a project) / refer to things obliquely, answer questions with questions

the debate format:

looking down the gallery, in the centre is Garden (JS Affirmative Constructive)

at the back: PODOCARPACEAE/Dacrycarpus – ASTERACEAE/Pachystegia (GA Negative Constructive)

left wall: Resisting Societal Norms (JS Cross-Examination of Negative By Affirmative)

Media room:

Pictures and Things from our Walls (GA Cross-Examination of Affirmative by Negative)

back room:

Fir Tree Small II (JS Affirmative Rebuttal)

Sound and Vision (GA Negative Rebuttal)

A Pile of Boxes (JS Affirmative Rejoinder)

Mid-west

I found these images when I was sorting through the files on old hard drive. I really quite like this series of paintings, they ended up a little bit orphaned as my practice move on in other directions and they never got to be shown. I quite like the way they are a bit un-cool and outsider-ish. there is something neurotic about the hard-wood craft panels, the dodgy blending and the sugary colours. All things contemporary painting is a little sniffy about. It was really fun doing them. I might do some more.

Gow Langsford Window Project

The Week Of The Horse

after incubating for some time in my studio the horses are set free next week:

Horse #10 is at the Wallace Awards at the Pah Homestead, opening Monday 3 September.

and this pony is joining a line-up of sock ponies, accompanied by the carrot, in the Gow Langsford Window on the corner of Wellesley and Kitchener St. The opening is 5 – 7pm Tuesday 4 September, and it is on until 29 September.

crochet carrot

I have been crocheting a large carrot, it is not a crafty feel-good thing, nor is it a post feminist reclaiming the soft arts thing. It is just that my my drawings have almost always been of crochet carrots, so it seemed only right. Suffice to say I will not be one of those grannies that sit around crocheting blankets as a recreational activity, though it does give me renewed respect for such tenacity.

i selected this carrot drawing from my drawing book number 1.

and this somewhat fleshy purplish merino wool

and made this 1.5 metre pattern

it will be filled with bean-bag beans, slightly under-filled for that slightly flacid carrot-like slump.

when it is finished it will be part of the Gow Langsford Window project that I have been invited to take part in. I am putting in some of my sock ponies and wanted a large pink carrot to go with them. It opens 5 September, as an adjunct to their two galleries. those of you who are in Auckland – please come along.

Paper Bag Research Forum

Ah how quickly it came and went…. Or more how quickly the three weeks following it went, what with mid-year assessment casting its long shadow over art school and my husband breaking his collar bone only one week after officially recovering from breaking his other collar bone. And breaking off a wee bit of his leg-bone for good measure, to ensure full invalid status.

In the midst of this the One Day Wonder post-mortem has been repeatedly postponed. Or at least the public sharing of it has; In between the various man-and-child caring tasks I have been contemplating its outcomes and possible developments and this is what I have been thinking:

I found the overall dynamic of a research-based exhibition surprisingly generative and enjoyable. It was more than just the freedom from the need to present a cohesive, resolved exhibition, although that was in itself significant. I found the experience of exhibiting work as a mid point of process somehow much more exciting than the usual exhibition as culmination and end point of a given project. Despite a degree of apprehension I found it both enjoyable and useful to open up the making/ thinking process for discussion with a group of peers.

The project provided me with the opportunity to develop a whole lot of work that I had been thinking about for a while, without concerning myself too much about outcome or how it would all work together in the gallery. Maybe it made me reassess failure as an active driver in research, for while I am conscious that bad might be good, I find it difficult to hold the value of failure in the process of critical decision-making. I decided that in a research exhibition the inclusion of potential failure would be essential for useful discussion and critique and it seems that this embrace of a working level of uncertainty is not only generative and exciting for my working practice, but appears to generate a degree of energetic and polarised response from the audience.

The question is how can this be applied in the usual exhibition situation, where the exhibition probably is the culmination of a project, and stands of fall on its merits as finished work? It has me wondering if a practice, worked out as a series of exhibitions over time, could be an ongoing proposition; a never answerable question elucidated upon but not concluded, art as thinking rather than consolidated into thought.

My One Day Wonder

These are some studio trials for my one-day exhibition this Friday, 18 May. It is part of the One Day Wonder project, a series of 24-hour shows at the Pearce Gallery, Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design.

My exhibition is an experimental installation developing some of the ideas I have discussed in previous posts on the relationship between humans, domestic animals and the flower power movement.

Opening Friday night 4.30pm – 7pm. Saturday 10am – 1pm Discussion forum 5- 5.30pm

Pearce Gallery, 130 St Georges Bay Rd, Parnell

The One Day Wonder project

The Pearce Gallery at Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design presents the inaugural season of One Day Wonders, a series of one-day exhibitions discussing and developing new, emerging and experimental aspects of contemporary art practice.

Season one: 2012 Paper Bag Research Forum

A research based project investigating the dynamic between research practice, exhibition practice and the educational institution. Five member of faculty from Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design present their own take on this relationship as they address aspects of their own practice via exhibition and discussion

May 18 Jill Sorensen

June 1 Emma Johnson

July 27 Christina Read

August 3 Noel Ivanoff

August 10 Jacquie Ure

Friday night openings 4.30pm – 7pm. Saturday 10am – 1pm Discussion forum 5- 5.30pm

Pearce Gallery, 130 St Georges Bay Rd, Parnell

Happy Anniversary Blue Oyster

Blue Oyster gallery in Dunedin turned 13 in April and I was asked to join in the celebrations by contributing a work to the group show Silk and Lace.

The show is also reviewed on Eye Contact

The show required the invited artists to address the title Silk and lace and also to respond to a previous exhibition at Blue Oyster.

I chose to respond to the 2009 exhibition by Australian artist Sylvia Swenk. This show, titled, They paved paradise, put up a parking lot, after Joni Mitchell’s 1970 song ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ engaged with environmental issues and the human cost of unfettered capitalism. Swenk’s project took the form of a performance/ installation in the gallery and an interactive performance work, X Performance Dunedin, in which she choreographed and directed local participants to form a giant X with their bodies across an intersection connecting the Octagon to the surrounding streets.

Icing Sugar Floor Work

This work is a commemoration of the flower power movement and an acknowledgment of the fragility of the ideological high-ground.

Flower Performance X

My reworking of Swenks performance reflects upon the 99% occupation of the Octagon and pays tribute to civilian activism, from the flower Power era to present day. Rather than making the cross with the bodies of the participants I invited participants to lay a cross of flowers as gesture of support for peaceful protest past, present and future.