| Real Estate: Mini Graff / Jason Wing — 19 March to 9 April 2011 |
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19 March to 9 April 2011 Mini Graff and Jason Wing engage with the politics of space and access, vision and corruption. Their installations and artwork registers the dysfunctional beat and improvisational aesthetic of the street, a dynamic rhythm that pits creativity against the corporate state (and corporatized local government) and its relentless obliteration of memory and difference. They evidence the transformation of the urban landscape as public land becomes more valuable, stands out more and more and is more contested. Many forces are at work, but from Kings Cross via Barangaroo and Redfern to Blacktown and beyond the ideals of civic space and civil society are up for grabs. Their installations and artwork uniquely register the differences and potential play-offs between public address, gallery codes and the hand-to-hand spirit of social aesthetics and the enthusiasms of zine, stencil and community screenprint land. In Real Estate Mini Graff and Jason Wing chart gentrification, public space make-overs for real estate brochures (Fitzroy Gardens in Kings Cross), public lands (the Block, privatising housing estates) and landfall itself (the global refugee crisis in Mini Graff’s series ‘Country Shoppers’.) In the ‘box gallery’ window of Cross Art Projects, Jason Wing’s blow-up photograph ‘Sign of the Times’ depicts a floating island streetscape of road signage, surveillance cameras and real estate signs crowding like flies around a map of NSW 'For Sale' mounted on an island base in the shape of NSW—the proverbial ship of fools. The abstracted signs suggest, not the syncopated modernist city grid, but an immense framework of double standards. 'Sign of the Times' reprises a commanding installation for Djon Mundine's exhibition 'Ngadhu Ngulili Ngeaninyagu Premier State' (Campbelltown Art Centre, 2008) held during the period of the ICAC ‘cash for development’ inquiry into corrupt development approvals, bribes and undeclared gifts at Wollongong City Council. Inside the gallery, Jason Wing’s work ‘Going, going, gone’ marks the electoral backlash of the 2011 State Election taking place over the exhibition period. The melancholic installation Elders, a unique site-specific stencil in ochre pigment, signifies some of the overarching social justice issues at stake when peoples’ rights are denied and land becomes ‘real estate’. Mini Graff’s ‘Suburban Roadhouse’ series protests against Big Money and council’s continuous and insidious ways of vetoing art on our streets, nooks and crannies. She parodies and challenges the might of the advertising industry and the brand names and branding that invades and claims public spaces, including streetscapes, parks and schools to plant the banners of consumerism and lines to make us insecure. While corporations gloat, artists are forced into humiliations of form filling and attending to overseers of ‘official’ artworks, a censorship not tolerated by any other professional group. Mini Graff champions the paste up brush of street art as an act of daily civil libertarian heroism.
Links: http://minigraff.com/; http://www.jasonwing.net/ Download Further Reading: Mini Graff Interview by Jaklyn Babington Podcast Jaklyn Babington interviews Mini Graff and Jason Wing, 9 March 2011: http://www.myspace.com/crossartprojects
About Fitzroy Gardens — The Heart of The Cross Link: http://www.savefitzroygardens.com/
About Llankelly Lane and Llankelly Artworks
In 2000-2003 architect Peter McGregor re-designed Llankelly and Springfield Mall for then South Sydney Council. His lightwork and pavements have become quiet local place markers and a senstive evocation of a European style landway for pedestrians. In November 2010, the Art Deco Cahors Building where the gallery is situated erected a "temporary" hoarding outside the gallery's main viewing window also an important source of light. Despite representations, Council was content a hoaring can be used primarily as a private garage for a contractor working on the building. The "temporary hoarding" remained in situ for 8 months. (Removed on 23 June 2011.) The Cross Art Projects proposed artworks by Mini Graff and Jason Wing to animate the obstruction. By this time the artworks were in situ. A private carpark in a public lane is OK; art might upset corporations. The artist used words and manipulated logos, this was "advertising", not critical contemporary art. Art does not matter, nor the reputation and livlihoods of artists.
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