Self Portrait

Like aliens perched on an enchanted tree, Jen Lyons-Reid crafted sugar sculptures and wild fermented bio-art in her likeness and collaborated with Carl Kuddell and Felix Weber to create a DNA spiral staircase to display ten life vessels. At war with life itself we are but bacteria.

Installed opposite Emilija Kasumovic’ Air Matter, a mixed-media kinetic lung installation, the works are using plastics, bio-art, slime and digital projections. self portrait plays with our intimate connection to everything and challenges the belief we can plunder and control the universe. How do we experience that everything is connected?

Artists: Jen Lyons-Reid, Carl Kuddell, Felix Weber

self portrait at Coral St Artspace. Photo Johanis Lyons-Reid

Bunker Rulz 8: Restrict acceptance. The Cartesian myth of being separate from the world isolates us. The Colony engineers byzantine bureaucratic systems to separate, control and exploit everything.

Acceptance is a risky business, it can be marshaled to let go of the consequences of our actions. Most beliefs offer care, protection and certainty in a perceived chaos - in exchange for acceptance - as an uncritical submission to a restrictive, torturous bureaucratic process repeated endlessly from cradle to grave. Follow the rules or else… - usually with special clauses for the rich and noble. This acceptance is the playground of supremacist fear-mongers spruiking exceptionalism, risk avoidance and redemption: You are special, but don’t rock the boat, join the flock and accept your lot.

Against the desire to catalogue the universe, we are challenged to embrace chaos and overcome our fear of complexity. Breathe out, and experience the existential joy of not making sense: I am the universe and the universe is me. What if we are all timeless universes? We frame acceptance as an existentialist, absurdist and expansive image of ourselves as infinitely fallible, small specks of dust swirling shortly through a universe brimming with possibilities of love and hate, and we are that universe without time. So where’s the justice? It exists in our stories. We only live NOW and craft stories of past and present that inform how we live NOW.

self portrait with artist Jen Lyons-Reid. Photo Johanis Lyons-Reid

What is the impact of trying to segregate and control everything?

Where are we in this mind-body illogic? Where do my lungs end and the ‘outside’ world begin? How can we create a risk free universe? How do we embrace and avoid chaos, the unknown, the unknowable? How can we acknowledge our embodiment? How can we use breathing, crying, laughing for change? What do we have to lose?

Justice is what we make of it, so how can we let go and share?

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Air Matter

Through almost invisible, but deeply sensory and affective materials (non-Newtonian fluid), Emilija Kasumovic’s Air Matter searches for a potential where energy, space and matter become one with our bodies, thus connecting us to each other and the world.

Is This Enough? at Coral St Arts. Photo Johanis Lyons-Reid

Enough
Enough is a detail from a larger textile work by Helen Kelly, which she is working on with her 90-year old mother, Clare Kelly, exploring concepts of ‘enough’ through embroidery and poetry. Is it enough to collaborate, to make, to be, to acknowledge ones privilege?

self portrait at Signal Point Gallery Goolwa, Jan 2021. Photo Johanis Lyons-Reid.

Provocateurs corner: Asking foolishly big and absurd questions and combining elements across the work, _this breath is not mine to keep is still an enigma to us, a riddled work in progress, a mesmerizing bubble of balloons, gloves, paint and silicon, exploring the fullness of the air we breath and the airiness of our lung tissue. Take a breath to contemplate our intimate connection to everything.