Grong Grong House artists
During 4 - 11 August 2013, The Cad Factory invited six artists to the Grong Grong Motor Inn for an intensive week of making new and original artworks to bring the motel to life with installations and performance for a special one night event on Saturday 10 August at 6:30pm.
Four local Riverina artists were involved and included: Scott Howie, a theatre maker; Julie Montgarrett, a textiles artist; Her Riot, a musician; and Vic McEwan an installation artist and performance maker. Sydney video artist Darrin Baker and writer Clytie Smith made their way down the Hume Highway to the region as well to participate.
The artists lived and made work in their rooms as well as collaborating with each other to make work around the grounds. This week-long intensive arts laboratory allowed the opportunity for deep exchange, exploration and presentation of ideas.
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Read the review written by Jason Richardson
Look at the images by Trent Light
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Rural Residency Program
The Cad Factory Rural Residency Program invites national and international artists to work at the Old Birrego School, a remote, disused, one room school built in 1886. The project aims to increase opportunities for exposure to high quality artistic programming in regional Australia and allow communities to engage with artistic process during the creation of major site specific artwork(s).
This program affords artists the opportunity to consider their practice within the remote horizons of the Australian landscape and its immense panorama of time and space. Each artist will maintain a blog during their residency.
Artists
Clytie Smith
Clytie Smith is a lighting designer, production manager, rigger and installation artist. She is engaged by the possibilities of spaces in-between; between art forms, the distance between people, cultures, between two trees on a river, between what is known and unknown, what is loved and unloved. She collaborates in a variety of roles with artists across many genres, from contemporary dance and performance, to site specific work and live art.
Darrin Baker
Darrin Baker remembers the sound of a bird, just before dawn, when he went fishing with his father as a child. That sound moved him deeply, for reasons unknown, even to this day. Somewhere buried deep inside him, mixed in with the bone and blood and other mysterious parts he will never really see, are the reasons why he continues to make things and show them to other people. The sound of that bird is in there too. Even now, the sound of that unknown species can still be heard from his bathroom window some mornings when he wakes and showers before dawn...
Her Riot is considering how you be a musician within the visual arts by creating songs, videos and installations that range from sincere and contemplative to irreverent punk pop. Inspired by DIY aesthetics, the Narrandera tip and writers such as Silvia Federici, Her Riot is respectfully raging against the music industry, complicated histories and our troubled Western past.
Julie Montgarrett is a textile artist, curator and lecturer at CSU, Wagga Wagga NSW whose practice includes solo and group exhibitions, site specific installations, public art commissions and community-based arts projects in Australia and internationally. Her main interests are in the areas of drawing and textile to extend the conceptual and spatial possibilities of textile as narrative questioning dominant Australian histories; to explore doubt and fragility via visual narratives in complex installations.
Scott has been making significant contributions to the cultural landscape of regional NSW for over 20 years as an arts manager, artist, educator and advocate. From his home on Wiradjuri Country (Wagga Wagga) Scott has produced many significant and impactful community-based projects. His passion for the arts is underpinned by Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community.
Vic McEwan is composer, sound and installation artist, producer and director based in Birrego. Vic is interested in landscape, communities, remote spaces and cross art form collaboration. He creates sound for theatre, dance, performance and conceives, creates and directs large scale site specific collaborations that often involve dance, projection, installation and sound.
Artworks
This project was supported by the Regional Arts Fund, Narrandera Arts and Creative Network, Western Riverina Arts
