The Ferry Gallery

This series of videos depict a woman attempting to escape the everyday through a variety of comic vignettes. The videos are an archive of absurd gestures, repetitious, futile, joyous, and mischievous. They are intended to be humorous, and have a slapstick quality to them.

In these works, Smith has chosen to depict the scallywag, the tramp, the slapstick, or screwball, falling down, messing up, the loveable rogue, in an effort to tap into the humour and humanism of the heroes of the silent era. A homo tantum -character to be sympathised with by all. This is based on the assumption (always dangerous) that humour is something easily shared.

In his essay on Laughter, Bergson writes that

The woman Smith is showing, like the myth of Sisyphus, trapped in an eternal loop. Moments of pleasure and anxiety co-exist, in a kind of virtual space that exists without established hierarchies and boundaries, which has its own logic and momentum."

Self Portrait is a work the artist made in response to her experience training as a Prison Officer in a maximum security prison for men which were both unnerving and invigorating experiences. As a female Prison Officer, Mattingley held power over male inmates, trained to administer discipline and punishment upon them. 

Mattingley posed for the camera - poised and attentive to the male gaze - mimicking the dominant representations of women throughout history. Adorned in the Prison Officer uniform, she set out to contradict the stereotypes of gender, vulnerability and power, so that both sexes give and receive in acts of violence. In this scenario, either sex is the giver or receiver in acts of violence.

15 - 30 SEPTEMBER 2016

LAUNCH:

15 SEPTEMBER 2016 

1 - 5 PM

THE JAM FACTORY (SUMMER HOUSE)

RIVER TOUR 2 - 4 PM

Samsung has now done more to honor Southeast Asia’s cultural and historical heritage with the launch of its upgraded “Culture Explorer”. This application seeks to connect modern people with their nation’s rich history and cultural pride. Culture Explorer is now in its second year and embraces the “Falling in Love with Bangkok Once More & Reviving Chao Phraya’s Old Memories” theme.
Culture Explorer 2.0 has added the content about Thailand’s major river, the Chao Phraya, as well as its key piers to let people indulge in the good old days. The additional content covers 12 districts but features two categories.

The first offers street view, presenting

1) Charoenkrung

2) Rajdamnoen

3) Yaowaraj 

4) Pathumwan

The second features river view, presenting

5) Memorial Bridge Pier

6) Tha Thien Pier

7) Tha Chang Pier

8) Tha Phra Chan Pier

9) Tha Phra Arthit

10) Tha Rotfai Pier

11) Tha Si Phraya Pier 

12) Tha Rajawongse Pier

Thanks to advanced technology, the content can blend into new photos and VDOs taken by app users. Such innovation paves way for new-generation people in indulge in the precious cultural and historical heritage. Culture Explorer 2.0 includes many interesting, easy & fun-to-use functions. Augmented Reality, for example, perfectly combines the bygone eras with the today’s environment. Time Travel VDO is also a great feature, giving people the fascinating glimpse into the past. VDO Effect is also available, making people feel like they are in the middle of unfolding historical incidents. On top of this, Nearby Notification is always ready to alert its users when they come close to any important historical sites.

Interested people can download Culture Explorer 2.0 application for free onto their Android smart phones/tablets from September 15, 2016 onward. Via the app, they can then retrieve information on the culture and history from database. Available are texts, photos and even videos that will bring them back in time. Altogether, there are street and river views of more than 47 places. Over 500 items are ready for retrieval so that people can time-travel into the glorious past, capture the beautiful moments, and instantly share them on social media. It is interesting to record the combination of the good old days and the present. Culture Explorer, moreover, can serve as a tour guide informing its users of interesting facts about the places they visit.

WATERMELON

“Constant dripping wears away the stone”

Two dismembered hands are slowly, continuously and repetitively adding the large amount of rubber bands to the middle of the watermelon’s tortured belly. As the rubber bands squeeze and tighten, the pressured fruit gradually begins to leak, breaks and eventually explodes into 2 pieces revealing the inner fresh red flesh and its juice. Steve Carr’s Watermelon expresses the extensive emotional endurance between the unidentified women workers and the watermelon while testing the viewer’s patience and durability while confronting the ongoing subtly-violent act.

EXHIBITION: LUCKY BREAD

ARTIST: MAYA DE MONDRAGON

DATE: 4 MAY 2016 - 30 JULY 2016

Lucky Bread is a 12 minute film in two parts, portraying the meditation, or the dream perhaps, of the character expressing herself at the beginning.

The first part is about a ritual of bread donation to the fish in the security zone – or sacred zone – which is the "topological aura." However the zone is determined and controlled by the Thai temples. This ritual gives a certain insight into the importance of spirituality and/or superstition between the skyscrapers in the heart of the Bangkok megalopolis. What is heard here is the testimony of the feeling of communion that emerges; all beings are then like waters blending in the happiness of sharing.

The other part is a poem inspired by the park of the Bangkok Suvarnabhumi airport. (Edifice of the non lieu*), This contemporary mega structure – a “non-place” construction – a source of national pride, is slowly being absorbed by the swamp on which it was built... This park, visible through the glass wall of the main hall, is a backdrop to the traveller's own saga. This pleasure garden offered like a postcard, a colorful poster, to the tourists who arrive or who are moving on, their minds already full of pictures, eager for exoticism, tends to fulfill their expectations with ready-molded images.

This exposed space becomes an image, and loses its third dimension by becoming a mere décor – from the Latin word "decor" meaning convenience, adornment and ornament, connected to the impersonal verb "decere" which means to suit, to be appropriate, and that became the word "decent". It is decent to satisfy and welcome, to "civilize", to promote, as it is indecent to exhibit what is out of our control, like the passage of time, or political corruption that led to the construction of this shaky building. Space has become an image due to the loss of its 3rd dimension, but additionally because of its motionlessness. But this immobility is linked to scale, since when zooming in on the picture we discover something very different, the swamp taking back its place as time passes by. This representation is irremediably faced with its finite dimension. The landscape comes to life in its details, provided that we give it time for contemplation. Artifice is set into motion by time that carries it away, as shown by the very real wave swelling the pavement representing the blue seas. The issue of frame, and that of relationship to time are directly connected in this strange landscape torn between artificiality and nature, representation and reality, swaying between testimony to a cyclical vision and the surge of entropy.

The final destruction of a bread model of this park to the fish of the sacred zone of the Thewet temple puts a final point to the video. This recorded action could be an attempt to interfere symbolically. It is about taking part in the ritual by transforming it, and to augment it with a new significance. The consequences of this short circuit have no tangible impact; they belong to the same world as the ritual they were born from, as suspended at the surface of a reality that will not admit them entirely. With images and a film, as the only trace left, these consequences are a question left without an answer, because reality, like a palimpsest, only tears for an instant.

*Non-Lieux, introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité (Le Seuil, 1992). Marc Augé

Maya de Mondragon is an interdisciplinary visual artist working primarily with sculpture. Her practice investigates emotional relationship with elements such as water or drying mud. In her work, these primary elements are often confronted with much more artificial, decorative or even kitsch items. Her Instinct based practice constitutes a protocol to create dream-like associations. Taking shape as installation, sculpture, videos and poems, all questioning the poetical concept of surface and invisible streams, her work tends to crystallize forms of a "contemporary romanticism".

 Graduated from ENSBA (Paris) in 2011, she now lives and works in Brussels. Maya de Mondragon's solo and collective projects have been presented in galleries and artist-run-spaces, such as Graphem or Marine Veilleux in Paris, Clovis XV or De La Charge in Brussels. Maya dM is also part of the collectif_sin which focuses mainly on live installations featuring sound and image through wave frequencies.

EXHIBITION: BLIND SPOT

4 - 30 MAY 2016

Susan Carnahan explores the nature of relationships and the perpetual shifting dynamics between people and their various roles, how these roles inform each other and how they are never static in nature, but rather constantly subject to change as they evolve. Carnahan's video works 'Drowned' and 'Milk Run' examine roles and ideas from the perspective of a child.

FLOATING GROUNDS

15 December 2015 — 30 March 2016

About the exhibition

Presented by Channels, Floating Grounds is an exhibition in response to the site-specific video art gallery in Bangkok. Situated on an operating ferry, the exhibition explores the shifting perspectives of gestures and history, the ideological and the physical. ‘Ngallowan (They Remain)’ (2014) is a dual screen video collaboration between artist Kate Blackmore and Dharug elder and songwoman Jacinta Tobin. The work responds to W.E.H. Stanner’s notion of ‘The Great Australian Silence’ (1968) which suggested national amnesia, or what Stanner called ‘cult of forgetfulness’, silencing the history of Indigenous dispossession in Australia. An interplay between presence and disappearance, through repetitive gestures the duo performs in a dialogue that challenges the contexts of history and echoes the discontents of Australian identity. Laura Carthew’s ‘Immortal flower (무궁화)’ (2015) draws on a different experience of history. Exploring the cyclical nature of life, Carthew’s mystic female flower characters perform in a synchronised, ceremonial dance. Developed during her artist residency in Seoul, Korea in 2015, the work re-imagines Korea’s national flower: the Mugunghwa(무궁화) and its symbol of immortality. Theatrical and strangely unsettling, ‘Immortal flower (무궁화)‘ presents the cyclical journey that we each embark on, where our repetitive performances written into the grand narratives of history.

The exhibition is presented by Channels, The Australian Video Art Festival in partnership with The Ferry Gallery.

About the works:

Kate Blackmore & Jacinta Tobin

Ngallowan (They Remain), 2014

Dual Screen Video Installation, High Definition Video, 16:9, PAL, Sound

Dur: 15'50''

Video & Sound: Jon Hunter

Ngallowan (They Remain) is a collaboration between Kate Blackmore and Dharug elder and songwoman, Jacinta Tobin. The dual screen video work is a response to W. E. H. Stanner's notion of 'The Great Australian Silence', a reference to the national silencing of the history of Indigenous dispossession in Australia. Through performance and song, Blackmore and Tobin each engage with the notion of 'white washing', resulting in an interplay between presence and disappearance that questions the way in which history is written and recorded.

Laura Carthew

Immortal flower

Immortal flower fuses together historical symbology and Korean identity to reflect on the universal cycle of life and death. Three mystic female flower characters reference Korea’s national flower: the Mugunghwa (무궁화), which translates in English to ‘Immortal flower’. The green pyramid-like structure represents the mysterious place before life and after death. The flowers dance rhythmically over the pyramid, exploring ritual and spirituality, as we observe them growing, budding, blooming and dying.

About the artists:

KATE BLACKMORE is an Australian artist and filmmaker whose work explores the intersections between contemporary art, documentary and anthropology. Since 2007 Blackmore has been a key member of artist collective Brown Council (with Kelly Doley, Frances Barrett & Diana Smith) whose live performances and video works engage with concepts of spectacle and endurance, as well as the dialogue between ‘liveness’ and the performance document. Blackmore’s solo and collaborative projects have been presented at institutions including Artspace (Sydney); Monash University Museum of Art (Melbourne); Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane); Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney); National Museum of Contemporary Art (Seoul); The Physics Room (Christchurch); and Art Nova 100 (Beijing). In late 2015 she will travel to India for an Asialink residency to develop a major new video project with members of the Gulabi Gang, a vigilante group of female domestic violence activists. Blackmore is currently undertaking a Masters in Visual and Media Anthropology at Freie Universität, Berlin.

LAURA CARTHEW is an interdisciplinary visual artist working primarily with video and photography. Her practice investigates rituals, memorialisation and choreography within both cultural and spiritual practices. Since graduating from Monash University in 2011, she has had solo and group exhibitions across a range of galleries including Anna Pappas Gallery, Nellie Castan Gallery, Platform Contemporary Art Spaces, Seventh Gallery and Trocadero Art Space. She is a recipient of Artstart, Australia Council for the Arts (2012), an Artist Encouragement Grant, Rotary Club of Melbourne (2013) and a Creative Young Stars Grant from the Australian Government (2013). In 2014 and 2015, Laura participated in a mentorship and residency in Seoul with South Korean Artist Yeondoo Jung. For this she was supported by a Creative Individuals Career Fund Grant, Copyright Agency Limited (2014) and the Ian Potter Cultural Trust (2014).

In ‘Love’, the subtleties of first desires to climactic scenes of impassioned dialogue and action, to betrayal, disgust and violence that have played out over the history of film are ripped from original contexts and edited into a repetitive staccato rush, regurgitating, for our entertainment, horror and critique, the stereotypical, hyperbolic trajectory of (heterosexual) love. Through this process Moffatt unites the graphic punch and suggestiveness of the (movie-)still image with the satisfaction of a complete movie narrative. In the end, its only a movie.

‘Love’ embodies Moffatt’s desire to create work that has an ‘international look’ and deal with ‘universal predicaments’. 'Love' is both parody and pastiche, critical comment, and wryly humorous.

'Other' is one of the most mesmerising of the series as it edits together scenes of interracial encounters. It opens with first contact sequences, films in which the beach and the shallow waters are a zone of encounter between ships and canoes, between Europeans and non-Europeans. It then moves to images of looking, of two different peoples meeting for the first time and appraising each other visually. As imagined by Hollywood and TV directors, this is a moment of both curiosity and desire, where glances become lingering and erotically charged.

The next sequence moves from first encounters to quite literally first contact, when brown and white touch. Again curiosity is mingled with desire and an erotic tension crackles through these images. From touch we shift back to the eyes, but now vision is highly eroticised, looking has become a physical conduit to arousal and the gaze is embedded into a bodily response. Intercut are scenes of Westerners losing their sense of propriety and themselves when encountering an ‘other’, a moment when their own social structures erode.

A kitsch frenzied depiction of the other as threatening, feverish, abandoned and erotic informs the next selection of scenes in which running and dancing, from faux-tribal gatherings to frenzied hysterical choreographed sequences move closer and closer to orgiastic sexual abandonment.

In the final sequences desire is consummated in wild encounters which transgress race and gender. Humorously intercut with these are images of men hugging each other, an implied repressed homosexual subtext which is still unable to be depicted in mainstream cinema while we see frenzied hetereosexual couples and women making love to each other with abandonment. The video culminates in some literally explosive moments in which revel in the clichés of cinematic sexual orgasm: fires burn, volcanoes erupt and finally planets explode.

Moffatt utilises the clichés of cinematic representation of the ‘other’ to trace a pop culture history of how the west has represented its encounters with countries and peoples that are not itself. These mainstream representations somewhat hilariously reveal more about the cultures that made and consumed these films than the countries, peoples and histories they purport to depict. The ‘other’ here is a people and a place where the transgression of race, gender, and cultural norms can be imagined but which has little to do with any anthropological reality. As the clichés pile up this work is hugely entertaining, fast paced and sexy as it rolls through 60 years of moving image history. It also reiterates how desire, looking, power and the cinematic experience are so closely intertwined.

(Credit* Art Gallery of New South Wales) 

www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au 

Exhibition Dates: 27 June - 30 September 2015 - Tha Tien Pier

Opening: 26 June 2015 ( 8 - 10 pm) - The Jam Factory Pier / River City Pier

Payam Mofidi's series of 3 videos "Cohesive Disorder" metaphorically, culturally and psychologically reflects on the human conditions. The series are narrated through layers of his animated pictures and sketches in an aesthetic language to express the roles of religion and political powers which affect human’s action and reaction.

In this series of work, the hands and napkins are the principle components as symbols of control, comfort, and security. Without these cultural aspects of stability and protection, human beings shall lose their controls and actions of their bodies. Therefore, they will progressively deprive their own strength. As the conflict between being safe and endangered of certainty continues and repeats as seen in the videos, the repetition of being trapped within such cycle gradually becomes exhausting and restless until eventually turns into acceptance.

OPENING: LIQUID IDENTITIES – Bangkok
International experimental video-art festival

The Ferry Gallery, March 07/14 2015

International ArtExpo and The Ferry Gallery are proud to announce the opening of LIQUID IDENTITIES, international experimental video-art festival which will be held in Bangkok (Thailand) at The Ferry Gallery, from the 07th to the 14th of March 2015. The event will be curated by Arch. Luca Curci (founder of LUCA CURCI ARCHITECTS, International ArtExpo and It’s LIQUID Group).

The opening of the event will be on March 07, 2015 at The Ferry Gallery, starting from 05.00 PM.

Organizer: International ArtExpo
Partner: The Ferry Gallery
Curator: Luca Curci
Press office: It’s LIQUID

Venue: The Ferry Gallery, Tha Tien Pier, Khwaeng Phra Borom Maha Ratchawang, Khet Phra Nakhon, Bangkok 10200, Thailand (info: www.theferrygallery.com)
dates: from the 07th to the 14th of March 2015; from 05.00 to 07.00 PM

LIQUID IDENTITIES explores all the different facets of social, physical and cultural identities of our contemporary societies. Everyday we deal with a multitude of different identities and roles: we face the public life creating and adapting our social identities; our body and aesthetic tastes modify and are modified by our physical and sexual identities; our whole being evolves as well as contemporary cultures and modern cities do. Differences create new compounds and exchange possibilities.

Exhibition dates: 20 March - 30 June 2015 

Opening: 20 March 2015 (5-7 pm) 

A WAY WITH IT ALL IS KINDLY SUPPORTED BY

A Way with it All reflects on Melanie Jayne Taylor’s engagement with the archive as an institution, a place, and a process or series of processes.

The potentially infinite nature of the Modern archive, and the physical weight of her ever growing body of material, creates a situation where the organisation and management of Taylor’s personal archive forms the subject of her art practice. In this way, each exhibition presents a new arrangement of the broader archive.

Taylor suggests that, in order to allow for the influx of new material into the archive, one must physically and mentally clear space within the archive. We have to experience the process of ‘letting go’ in order to move on and make way for the new.

In her new video works, the artist performs the physical act of letting go of past images from her archive. In Away with it All [By Dusk], Taylor stands on the water’s edge at sunset and attempts to push an archive box full of photographic content into the sea. This poetic gesture appears at first to be futile, as the box floats out momentarily, before being pushed back to the shoreline, but as the salt water starts to physically interact with the photographs the images are irrevocably changed, physically and metaphorically.

As a counter to the very personal expulsion of images presented in the video works, Taylor has invited cataloguers at the State Library of Victoria to review and catalogue a selection of her photographic archive, which will determine how the works are compiled and disseminated within the space of the gallery. This gesture suggests an oscillation between the subjective and objective that forms the selection process of any archive, further examining the action of ‘letting go’ and how this can stimulate the archive .