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The Half Blood Prince wipes the floor performing ‘The Drainbow Connection’ LIVE on Massey’s Next Top Artist

A 3D print of pepe frog rides around on a roomba playing an interpretation of ‘The Rainbow Connection’ by Kermit the Frog.

He is a ghostly white for the most part, save for his red lips. Noticebly, in the center of his lips, there is a heart shape in the negative space of the paint work. Between this and the use of the ‘prince’ in the title we recall the myth of the princess and the frog, that the princess must kiss the frog in order for him to be transformed back into a prince. This takes trust, and intimacy with something repulsive.

His arm is also red, in a composition that mimics that of Pierre Huyghe’s dog with a pink leg.

This dog named ‘human’ lives in Huyghe’s exhibtions and there has been a lot of controversy surrounding the ethics of the animal’s use in exhibitions.

This redness also invokes ideas of guilt ‘blood on your hands’ ‘out damned spot’ It also acts as an arm band, fascistic in nature. it’s unclear what the message is, its there to confuse, to send people in circles. People’s own politics are brought into question as they contend with the work.

He rides around aimless, lost in the gallery space, he sings the Rainbow connection. A beautiful song about chasing ‘the dream’ as it is co opted and used to manipulate through a misleading ideology.  Following the lineage between Kermit as a mostly pure romantic lamenting the loss of inocence and encouraging the cultivation of hope within that - to this more tumultous frog who’s meaning seems to fluctuate along with the whims of the internet.

This cluster of signs and symbols form a network that trancends the borders of politics but all talk to the idea of the contingent nature of language. Is pepe losing his colour, or in the process of becoming red? Do we need to come erotically close with the opposition in order to fully concquer it as Berardi says? Where do we place hope and rehabilitation in this maelstrom of information and ideology? it can seem aimless.futile at times.

Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection

the lovers, the dreamers and me.

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Amber 2022 - Sorcha Ashworth, Amadeo Grosman,  Single channel video

Very important work for the development of my practice, furthering collaborative relationship with Sorcha. It felt very much like we really hit something with this work. It wove in our shared ideas in a way that I find very subtle and sophisticated. Banality is fused with monumental imagery to create a hypnotic spectacle out of nothing at all. An aimless figure in an otherworldly location being subject to nondescript discourse regarding an unknown person. We don’t really know if the figure in the video is speaking or being spoken about, we don’t know why she’s in a pool full of orange liquid. But leaving that mystery allows for this endlessly intriguing experience despite the re use of clips over and over again. 

This is a trick we end up using frequently in our collaborations. in Its Almost Painless, the video remains reppetitive while the score underneath changes over time to offer different readings and combinations of feeling.  In amber we re use the same footage while we change the text

in Living Legends we use the same footage but change the combinations in which they appear, which acts to persistently denies the temptation to read a dichotomy between the two scenes. 

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Write up for Living Legends

Living Legends sees frequent collaborators Sorcha Ashworth and Amadeo Grosman grapple with the fractured shards of contemporaneity in their latest video work. Here, filmic compositions are assembled from misrememberences of movie scenes and images long lost to the feed. Cinematic conventions are bent to a mediaeval score as scenes of endurance and empathy are stress tested—reused and recycled in unending dichotomies that hope to one day deliver meaning.

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Progress photos for Living Legends

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Half blood prince progress photos

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Nice interview and conversation between two of my favourites Jordan Wolfson. The conversation divolges into a discussion on how portrayal of something terrible doesn’t mean that it is being condoned, and that art ought to put us in positions that make us question what is taken for granted. Wolfson believes that his depictions of violence are being used in a productive dialogue through the art. 

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Behind the scenes of another collaborative video work with Sorcha

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‘Amber’ Exhibition Text

Amber brings together works from Elsie Christoffel, Amadeo Grosman, and Sorcha Ashworth, as they probe at the vicarious networks that constitute our late capital climate. 

Between stop and go there is a fire, a pause, a golden hour. 

Within the derelict walls of a failed nightclub, Amber contends with our restless anticipation. Warped organisms stretch across super-sized receipts, a silent muse gestates under loops of banal commentary, a Glasson’s girl flickers at the whims of an adolescent soundtrack. Gossips, dancers, and scientists—we find ways to occupy ourselves in the hot car of the world.Waiting patiently, as though caught in amber. We are specimens. We are living legends.

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Documentation of ‘It’s Almost Painless’ , Sorcha Ashworth, Amadeo Grosman 2022 - 18:00 Audio and Video

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Documentation of ‘You Want It Darker’ series 1-3 , Amadeo Grosman, 2022

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Doccumentation of ‘Amber’  - Sorcha Ashworth, Amadeo Grosman, 2022 - single channel video 

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I really love almost all of Balenciaga’s recent efforts in their collections and subsequent branding exercises. They conveniently inhabit that frustratingly comfortable space of critique of capitalism where they know and satirize it so well that they are inevitably enabled and consumed by it.

This campaign in particular echoes a lot of the aesthetics and ideas I’ve been thinking about lately. The highbrow / lowbrow collision. The insistence on consumerism and culture being inseperable even as the world collapses around us.

To me this set of videos advertising the clothes was a perfect example of how critique and consumerism have married in a frustrating way.

Of course the common counter comes up “How can you create a meaningful critique of capitalism whilst also participating and perpetuating it” To which one could respond “Well who better to demonstrate its unrelenting, shameless fervor than those who participate in it?”  This would be a convenient retort because it means that change doesn’t have to happen directly from the brand or its benificiaries, but at least for me it has been far more illuminating at demonstrating the evils and perils of late stage capitalism than any number of dense or inaccessible texts. 

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Dimitris Papaioannou:  Transverse Orientation  (2021). Choreography

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Jess Johnson Lecture Notes

Deeply inspired by old sci fi posters, gig flyers, cartoons, manga. Art that exists in popular culture as opposed to the potentially more ‘sophisticated’ contemporary art world. 

Has meticulously developed a style since childhood. 

Drifting after artschool, uninspired. 

Making gig posters for a music scene meant that her art existed in the spaces of her actual community. 

drawing full time.

Escalating scale and medium, collaborations with 3D artists.  Touring large scale installations.

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HyperNormalisation - Adam Curtis Interesting overview of the rise of neoliberalism, individualismm how reality and fiction became blurred as a result of millitiristic imperatives.  an interesting point made when curtis describes a very early program that acted like a therapist to the user simply by regurgitating what was being said back to the user. This kind of program didn’t understand what the user was saying, it was not AI, rather a parody of the ideals of AI. Anyone that used this program immediately became engrossed in it, sharing hyper specific intimate details about their life. This therapist didnt condascend or threaten the user. Curtis notes that in the age of individualism, what made people feel most secure was seeing themselves reflected back on them, exactly like looking in the mirror.  This changed the course of the pursuit of AI via a detour toward feedback loops. this ordered the world with the user at the center, but had the added bonus of being the perfect honeytrap for the extraction of value. The manufacturing of desire and the promise of fulfilling those same desires. In the age of the anxious individual, a system that reflects the individual is reasurring. 

- Talks about the concerted effort to manipulate the dissemination of news media as a means of constructing a narrative to justify the invasion of the middle east, to cause unrest among the middle east. It tells the tale of the birth  of the post truth era

-talks about a russian technologist called Vladislav Serkov, originally from the theatre world. What he did was to apply avante garde ideas from theatre into pollitics and economics in order to undermine the public perception of what was real and what was not.  Serkov funded many opposing extreme pollitical groups and then made it known that this is what he was doing. No one knew what was real or fake in modern russia. “It’s a strategy of power that keeps any opposition constantly confused. A ceasless shapeshifter that is unstoppable because it was indefinable. 

The same happened in the west,,,, tbc

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‘C.L.B (Certified Lover Boy) / Saint Sebastian Dakimakura’ - 2022 - Amadeo

Franco Berardi ‘Bifo’ frequently finds correlation in his writing between the monetary economy and the economy of the world mind. He details its effects and affects - its impact on our sense of self and our social relations. For Bifo, neoliberal ideology injects itself into the mind through various forces. 

“They take Viagra because they don’t have time for sexual preliminaries.”

This idea that neoliberalism has supplanted intimacy with a scattered sense of self and alienation is central in my work. Identity, intimacy, and desire. 

In this work I examine the relationship between the mythic figure of the martyr by way of Saint Sebastian, and the modern phenomena of the anime body pillow (dakimakura, or daki for short) - as a way of exploring the above ideas in the contemporary socio/economic/cultural contexts. 

Anime fans, and specifically Daki owners occupy a cultural subsect designated to the outcasted, socially inept, ugly, and alone up until recently as an interest in anime has become more acceptable and in many cases quite fashionable (perhaps because of its marginal status). Some Daki owners use them for sexual purposes, but more often they are simply totems to comfort and a bandaid for lonliness. Sleeping with a pillow made to mimic the mass and shape of a body, which itself has the design of a fictional character on it - is something I find very telling about the state of our world.  Saint Sebastian is a biblical figure who was martyrd for refusing to renounce his faith. He is a symbol of endurance, beauty, and a protector against plague. He was tied to a post and shot full of arrows. He survived this. I think the role of the martyr is an interesting one. They take on the pain of a community and are given up in the name of this community or idea. I wonder what role that has today?  Is there a connection between the totems to lonliness and the totems to pain that martyrdom entails?  This is also a semi self portrait. In my online performance I will often post myself as an anime or cartoon boy. Sort of representing a characature or splitting of the self. The red hat is also a motif in my posts that feed into this. The pillow is not not me but its also not me because me is????? 

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Notes on wordplay in hip hop

I’ve been thinking a little bit about why I love rap lyrics so much, and why the use of word play is really important in my work. Traditionally, we learn in schools that a similie is used to connect two distinct ideas into something that connotes a deeper kind of meaning. I’ll use this lyric by Leonard Cohen as an example:

“You held on to me like I was a crucifix”  Here we understand that a crucifix is held in times of need, in times of desperation, in times of prayer, they are clutched tightly for protection and assurance. Connecting this connotation to the way one holds a lover creates this really beautiful image. It produces a meaning more profound than something like “you held on to me tightly/desperately/lovingly” 

However often times in rap lyrics, similies make a connection that by traditional measures might read as sloppy or ineffective. Take this lyric from Drake: 

“Like a job straight out of High School there’s no you and I” 

Here “you and I” is a homophone of “U.N.I.,” as in “university”—people who start working right after high school haven’t gone to university yet. But beyond this word play there is no deeper connotation. What does getting a job straight out of high school have to do with there being no relationship between Drake and who ever it is he is talking about? Nothing really. This happens quite a lot in rap, a connection is made between two things seemingly on a purely aesthetic basis. Some might put this down to poor writing, but I think there is something more interesting going on here. 

These lines express an exuberant unpredictability which defy the conventions of poetic language. They are playful, and priotize the creativity of the initial connection over concern to adhere to the normal ways in which literary devices are used. While there may not be a strong initial connection between two ideas in the traditional sense, meaning is still conveyed in the shear creativity of the connection in a way that I find quite radical and precisely unique to hip hop. 

I think there is something to be learned from this ‘tossing out’ of the rule book. Rap has developed its own set of rules and precedents. I think there are possiblities to adopt this kind of attitude when it comes to artmaking, and particularly in regards to my ongoing practice of clustering together seemingly disperate cultural ideas. Its about the play itsself.