p02 → Art Month Sydney
Festival Communications and Brand Strategy
www.artmonthsydney.com.au
Launch video for Art Month Sydney 2021
Made by Meg Perkins
Brand and tone defintion for Art Month Sydney
Positioning Art Month Sydney within Sydney’s cultural events, art, and galleries space.
Collectors Space Exhibition: You Never Forget Your First
Take a sneak peek into some of the city’s most fascinating private collections. Curated by Gina Mobayed, Director of Goulburn Regional Gallery, this year’s Collectors’ Space is not to be missed. Come along for a rare and personal journey through the private collections of practitioners, philanthropists and arts leaders based across NSW. They will share with us the first piece they ever bought and then trace their journey with collecting through to their most recent purchase. Collectors include Chris Kirby and Ray Monde, Michelle Newton, Evan Hughes, Jasper Knight and Isabelle Toland and Megan Monte.
Feature Article
The Memory and The Relief
Sydney’s unrepresented artists display works that explore remembering and repose.
The Western Sydney art scene has been swelling for the past few decades, with new initiatives and a ream of talent issuing forth. Each year Parramatta Artists’ Studio (PAS) allocate their 13 studio spaces to artists from Parramatta, Western Sydney, and Greater Sydney. They represent a diversity of backgrounds, mediums, and career stages. For those chosen, it is a year of interpersonal creativity.
One of the program members, Akil Ahamat, is a multimedia artist. His works employ visual and audio cues to tell nonlinear stories and bring the viewer into a space that can elicit a physiological response. In his studies he came across ASMR and developed an interest in its form and effects. “It’s essentially a self-administered therapy device that people are drawn to on the internet” he says, “it’s a physiological phenomenon like deep bodily tingles from particular kind of sounds.” Akil explains that the subject of ASMR is “sound that has an alignment with intimacy, sounds that are in the periphery of being heard.” The result is a series of works called sonic showers.
Tucked into the corner of the threshold to Paramount House Hotel, beside the elevator pink velvet curtains are drawn open to reveal Akil’s A World that Breathes Out of, Surry Hills. The work offers a private and sensory experience housed in a public space. A World that Breathes Out immerses you in a downpour of sound and invites you into a moment of speculative therapeutic technology. As you experience the piece, the exhale is one of emotional and physiological decompression. The shower of sound is the relief, engaging with it is the same as understanding it. This release pairs and contrasts with its sense of place of the hotel. Akil says, “doing the show at the hotel is really appealing to me. I think it’s the perfect place to have this technology, this therapeutic device. A big part of it is understanding those experiences of intimacy but in a public space.”
A series of artworks from Parramatta Artists’ Studio will take up residence in Paramount Coffee Project and Paramount House Hotel for the duration of Art Month Sydney. Featuring alongside Akil’s work will be Tully Arnot’s piece, Sanctuary, a cluster of mechanical butterflies inhabiting the double-height entry windows of the lobby. Sofiyah Ruqayah’s Devotion will feature in an exclusive hotel room for guests to enjoy. Plus, Lillian Colgan’s Girl Introjected, an amalgamation of materials that will be suspended from the rafters of the adjacent Paramount Coffee Project to coincide with a ticketed evening workshop on the 17 March
The PHH lobby will house these works for the duration of Art Month Sydney and will remain open 24 hours a day for hotel guests, Art Month Sydney patrons and locals to enjoy. Each artwork displayed is also for sale and can become the latest addition to your collection through the Shop section of Art Collector magazine.
Find more information on the collaboration between Paramount House Hotel and Parramatta Artists’ Studios on the Art Month Sydney website.
This theme of curation extends beyond the lobby, as PAS artists delve into the process and result of collecting. Launching with Art At Night on March 5th at Parramatta Artists’ Studios, The Collector’s Item is an invitation to consider the nature of collection. The practice of gathering and curating runs through our lives as we accumulate a nest of objects and cherished items that we instil with meaning and significance. From physical tokens to digital images and immaterial memories. Selected artists from PAS will share their own artworks that muse on this theme of selection and categorisation.
Gillian Kayrooz, of the PAS studio program, has a strong sense of the value of preservation. Her works slide through mediums and forms with a base in photography and film. She is earnest in her pursuit of protecting stories, creating space for the past to reverberate and be accessed. Her pieces centre around authenticity, aiming to capture and amplify moments of humanity, to enshrine memories so that they can be replayed and explored. She works to defy the swell of time and to safeguard moments that can easily be lost to the river.
Parramatta Artists’ Studio has a special place in her life. “My mum took me when I was in high school” she says, “it blew my mind at that age to see that these people are doing ‘the artist thing’ full time, it’s not a myth. It’s even more mind blowing to realise that I’m now here.” Growing up in Western Sydney, she wants to make sure the arts are accessible to the young people of the area. She spends a day a week working as a studio technician in a local school and is involved in developing art education programs for students. “For me, as an artist, it’s something I don’t want to forget about” she says, “it’s part of my practice to make sure that this doesn’t just remain in the art world.”
Gillian’s contribution to The Collector’s Item will be another piece of preserved narrative. Items collected from the mountains of Sapporo, Japan where she completed an art residency in 2019. Her piece tells a story through arranging natural and synthetic materials that have been scanned and rearranged, set against a dark backdrop, like they are “floating in a black abyss”. The images are printed on silk and stretched onto a frame. Gillian’s work will be displayed alongside her peers, Tully Arnot, Kalanjay Dhir, Amy Prcevich, Shan Turner-Carroll, and Justine Youssef. Each work of The Collector’s Item will also be for sale. The exhibition opens on March 5th and continues through to March 28th.
This year, the city comes together in a shared celebration of expression. The humanity of art spans across Sydney and tells an old story in a new voice. Emerging artists who are a part of the rejuvenation of creativity and communication are given a sense of place to share their perspectives and stories. In varied forms, they convey messages and meaning and invite us into the drama of both. Moments of remembering and exhalation that can act as therapeutic repose and enrich our sense of our place. From whichever corner of the city, to each place they are contained the messages are potent and the voices resonant. Art Month Sydney invites you to get up, get out, and explore the sprawl.
Check out Art Month Sydney
artmonthsydney.com.au
Check out Paramount House Hotel
paramounthousehotel.com
Shop the artworks:
https://artcollector.net.au/product-category/artworks/
Check out Parramatta Artists’ Studio
cityofparramatta.nsw.gov.au/visiting/parramatta-artists-studios
Check out PAS X PHH
artmonthsydney.com.au/events/parramatta-artists-studios-x-paramount-house-hotel
Check out Lill Colgan’s workshop
https://artmonthsydney.com.au/events/artist-talk-dinner-pas-x-paramount-house-hotel/
Check out The Collector’s Item
artmonthsydney.com.au/events/the-collectors-item