Opening: 6 – 9pm Wednesday 5th December, performance by Weekend Immendorff 7.30pm with Callum Galletly, Wreckers Artspace 7 Lotus Street, Woolloongabba
The Preservation Machine/Life Matter (14.08 min HD Video) from David Thomas on Vimeo.
Is a music video work for the electronic music group Weekend Immendorff. The original members of WI were Suzanne Howard and David M Thomas. The music is a montage of live electronic music performance, studio arrangement and field recordings from Mexico City and Veracruz 1998. The video features a sunrise emerging from Morton Bay and is the last video footage Suzanne shot. Suzanne shot this video from the top balcony of the house in Wynnum that she designed and built between 2012 and 2018. Suzanne died February 27, 2018.
The title refers to Phillip K. Dicks short story The Preservation Machine that describe an inventor who devices a machine to preserve great works of music by transforming them into living creatures. The video also features animations abstracting two of Suzanne’s drawings made whilst on residency in Penang 2015. I recently became aware of the abstract works of Hilma af Klint, whom I am not sure, but I am pretty sure Suzanne was unaware of, the similarity between their works is uncanny.
Other works in this installation are:
The Dark Side of the Moon, 187 x 187 cm, 2018, wool and wood, concrete masonry unit x 2, paper, ink and acrylic paint
Random Bats, 2018, 120 x 60 cm, wool steel and aluminium sheets, white gaffer tape
Communicating With Spirits Machine, 2018, 50 x 50 x 50 cm, wool, steel, concrete masonry unit x 2, and paper plinth
The Sun and the Moon (a non-objective portrait of Suzanne Howard), 2018, 187 cm x 187 cm, wool and wood, concrete masonry unit x 2
For 21 years I have made work in collaboration with my partner in love, art and life Suzanne Howard (1962-2018). This at the outset made the making for me more difficult as there were already a few voices in my head. Art-school and running a gallery, although very enjoyable and informative, had crowded my brain. Ironically, as this collaboration was largely unintended, I didn’t trust Suzanne’s judgement, I didn’t think she was qualified as she had not gone to art school. This makes me laugh now, as my belief in the academy’s absolute authority has softened somewhat, and my faith in her ideas grew greatly, as I realised more often than not her insights were right on the money. Suzanne had great sensitivity and an uncanny intuition both visually and sonically and plus she had fabulous style. So this is the problem, how do I continue our projects without Suzanne’s voice? The solution was to start again and listen for that voice, which is thankfully still there, in my head and in the work…just as loud, clear and beautiful as ever.
My own art practice has always been about finding ways to think about what’s happened and what is happening and what will likely happen. With this in mind recent work for the show at Wreckers Art Space in Brisbane, is about this aspect of life. The making of these works is a way of continuing, and also distracting us from the responsibilities, horrors and humiliations of life. Also a reminder of a particular aesthetic way of life, one that as an individual and with Suzanne as a couple and as the group Weekend Immendorff we committed to. This is not easy, bad faith seeps in everywhere. Through the doors left open by self doubt, self loathing and ones idea of self, and also the seduction and tress-passing of other ways of life.