A Twin Entity
Czech & Slovak Film Festival 2016
Betwixt
Wednesday 14th – Friday 23rd September, 2016
ACMI Mediatheque
Since retired from holding their positions in the windows of Obus and Collected Works, as part of BLINDSIDE’s recent On the Verge festival, a cast of new Salvaged Relatives drawn and collaged have assembled and are in final rehearsals for Betwixt, an exhibition curated by Carmen Reid, as part of the forthcoming Czech & Slovak Film Festival of Australia.
In response to the theme, Text and Texture, our dust jacket zebras and grey parrots are set to inhabit a vitrine at ACMI's Mediatheque for the duration of the festival. The exhibition will include work by Stephen Banham, Bernard Caleo, Angela Cavalieri, Peter Ellis, Petr Herel, Andrew Keall, Reid and Sally Tape.
Transforming humans into ravens and paper into books, in addition to our part in Betwixt, we will also be conducting a concertina bookbinding workshop for kids, inspired by Alice Nellis’s fairy tale, The Seven Ravens, on Thursday the 22nd of September.
Two-fold
A twin entity! A double life, sprung “from matter and light, envinced in solid and shade,”[i] our Salvaged Relatives, collaged and drawn, toss gauzy film over the certainty of your consciousness.
A shadow, rendered, of a life imagined; or is that the other way around? In a game of Chicken and Egg, call and response, surely, the drawings echo the collages on cartes de visite. And were they to be “separated from one another by the whole length of the building.... [the] distance between [them would] seem monstrous.... as is they had taken half [their] bodies away. [They would lose their] sense of balance.... feel dizzy.... fall.”[ii]
Creeping through these unknown time-eaten spaces, memories splinter; with nature as your theatrical backcloth, you’d do well to borrow a stained costume from the Ballet Russes, while things reconfigure.
My tail, Léon Bakst, what do I do with it in this lonely place “newly with grass o’ergrown”?[iii]
[i] Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Silence (a sonnet),’ version published in The Raven and Other Poems, 1845.
[ii] Ágota Kristóf, The Notebook Trilogy, (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2016), p. 23.
[iii] Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Silence (a sonnet).’
Image credit: Collages on cartes de visite with pencil and paint additions (by Gracia Haby), pencil drawings on Fabriano Artistico 640gsm traditional white hot-press paper with metallic paint trim (by Louise Jennison)
