This Friday, everybody’s favourite art-zine-turned-magazine-that-also-now-has-it’s-own-artspace, Oh Really on King Street, is celebrating the first birthday of its gallery and the fifth issue of its publication. Featuring work by Ben Frost, Beastman, Ape7, Claire Nakazawa, Creepy, Max Berry, Mini Graf, Phibs, Syke, Teazer, Yok and about fourteen hundred other local and international artists, the group show is an exhibition of handpainted book covers. A few are in the pictures above.

Hard Cover No Jacket is a double whammy too; it also celebrates the launch of Issue Five of Oh Really Magazine – 1000 limited edition magazines that themselves have hand-screened covers. We asked Jamie Nimmo, one third of Oh Really, about being one years old again…

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+ Happy Birthday! You’re one years old! I haven’t been one years old in ages. What’s it like?
> Well after being birthed into the gallery scene it’s been an interesting year; learning to crawl, eating solids and not spitting food on ourselves was a breakthrough. After taking the pelican bib off, and wiping the apple sauce from our cheeks, we feel great.

+ Keeping on this somewhat tenuous theme of infancy, what’s the biggest teething problem you guys have had since starting up the whole Oh Really mag/gallery venture?
> Tax…. Figuring out the right GST to charge and who pays the GST was one of the hardest challenges.

+ If Oh Really gallery could pick any birthday present, what would it be? (You can’t ask for unlimited presents.)
> Studios, preferably a warehouse for our artists, which would double as a place for more events. We hear from so many artists that they need a place to paint and talk amongst other creative people.

+ How are you celebrating your birthday?
> With a group show, magazine launch and a shit load of beer. We wanted it to not just be about us but about the space, the people that come to shows, and the artists that have helped us so much over the last year.

+ Talk us through Hard Cover No Jacket. What’s the concept? How did it come together?
> We’ve been trying to get Oh Really Issue Five out for about six months. We’d find time, then a couple a shows would hit the gallery and it would take a back seat. The amount that needs to be done to run a gallery really took us by surprise, and now we have some systems in place we finally decided to get dirty, splatter a whole bunch of front covers with paint, and screen them. Yep, it was pretty ambitious making 1000 copies with hand screened covers.

So with all this printing to get the issue out, we thought we’d make the show fit around the publishing theme. By the time we had done enough copies, our first birthday was around the corner, so we asked everyone to paint a hardcover book without its jacket – Hence Hard Cover No Jacket for our first birthday celebration.

+ What’s in store for your second year?
> Well, there’s talk about having an international artist show, and definitely Issue Six of Oh Really. More Culture Jams, and you never know, we might actually get our birthday present. Fingers crossed.

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Hard Cover No Jacket launches on September 4th, 6pm-9pm at Oh Really Gallery, 55 Enmore Road Newtown. It closes on September 6th. Buy a magazine too, quickly, because their last issue sold out.

I like art, and I like art openings, but today I can’t be bothered to get out of bed and despite the fact that real art openings are probably more free drinks rewarding, all I really need to do is get Steph over with some cheap champagne and sit with me around the computer screen as we drink it out of plastic glasses, quietly judging each other’s outfits and murmuring about how much more we liked the artists’ earlier work. Way to cut out that pesky middle-man!

http://freshlybakedgallery.com/. In an hour.
And you don’t even have to put pants on.

[UPDATE]: Ape Seven, Mephisto Jones, Max Berry, Alastair Mooney, Aida Sabic, Dan Foothead, Baden Pailthorpe, Caitlin Rigby and Satta van Daal….

The idea of the Lock-In is to take artists out of their usual habits, processes and environments and see what comes of it. They might work together, they might work separately, they might feed off each other creatively, they might just eat each other. Jamie Nimmo is one of the trio behind the Oh Really collective, who are always trying new things to widen the walls of the creative minds they work with. He just called me up to tell me a bit about the Lock-In and accidentally found himself being interviewed while he was supposed to be at work (sorry Jamie Nimmo.)

The four artists are Joe Wilson from N.A.S, Chris Bennett from the College of Art, Joe Purtle who is tall, dark and apparently handsome and Claire Wieland, who graduated from N.A.S in 2008. “Joe [Wilson] and Claire have been to one of our culture jams before.” The culture jams are monthly nights run by Oh Really which combine improvised music with live action painting. “They tied their hands together and dipped them in these different coloured Indian inks and then drew on the walls, wearing these black big plastic bags cut up and designed in a way which made them look like this big, black, feathery entity drawing on the walls. A world music band was playing live as well.”

So I guess virtually anything could come out of the experiment? “Basically. This is the first time we’ve run the concept; next time it will be with a new group. The idea is to start mixing and matching different sorts of artists – we figured it might be cool to mix abstract painters with street artists, or landscape people with 3D artists… The main thing is to just sort of throw four different artists into the room, and let them have free run of the walls and the tools and anything they want to bring and use.”

The best part is you can go and watch them do it until 5pm Saturday (tomorrow), at Oh Really Gallery – 55 Enmore Road, Newtown.

If you miss out, head to the next culture jam, on Thursday July 9.

The first Thing is an astronomical dance, whereby the Earth tilts herself as far away as possible from the Sun, and the Sun responds in kind by halting in his path across her sky and then promptly changing direction. This will be called the Winter Solstice. The second Thing is a multimedia group exhibition, where fourteen Sydney underground artists will bring new work to St Peters newest warehouse space, Tortuga Studios. This will be called “The Longest Night”. Taking inspiration from the urban industrial environment around them, the show is a celebration of “the longest night under a sky of steel.”

We talked to Tortuga director H Morgan-Harris about the exhibition, the studio, and the warehouse utopia of which it was an offshoot – the legendary Mekanarky, occupied by forty-some artists until they were evicted in 2008.

“Mekanarky was created out of necessity in 2001 by a group of ten anarchy-loving artists who were pushed to the city limits by over zealous real estate developers. In the search for affordable workshop space they discovered the old Streets Ice Cream factory in Turrella. It was a labyrinthine maze, with over 4000 square metres of vast, echoing industrial warehouse space; rusted, warped and unloved.” The drive of the warehouse was to offer artists an opportunity to exist close(ish) to the city. “Because of the semi-derelict state of the building the rent was low and as a collective Mekanarky tried to offer space and facilities to any artist keen to be a part.”

Other than the artists, Mekanarky housed a Ridiculous Amount of Stuff: a recording studio, gallery space, performance space, printmaking, metal and wood workshops, set-building and prop construction workshop, costumes, jewellery and body art, film making, animation and multimedia, painting, sculpture and airbrushing, sound and lighting technicians and designers. “You could turn up and find mechanical ants ripping panels from an old red Mercedes, a kombi filled with water being driven by a scuba diver, or clanking mechanical beasts having a food fight. Mekanarky was a living thing to those that worked there.”

So, understandably, the news of eviction was Very Bad News – and the bump-out itself wasn’t fun. “It was the most harrowing thing any of us have ever done. The entire place had to be gutted, the infrastructure we had built removed and any trace of artistic endeavour obliterated. It took months. We found rooms we had never seen before and discovered long lost treasure. We moved over 40 tonnes of rubbish and 20 tonnes of metal out of the building; we transported the most ridiculous things on the back of trucks, hanging out of car windows and on bicycles and we estimate that we drove over 400kms in the trips between Turrella and St Peters in the process.”

St Peters isn’t the only suburb that benefited from the eviction though – other warehouses have sprung up with the initiative of the core Mekanarky crew; one in Carrington Road, and an almost-there in Arncliffe called Salmagundi Art Studios. Apparently the hard work was worth it, too – the new environments sparked a new creativity. “Mekanarky fought the fight against a narcissistic and vengeful landlord to the point where our creativity was stifled. Tortuga and the other new spaces offer us a wealth of new opportunities, new creative environments and new connections… There’s a shared drive amongst all of us to see any new venture that has emerged from the ashes of Mekanarky not only survive but succeed.”

This seems to be a pretty consistent drive amongst all of the artist-run initiatives (ARI) we’ve encountered in Sydney. But it’s a hard battle to win. “The biggest issues we face are the rising cost of space in the city, a severe lack of funding due to a lack of recognition of what it is that we do and why we are different.” There have been a bunch of ARI’s who’ve felt this pressure a little too hard: spaces like Space 3, Phatspace, Gallery Wren, the Wedding Circle and Knot Gallery have all been forced into closure in recent years.

But these are a resilient people, a fact that H attests to. She sees a rising movement amongst artists towards recognition, respect and funding which will hopefully lead to artist run initiatives enjoying a firm and valued foothold in a city without fear of marginalisation, gentrification or, yes, eviction notices. “There is an awesome future for artist-run initiatives. How do I know? I am the director of one and no matter what happens, I intend to continue doing what I do, and I know that other ARIs feel the same way… ARIs by their definition are not contained, tethered to convention or restricted in where they operate. Yes, there’ve been closures recently, but there are also growing numbers of ARIs popping up.”

And yes, one of them is St Peter’s Tortuga Studios. See what we did there? Full circle; hello Pulitzer. The group show coming up there – ‘The Longest Night’ – celebrates the urban environment of the industrial warehouse space in which the work emerged. And yes, I’m going to hyperlink a collection of words to direct you to Marcus Westbury’s Renew Newcastle – the project reinvigorating the abandoned and disused transitional buildings along Newcastle’s main strip of Hunter Street by finding artists, cultural projects and community groups to use and maintain them until they become commercially viable.

I asked H what she thinks it is about abandoned and disused spaces that seem to inspire so many creative adventures? “[They’re] embodied with a sense of worth; a palimpsest of memory, form and function. For those of us that work in such environments inspiration seeps into the psyche from the physical features of the building, its history and the lingering sense of the past that cloaks it… There’s a beauty in decay and dereliction that is often overlooked, and a profound fascination with any space that has existed in time beneath the shroud of many guises.” On top of all that, there’s the collaborative mindset that a shared space can engender, as well as the whole notion of working creatively somewhere that didn’t expect it: “In a sense it’s about a reclamation of space.”

Come along to celebrate that reclamation at the opening of The Longest Night, 6pm – 9pm at Tortuga Studios. You’ll not only be party to the street art, visual art, photography and sculptures that will be taking up the warehouse until June 26, but you’ll also be at a Snowdroppers gig – they’re filming a clip at Tortuga. What else to expect? “Aside from the anvil swing, which might feel a little freaky, we hope you’ll be inspired, engaged and entertained.”

An anvil swing, you guys. An anvil swing!

The Longest Night
Opens 6 – 9pm June 19, continues until June 26 at Tortuga Studios
31 Princes Highway, St Peters (parking across the road at Sydney Park.)

Top left by Terry Archer, top right by Brian Paisley. Both are exhibiting.

Well guess what. We think we found a start.

When Lisa Corsi and Margaret Farmer heard the aforementioned lament of Mr. Post, they got straight down to business securing spaces, looking into funding and making a national call for submissions to emerging Australian artists. The first SafARI Festival was held in 2006, scheduled as an unofficial fringe festival during the opening weeks of the 15th Biennale of Sydney – one of the world’s leading international art symposiums. Celebrating its second birthday this year, SafARI will open on June 13 and run til the month’s end, offering a platform for underground (but rising) Australian artists to show off to the quarter of a million visitors expected during the 16th Biennale. According to Corsi, showcasing the Fringe is absolutely essential to a fair representation of the Australian art community during the BoS: “A fringe adds to the width and breadth of the visual arts make-up of any city. It makes absolute sense to make as much of the spectrum as visible as possible, particularly when you have such an internationally high profile event taking place.”

If art festivals were limited to simply re-establishing the masterminds of the mainstream, culture would never get anywhere. Fringe Festivals are usually traced back to 1947, when the Edinburgh International Festival was launched to break the bitterness of post-war Europe by showcasing the good parts we could all hold hands about – high art and culture. Alot of people liked the idea, including eight independent theatre companies who rocked up without invites; only to be refused rooms in the heart of town. Rather than go home, they decided to Take Their Business Elsewhere Thankyou Very Much, and set up a few gigs on the outskirts of Edinburgh. And in an ironic Sucked In To You, the little Fringe Fest brother has since overtaken it as the largest arts celebration in the world.

Sydney’s SafARI intends to offer an experience in a similar vein; according to organiser Lisa Corsi, its aim is to ensure guests of the Biennale are treated to the best of both worlds – the Establishment of global contemporary art and the grassroots initiatives from which it often spawns. Artist Run Initiatives (ARIs) are grassroots spaces rented by artists to run independent shows that exist outside the commercial gallery culture, and SafARI curator Lisa Corsi explained to us why they’re so integral to Sydney’s art scene: “They’re a crucial water hole for any city’s cultural development … often they’re the places that many return to at later stages of their careers to continue research and experiments without commercial imperative.” This year, the three ARIs getting involved in the SafARI fringe project are the raw China Heights Gallery, the stalwart MOP Projects and newbie Gaffa Gallery, w hich accommodates for design as well as other artistic expressions.

So if the Biennale of Sydney catalogues where global contemporary art is right now, SafARI shows where it begins, “providing a sneak peek into the work of those at the forefront of tomorrow.” How did Corsi pick which artists to throw to the lions of the Bienalle’s crowds? “By keeping a very open mind, while always remaining conscious of the context in which art and these artists exist. It’s also a matter of trying not to be influenced by current trends… There are a number of treasures that have emerged that have a rather different approach, because they’re still so new to the game. It’s a refreshing exercise.”

Lisa Corsi – COFA grad,10 years experience in art administration, Swiss ARI curator and most recently Curatorial and Collections Manager at Sherman Galleries – has earned the right to tell us what she thinks the Sydney art community needs more of: “Discussion and sincere action to help educate about the necessity of culture.” And less? “Less fluff.”

SafARI Fringe Festival is being held (FREE!) from the 13 June – 29 June 2008 at Gaffa Gallery, China Heights and MOP.

Row 1: Jessica Grogan

Row 2: Lucas Grogan

Row 3: Liam Benson