Gallery foray ~ theatre notes

Monday, April 14, 2008

Gallery foray

On Thursday night, Linden Centre for Contemporary Art in St Kilda is opening its new exhibition, My Doubtful Mind, subtitled "Artists aim to screw with your head". A gruesome prospect, indeed. It seems that several artists were asked to make visitors as uncomfortable as possible, and the exhibition, curated by Jan Duffy and Alex Taylor, is an investigation of irrational phobias (including a phobia of bananas). But a couple of theatre artists are there in the mix.

Dan Spielman's contribution is, as far as I understand, a meditation on grief, so I'm not sure how much it has to do with irrational phobia. This is Dan's debut as a visual artist - a man of many talents, he is best known as an actor, and over the past few years has forged a career which included being a founding member of the Keene/Tayor Theatre Project and a two-year stint, until he resigned last year and was replaced by Luke Mullins, at the STC's Actors Company.

Moreover, this exhibition includes a suite of poems written by Daniel Keene, best known as a playwright (and whose diptych The Serpent's Teeth opens at the STC next week - personal disclaimer in the sidebar, blah blah). Daniel will be reading at the exhibition opening on Thursday evening, at around 7pm. It's called a "spoken word performance" on the web page, but I call it a poetry reading.

3 comments:

said...

With most heads there’d be little of non-quotidian substance to screw with.

leah & nani said...

Hey Alison!

Don't forget us paranoid fiction writers doing our fair share of the head-screwing at Linden- Chris Eipper, Chris Tsiolkas and myself -albeit via pieces in the catalogue for the exhibition My Doubtful Mind!

It's a credit to the staff at Linden that they have nurtured a cross-genre collaboration for this exhibition. I've had a studio out the back of Linden for a year now and they have been incredibly supportive of me as a writer!

cheers
Leah Kaminsky

Alison Croggon said...

Apologies Leah - the blog's natural bias took over there. Immensely looking forward to tonight!