Stills Fragments Landscapes

Stills | Fragments | Landscapes extends landscape paintings into moving image forms of film, video, and animation movement. This new collaboration between Jo Law and Louise Curham transforms everyday spaces into poetic and lyrical vignettes in a series of moving image works by combining hand­processed analogue motion film with hand drawn animation. These crafted images generate an irrepressible rhythm in the manner of zuihitsu fragmentary prose. Installed as a moving landscape, the work creates a contemplative room that offers time and pleasure for the visitor

(Wo)man with Mirror

Teaching and Learning are Louise Curham & Lucas Ihlein. TLC evolved from the Sydney Moving Image Coalition - a filmmakers and film lovers group with a specific focus on Super 8, Curham works in film performance, installation and experimental film. Her key interest is the experience of deteriorating and ephemeral film images. Ihlein is an artist who works with social relations and communication as the primary media of his creative practice. His work manifests as blogs, participatory performances, pedagogical projects, experimental film and video, re-enactments, gallery installations, lithographic prints and drawings

Caring For Live Art That Eludes Digital Preservation: Poster - iPRES 2016 - Swiss National Library, Bern

This poster outlines my research on strategies of re-enactment to keep alive artworks that rely on performance. While digital documentation for some of these works circulates, the live nature of the works means they evade meaningful digitisation. In an artist/archivist collaboration, Teaching and Learning Cinema, myself and colleague Dr Lucas Ihlein have evolved three principal ways to bring these works from the original artists through to future generations – direct engagement with the original artist, extensive documentation of the reenactment process and the formulation of new 'expressive' instructions. This approach resonates with a newly ignited discussion in Australia about how the conservation profession can effectively reach beyond institutions to communities. This work suggests that empowering communities to find their own solutions to intergenerational transmission means the process of preservation becomes part of the cultural product, a preservation of doing

Reaching through to the object: reenacting Malcolm Le Grice’s Horror Film 1.

In July 2014 Teaching and Learning Cinema, an Australian artist group coordinated by Louise Curham and Lucas Ihlein, presented a reenactment of Malcolm Le Grice’s Horror Film 1 (1971) at Canberra Contemporary Art Space. A key work of Expanded Cinema, Horror Film 1 involves a live performer playing with shadows, interacting with the overlapping beams of three 16mm film projectors. Our reenactment was the first time in the work’s 40 year lifespan that it had been performed by anyone other than Le Grice himself. In this paper we offer some reflections on the process of making our reenactment, which we regard as ontologically double: simultaneously “the original object” and an entirely new entity. We discuss our methodology of tending the archive--an activist strategy for operating at the borders of archival and artistic practice. And we suggest that reenactment, as a creative practice, can be a way of “reaching through to the object” which sheds new light on the artwork and its cultural-technological context

(Wo)man with Mirror - a user\u27s manual

Between 1966 and 1976, some independent filmmakers began to make works which questioned the mechanics of cinema. Expanded Cinema went beyond mere projection. This was the event of cinema -the space, the audience and the projection. The artists employed physical interventions in the cinema space, such as flashing light bulbs which illuminated the whole room, clouds of smoke which lit up the cone of light from the projector, and even the creation of mini-cinemas where the sense of touch, rather than sight, was utilised.

Kambah

Kambah is a suburb of Canberra that began in 1974. Kambah Station was subdivided and Village Creek went underground. Houses were built with a commons running through the middle. This exhibition explores Kambah through the eyes of those of us who live here. It investigates how a suburb that set out with utopian ambitions in the 1970s evolved to become famous as one of Australia’s biggest bogan suburbs. What does that mean in 2023, just before Kambah turns 50? What effect does it have on us as we prepare for challenges for communities from climate change? The exhibition shares a digital map built from the community’s answers to the question ‘what do you know about Kambah that you think is important to share with others?’ Along side the map is a series of images of Kambah made using pinhole photography and cyanotypes. These are processes that take time and sunlight to record an image, very literal portraits of Kambah. Visitors to the exhibition can add to the digital map or join in a photography workshop. The aim is to show up what is valuable to those of us who live here and along the way, the diversity of who calls this place home (not just people, but everything/one else too) and what we might build together in the future

Still Life | Moving Fragments

Explores the tension between stillness and movement, using the quiet intensity of the still life painter’s gaze and the fleeting, unstable properties of the moving image. At first glance, these works present domestic scenes that are nondescript, tediously familiar. This draws upon French writer Georges Perec’s idea of the infra-ordinary – ‘the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary’ – in domestic spaces. The works aim to bring attention to the enigmatic power of these spaces. In this exhibition, moving image artists Jo Law and Louise Curham presents two series of video works. These works extend the genre of still life painting into the realm of contemporary screen practice. Exploring the tension between stillness and movement, the works make use of the quiet intensity of the still life painter\u27s gaze and the fleeting, unstable properties of the moving image. The works draw attention to overlooked and enigmatic undercurrents in domestic interiors

(Wo)man with Mirror

Here is link to a documented rehearsal by Lucas Ihlein for (Wo)man with Mirror performance at Artspace, Sydney. As part of Imprint exhibition curated by Anneke Jaspers. Vimeo Imprint brought together works by three artists and one collective to examine the relationship of documentary and archival systems to performative, ephemeral and process-based practices. Through the interplay of performance, action-research, photography, video, installation and text, the exhibition explored a series of concerns embedded in the notion of an imprint: the character of a partial or secondary trace, the effects of repetition, contiguity and succession. For more information on exhibition click here