Lt. Aldo Raine to Lt. Archie Hicox in ‘Inglourious Basterds’ by Quentin Tarantino.
Image of A. Baker basement bar at NewActon, Canberra. Shot by Scottie Cameron.
A walk about with Nectar Efkarpidis, Hotel Hotel’s cofounder and co-curator, will inevitably find you wandering down alleyways, through bookshops, flea markets, second hand shops and artists’ studios… Nectar is a lifelong collector; from seashells, amateur ceramics, shaped objects (collected for nothing more than their colour); to more rarefied items.
Sniffing out the “good stuff” to him is an irrepressible reflex.
It’s good fun trotting about the world looking at the wonderful things that people make and amass until you find yourself in tow in Mumbai with mad Delhi belly trying not to spew all over the beautiful-ugly green glass chandelier he’s found in an obscure flea market stall (true story). Or when you’re dragged to yet another bookshop in Tokyo to haul a load of books by bike to the post office… Or when you’re in Braidwood trying to fit a giant tin tub into a two door hatch back… Yes, yes, I hear you, thing could definitely be worse.
As someone who has been involved since the inception of Hotel Hotel though, talking with Nectar about concepts, names, configurations, artists, processes of making…
I can tell you that, to be totally honest, it’s bloody tiring…
But it’s also totally inspiring.
Nectar has a curious mind. Curious in that he makes desultory connections between things and people (which often amount to nothing). And curious in that he takes an interest in pretty much every thing and everything and in the possibility of those things.
These connections span over a wide range of concepts, objects, places and people and their unexpected relationships (when they do actually amount to something) make for strange and fantastical worlds.
I’ll take you to one now. It’s one in the making so we’ll see what comes of it in the future…
Nectar found a book called the ‘Toaster Project’ by Thomas Thwaites. It’s the story of how Thomas makes a toaster from scratch from his home in the UK – mining the raw materials, making the plastic, inventing a furnace from a microwave… He spends about a year making what is essentially the equivalent of a $6 toaster. It brings up questions about mass production and whether it’s okay to spend just $6 on a toaster whose parts are so resource intensive… And that will inevitably end up in landfill after just a few years.
After his book, Thomas spent a year investigating what it might be like to be a goat. He commissioned some prosthetic goat legs, consulted a behavioral expert, and lived with some goats (as a goat) on a goat farm in the Swiss Alps.
So naturally (?) Nectar made the connection between these thoughts of mass production and living with goats and is now talking to Thomas about forms of experimental living. Madness. But excellent madness.
In his soft and thoughtful voice Nectar will be giving an informal talk as part of our Fix and Make program alongside his lovely curatorial co-conspirators Ken Neale and Don Cameron.
The conversation will give unique insight into the curatorial approaches of three very unconventional collectors and curators — presenting new ways for finding value and meaning in objects. What makes stuff the “good stuff”? Are the stories about the stuff and the people that made it more important than the stuff itself?
The Fix and Make ’19 Objects – New Ways to Value’ is on Wednesday 25 November at 6PM in the Nishi Gallery at NewActon.
Wooden mallet. Found 2011.
Resin insects. Found 2011.
Green chandelier. Found 2012.
Ceremonial cow head. Found 2012.
Wooden head. Found 2011.
Tin bird. Found 2012.
'Endless Summer' by Hidehisa Tachibana. Found 2012.
Thomas Thwaites' toaster.
In a series of photographs made over eight years, Julian Germain captured the quiet, contemplative existence of an old man living alone in a small house in a city on the south coast of England. Unfettered by the misplaced aspirations of the modern world, Charles Albert Lucian Snelling (Charlie) spent the last years of his life absorbed in his memories of his wife, his children, his love for flowers, music and the quotidian pleasures of the crossword, and his albums of his own photographs. Germain’s photographs of Charlie, his home and the things he owned are a beautiful, gentle portrait of a gentleman in his twilight years.
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A frenzied reworking of the accumulated archive of photographer Gareth McConnell. An onslaught of kaleidoscopic imagery fuses portraits he took of rave-goers in Ibiza with pictures he both shot and found of a number of key moments in recent British history, from the 1985 Battle of the Beanfield to the London Riots of 2011. Amongst this we find collected references to the Zen mystic Osho, whose people are said to have experimented with Ecstasy and taken it into clubs in Ibiza for the first time. This is a personal, political body of work–a frustrated meditation on the nature of human occurrence, the power of mass communion in it’s many forms, and the delirious experience of losing oneself to hedonism from the view of someone who saw it from within.
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Tracing Melbourne artist Riley Payne ‘s photorealist graphite renderings of fruit, foliage and figure, this book captures Payne’s technical acumen and offbeat humour to equal effect. Comprising uncanny accumulations and pairings of classical forms and Google image search results, Payne’s fastidiously realised drawings might be considered in terms of collage. Banana bunches and cigarette-smoking carrot men coalesce, while a neon hot dog perches before Antonio Canova’s ‘Sleeping Nymph’. Art history and the absurd knock heads, as do the labour of technique and the flippancy of the one-liner.
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Customs and traditions: the originality of Estelle Hanania’s photographic work appears in the fact that it focuses on the european vernacular rites in a very unique way. Unlike the anthropologist or pure documentarist, she doesn’t try to understand nor to decode the mystery of those rites, letting them pass trough her camera.
A procession of giants in a field, a magician in a parking lot, a wild cave… The shadows of a singular identity are standing as a non-exotic setting yet revealing themselves as an hallucination.
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Elad Lassry has developed a reputation for the wit and rigour of his investigations into how we perceive and conceive pictures, through photographs, films and sculpture, as well as interventions in the gallery space. For Lassry, the act of looking, whether at a unique artwork, human face or generic coffee cup, is always a picture making process, an instant that combines a particular sensual experience haunted by the memory of countless images that transform that experience. This book includes an accompanying text by Andre Rottman – research fellow at the Department of Art History at the Freie Universitat Berlin and contributor to Artforum International.
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Trent Jansen shot by Lee Grant
For a hotel putting on a series of workshops and talks about fixing and making stuff (that’s us) it’s important to ask the question: What’s the point of stuff in the first place?
“If you look back through human history we’ve always had things. Some are symbols of community; some are used for trade. Many are cultural,” says Trent Jansen, the furniture and object designer who will join a panel of four at NewActon on Wednesday November 18 to really get to the guts of what it means to own all the things we humans do.
Being one of the world’s makers of stuff, Trent thinks about this all the time. “It becomes quite clear early on when you’re designing that you don’t really need anything new if the point is purely function,” he says. And if function was the point, we should have stopped at modernism.
We perpetually make and collect because things carry stories; like that piece of linen that reminds you of a parent, or the holiday you think back on every time you wipe the dust off that useless but beautiful paperweight.
Stuff also helps tell the story of us to others. “Things help identify us as someone. Maybe it’s magazines on display, art on walls, or cars in the garage. These things say to others what our priorities are. They show our ethics,” says Trent.
But let’s stop Trent right there. At ‘The Ownership of Things’ panel discussion he’ll reveal more of his ethics and philosophies along with entrepreneur and co-founder of GoGet Bruce Jeffreys; historian, artist and writer Anne Brennan; neuroscientist Dr Pascal Molenberghs, and the ABC’s Genevieve Jacobs (as moderator). Buy tickets here. Oh, and a drink is included in the ticket price. This will be very interesting.
Pedro Calderón de la Barca – dramatist, poet and writer of the Spanish Golden Age.
Image of Lizzie pashing Gordon in the Monster Salon and Dining rooms shot by Lee Grant.
Rachel of Many Many and Nic of Honey Fingers shot by Lee Grant
Rachel Elliot-Jones (Melbourne) and Stephanie Poole (Zurich) are the co-founders of Many Many – an itinerant curatorial and publishing platform that investigates rituals of making and interdisciplinary design.
Of the many many excellent things they do, worthy of note is their brilliant occasional publication ‘House Wear’. ‘House Wear’ looks at the condition of impermanence in our everyday lives and the effects this has on contemporary design, art, architecture and writing.
They have applied these thoughts to bees. Swarm traps to be precise; as part of a project with collaborative studio and urban beekeeping network Honey Fingers (Melbourne).
Many Many, Honey Fingers and beekeepers Dermot and Sarah Asis Sha’non (Canberra) are holding a Swarm Trap workshop as part of our Fix and Make program.
At the workshop you’ll learn how to make a pre-fab house for bees (to take home) and what to do if bees move in.
If you are in Melbourne a session is being held at the MPavillion Sunday 15.11; if you are in Canberra book your spot now for Spring.
Add all of the ingredients into a Boston shaker… And shake.
Strain into a rocks glass over ice.
Garnish with a star anise.
Reflect on the fact that summer is coming… Finally.
We visited Naomi Taplin on one of Sydney’s first spring afternoons. Her studio was quiet and cold in the base of a big brick building covered in “Coming Soon – Luxury Apartments” hoardings.
Despite few signs of packing, Naomi was getting ready to close out her temporary lease here in one week. Porcelain plates, bowls and light fittings covered every surface including makeshift tables of thin wood tops and milk crate legs with Naomi sat amongst it all. She’s earthy in that she speaks gently about really practical things. And in that her shoes are covered in dust.
Naomi’s business, named Studio Enti, makes the dishes you can eat off at Monster. They’re beautiful, neutral toned pieces that look nice with food on them but are also mighty enough to deal with dish liquids, dish washers, stacking and so on.
“I make it as thick as possible so people can use it everyday. You know it costs a lot of money to produce this sort of thing in Australia. And I think to have this balance between something being precious but usable is really important,” she says.
Naomi was born in Canberra but grew up in Queensland on a rose farm. With six children in the family her mum took up pottery for some cash on the side and made things our own mother’s bought: terracotta birdbaths and house numbers.
“They (mum and dad) had an old gas kiln that you had to turn up every hour. As a little girl I remember them getting up every hour throughout the night,” Naomi says. These days Naomi has an electric kiln that’s just shy of two Monster plates wide. Great because you don’t have to turn it up every hour, but annoying that it’s short of two Monster-plates wide (it makes the firing process that much longer).
Making ceramics it turns out is a time sink. Batches of work take three to six weeks to go from cradle to table. Naomi uses the process of slip casting over throwing on the wheel or hand building. It involves moulds, mixtures, firing, glazing and re-firing. Then there’s the whole business side of things: packing orders, talking to clients and so on.
“At the moment it’s pretty crazy because it’s just me trying to do all of this. There are lots of different stages trying to produce ceramics so every day there’s a different thing going on. That makes it really easy to fall behind,” she says.
Which is why Naomi is here seven days a week. When she’s by herself she works in quiet. When fellow ceramicists are in the studio the radio is on. Sometimes her four year-old daughter Luna comes in and plays with clay.
In the little time Naomi has outside of Studio Enti she hangs out with Luna and enjoys living in Sydney because of the ocean. “That’s my favourite thing at the moment, just to walk and swim. Sometimes you get to a point when you’ve been living in a city for so long that you want to get out. So Sydney is this nice middle ground,” she says.
Soon Naomi will return to Canberra to take part in our Fix and Make event series, which questions our consumption of and relationship with objects. She’ll be teaching Kintsugi – a Japanese technique for repairing smashed or chipped pottery where the damage is celebrated as a part of the object’s history rather than disguised. Book here. And save your smashed pottery pieces.
