Panel Statement

Chair Per­sons: Lisa An­der­son & Josephine Starrs
Pre­sen­ters: Leon Cmielewski & Joni Tay­lor

This panel ex­plores multi-di­men­sional works that in­ter­act and ex­plore the nar­ra­tives of dam­aged land­scapes -ur­ban and out­back scars found on and within the struc­tures of land and ar­chi­tec­ture and scars re­lated to the move­ment of peo­ples. The speak­ers will pre­sent their art­works de­vel­oped from the ev­i­dence of weather shifts that are woven through var­i­ous forms, in­clud­ing per­sonal doc­u­men­tary-style im­ages, GPS data and satel­lite im­agery.  These art­works use im­ages of the earth’s sur­face to ex­plore nar­ra­tives of po­ten­tial fu­tures. Within past and pre­sent ac­tions can be found a fu­ture that rev­els within the sense of be­long­ing. The fu­ture could be based within a con­tin­u­ing par­a­digm or shift into greater un­der­stand­ings of new and an­cient tech­nolo­gies that shift our po­ten­tial for cre­at­ing and in­vest­ing in a fu­ture vis­i­ble world. The pro­jected im­ages and con­text ex­pand the premise that tap­ping into the nar­ra­tive of place re­veals an un­der­stand­ing of a fu­ture plan. This el­e­ment be­gins to ques­tion and push the sci­ence of weather, the land and the move­ment of peo­ples to a fris­son, wherein may lie a new ap­proach. Dr. Lisa An­der­son, Josephine Starrs and Leon Cmielewski have all worked with Lake Mungo in the re­mote Aus­tralian out­back and have drawn to­gether some of these quests to look more closely at the im­pli­ca­tions of story in place. Dr. An­der­son and Joni Tay­lor have both ex­plored the el­e­ments of col­li­sion of the urban land­scape against a wilder life,  that takes the city back at any op­por­tu­nity. Dr. An­der­son cre­ated Night Snow which ex­plores the shifts of an­i­mals into the vil­lages within the High Arc­tic and com­pares these sto­ries to those of drought af­fected cities in Aus­tralia. Joni Tay­lor con­sid­ers a shift in our ar­chi­tec­tural re­la­tion­ship to the wild to de­velop an aca­d­e­mic un­der­stand­ing and smart world ap­proach to the con­cept of ar­chi­tec­ture, to cre­ate an ar­chi­tec­ture that en­com­passes the changes in weather and move­ments of pop­u­la­tions, in order to es­tab­lish aware city sur­faces and en­clo­sures.  The panel will ex­plore a range of fac­tors to feed into an un­der­stand­ing of a fu­ture that is a brave new world ar­chi­tec­ture, that pro­tects from the void, that in­serts into this a pos­si­bil­ity for a gen­uine story of place to guide/in­form pro­jects. The spec­ta­tor­ship un­der­stand­ing of past en­gage­ments in­cludes the no­tions of na­tional parks and wild life as out­sider events and a pi­o­neer­ing ap­proach to ar­chi­tec­ture.  The speak­ers seek to in­te­grate nar­ra­tives of land, ar­chi­tec­ture and urban move­ments to focus on the prob­lems posed by the cul­ture/na­ture di­vide. The fu­ture is in­her­ent within this form of vi­sual un­der­stand­ing and draws on the very dif­fer­ent el­e­ments that con­cern these artists. They ex­plore the so­cial agenda of dif­fer­ence, imbed­ded within the ques­tion asked by the land­scape works of the Qing Dy­nasty – Am I in Na­ture or is Na­ture in Me?

• Dr. Lisa An­der­son is and artist with an in­ter­na­tional prac­tice work­ing across media and col­lab­o­rat­ing with oth­ers to cre­ate per­for­ma­tive events and pro­jec­tion and sound works. These in­stal­la­tions have been shown at venues in­clud­ing the St. Tropez Film Fes­ti­val, the Cite In­ter­na­tionale Des Arts in Paris, Wagga Wagga Re­gional Gallery, Artscape in Aus­tralia, SXS in Den­mark and also el­e­ments have been ex­hib­ited in Bei­jing, Am­s­ter­dam and Lon­don. They in­clude IVU, a Per­spex sculp­ture and mul­ti­chan­nel video in­stal­la­tion, The Truth About Snodomes, a paper work and sin­gle screen and sound work, and Pre­cious, a large scale light and sound work lo­cated in beach­side sand dunes. These works form part of the shinyshiny­cloud pro­jects that ex­plore the beauty of the apoc­a­lypse due to weather and peo­ple/an­i­mal move­ments, in places such as the High Arc­tic, Cen­tral Java, the Scot­tish High­lands, the Aus­tralian out­back and var­i­ous city lo­ca­tions such as Paris, Bei­jing and Lon­don.  Dr. An­der­son’s doc­toral sub­mis­sion en­ti­tled, Mem­ory Sal­vage and In­ven­tion: the Col­li­sion and Col­lu­sion of Pub­lic Archive and Per­sonal Anec­dote in Pub­lic Art was the first study to place the ex­pe­ri­ence of the artist as core to the cre­ation of com­mis­sioned pub­lic art, with a brief that ex­plores com­mu­nity. Specif­i­cally she was the first artist in res­i­dence at the Aus­tralian Mu­seum and to cre­ate a War Memo­r­ial work for a com­mu­nity.  Dr. An­der­son was re­cently Vis­it­ing Scholar and is the In­no­va­tion Fel­low in Ar­chi­tec­ture at the Uni­ver­sity of Tech­nol­ogy, Syd­ney and has pre­vi­ously un­der­taken Fel­low re­search pro­jects with the Uni­ver­sity of Wol­lon­gong Cre­ative Arts, Australia lisaanderson.com
•  Josephine Starrs is a Se­nior Lec­turer and Chair of Film & Dig­i­tal Art at Syd­ney Col­lege of the Arts, Uni­ver­sity of Syd­ney, Australia.

Full text (PDF) p. 93-98 (by Lisa An­der­son)