Future Girl and Tales of Interior Logic Anya Sinclair, Alan Ibell
Anya Sinclair's Future Girl is a sculptural rendering of sterile cyber-space, abstracted and distilled from nature, constructed by Future Girl a cyborg bishōjo (heroine) programmed to create immersive phantasmagorical landscapes. Future Girl aims to shape a private universe by consciously investing and indulging in her desire to escape into fantasy. By inviting viewers into her private world she references the shared consumption and creation of artificial virtual environments through mediums such as the Internet and multi-player computer games. Her work takes issue with the evolving sophistication of alternative realities that increasingly premise virtual experience over physical reality.
Alan Ibell's series of paintings Tales from the Interior Logic depicts figures within sparse, empty dreamscapes that are beholden only to the realm of human thought. Ibell's paintings are intended to stimulate the viewer's unconscious mind and offer a dreamlike narrative for waking life. The characters themselves, with their pale skin and blurred features, seem to occupy a limbo space somewhere between life and death, awake and asleep, as they negotiate their often absurd situations. Ibell explores the merging of reality and fantasy; the familiar and uncanny; logical and irrational; waking life and the dream.
In association with Future Girl the Blue Oyster will be running the second in a series of educational workshops. This drawing workshop will work with students as they construct their own fantasy landscapes through various drawing techniques. Workshops will be held on Thurs 18, Tues 23, Thurs 25, Tues 30 of June and Thurs 2 July from 12:30pm. Participation is free and available to school groups from any year.
Click to download the exhibition text (PDF)
Click to view video documentation (Vimeo)
Presented alongside Islands 'You and Me – A Second and a Lifetime'. Hofko, Sinclair and Ibell explore the construction of imagined realities as a way to interrogate issues arising in everyday life, through the way belief systems, fears and desires are revealed in the content of fantasies.
Blue Oyster Discussion Session 2: Wednesday 8 July, 5:30pm
Taking cue from current exhibitions that utilise fantasy and the construction of other worlds, a discussion around indulgence, pleasure and fun in contemporary art. How do we address the paradox of an art that critiques the very thing it indulges in? Where are we now at in our understanding of the role of pleasure in politics and power relationships? What is the role of pleasure in the construction of identity and identity politics? (We didn't talk about this today, but it could be interesting, but the question probably needs to be developed... ideas?). Anna Paris, PhD candidate, Department of Gender Studies, Otago University will joins us to explore these questions.
“Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about.” - Oscar Wilde
The attached suggested reading [R. L. Rutsky and Justin Wyatt Serious Pleasures: Cinematic Pleasure and the Notion of Fun Cinema Journal, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Autumn, 1990), pp. 3-19] is distributed for research purposes only and usual copyright restrictions apply.
