Exploring the interface between contemporary art and the mainstream media, this forum will unpack the practices of artists who engage with and manipulate media outlets and processes. What is the relationship between reality and fiction, information and manipulation, the artificial and authentic in this media-saturated world? With more and more artists adopting the mass media and online media’s language as their own, where is the line between critique and complicity? What are the benefits and drawbacks of working within this context, and how can artists influence media culture, deconstruct media myths and liberate audiences’ habitual patterns of consumption from within?
About the artist/s:
Lucinda Strahan is a writer, editor arts journalist and media academic who aspires to a creative state of non-suicidal Dorothy Parker-ness. She has written news, features and reviews on arts and culture for loads of publications such as The Age, ABC online, Broadsheet, RealTime, Inpress, The Big Issue and Harpers Bazaar as well as for community radio 3RRR FM and 3PBS FM. She holds a Masters degree in Journalism and lectures in communication at RMIT University. She also writes fiction.
Ben Frost is a Sydney-based artist best known for his confronting and often controversial Pop Art paintings. Using a ‘collage’ style of unlikely juxtapositions, his dynamic paintings are complex mash-ups of popular culture that savagely critique our media and advertising obsessed society. His painting White Children Playing: Late 1900’s was deemed too controversial for some for its graphic depiction of children shooting-up drugs, and was debated recently on a commercial current affairs program. His exhibition and art prank Ben Frost is Dead in 2000 saw him fake his own death, which was subsequently branded ‘tasteless’ when the Australian art world and national media actually believed his demise. In 2002 Ben exhibited in Primavera at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, and more recently he has shown at galleries such as 798 Space in Beijing; The Arm in New York; White Walls in San Francisco; Cosh Gallery in London and Studio Apart in Amsterdam. His work has appeared in countless magazines and newspapers including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Australian Art Collector, Empty, Monster Children, and the Sydney Morning Herald and he was a contributing illustrator for over three years to Black + White Magazine: www.benfrostisdead.com
Penny Modra is one of the five founders of Is Not Magazine – Melbourne’s independent street poster publishing oddity. For a crust, she works for Right Angle Publishing as the editor of threethousand.com.au (a weekly subcultural city guide) and various custom publications including Hot Spots for the City of Melbourne. She also writes a weekly arts review column for The Sunday Age, advertising copy for property developers and brochures for Tourism Tasmania. She is an advocate for zombie movies, bar tabs and cream in a can.
Sebastian Moody is a Brisbane-based artist with a conceptual art practice primarily concerned with how meaning is made and shared. A member of the artist group The General Will, Sebastian’s individual and collective projects have manifested in places such as the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; the Dell Gallery, Brisbane; Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney; the Livid Festival, Brisbane; Kings ARI, Melbourne; the Museum of Brisbane; the Goodwill Bridge, Brisbane; the Queensland University of Technology Art Museum, Brisbane; and the Southbank Parklands, Brisbane. Moody is currently studying a Masters in Museum Studies at the University of Queensland. His latest project This is Now is being presented across a range of print and film media during the 2008 Next Wave Festival.