Sterny news

You can tell I’m uber uber busy (who isn’t? But I still used to make time for blogging…) when I am not only posting very infrequently, but also mostly / only in response to comments left here (and it’s not as if my comments section is very forthcoming). Last week it was something on my Northern Ireland holiday in response to Laine. And now, artthrob editor Michael Smith asks – after chiding me about MWEB / artthrob down time – for some news. And he called me Sterny. Which is frakkin hilarious, on so many levels.

Admittedly, most news these days is dissertation-related, and / or not yet announcement-ready. There are a handful of exciting shows potentially forthcoming for me, but the operative word is potentially, and so I don’t want to make them public just yet. I am 5 weeks from a too short visit to Joburg and Cape Town – just a holiday, which I’m thrilled over – and then, after a 2-day stop in NYC to see family and hit galleries for a day, I start my new job at UWM‘s Peck School of the Arts. See more on that here. I’m actually on track to have a draft of said dissertation in before I leave Dublin, which is startling for most people, myself included (I’ve been working on it less than two years). The original proposal is here, and we’re lookin at 230 or so pages of academic text and case studies (5 chapters, intro, conclusion; this doesn’t include the bibliography or any of that extraneous stuff yet).

Confirmed shows include a group one in Pretoria with some older prints, and a new commission for Carine Zaayman’s NRF-funded project at the Michaelis Gallery at UCT, Jozi and the (M)other City. The latter show features work by myself, Ralph Borland, Nicola Grobler, Stephen Hobbs, Svea Josephy, Marcus Neustetter, Johan Thom and James Webb, creative writing by Sean O’Toole, and a catalogue with an essay by Zaayman herself. I’m very excited about the work I’m doing, as it’s a huge departure for me both conceptually and aesthetically – more of a performative and sociopolitical intervention than anything else – and is specific to a South African context and art world. The exhibition and catalogue and web site will all see documentation-as-art, so I don’t want to give too much away just yet, but the title may clue you in a bit: Doin’ my part to lighten the load… I will post upcoming international stuff when it’s confirmed.

In press news, there’ll be a full feature on me in the Winter issue of Printmaking Today, which is pretty exciting, and it also looks like I’ll be one of the featured artists in the sequel to Richard Noyce’s Printmaking at the Edge, by the same author and tentatively titled Printmaking Beyond the Edge, due for release in early 2010.

On a final note, I wanted to mention that I went to see Ralph Borland (fellow South African artist and Trinity grad student) and Julian Jonker’s Song of Solomon at the Project Arts Centre here in Dublin last week.

 A computer program samples many versions of the song ‘Mbube’ (the source of the song ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’) to form a continually-changing audio collage that questions notions of intellectual property and the processes of cultural production.

Although the original work was intended as a looped installation, this version was a 20-minute performance that did not disappoint. I have to say that the above statement reads like it could potentially be interesting, but might be better in concept than in practice. NOT TRUE. And the work was exceptionally potent as a performance, in the dark, sitting centered between the speakers, and as a common experience between all those present. It was a moving tribute and memorial which I’d sit through several more times, given the opportunity.

That’s all I got for now.