Issue 27: Outside
These are some photos of my work in progress during February and March 2015 at Big Fag Press. The audio tracks are from my conversation with Louise Kate Anderson, where we go into detail about my philosophies of making art, about art supplies and money, about disability, and other things like DVDs and socks.
Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank my good friend Louise for assisting with my application to Runway, as well as how much time she spent on the production of this work – recording my conversation and photographing my work, and also editing and collating all the files into this slideshow. I also want to thank Lucas Ihlein who worked on the sound editing.
The Big Fag Press location under the bridge at Jubilee Park is where I spend many of my waking hours, and where we recorded this, which is why you can hear trams passing along in the final piece. This ‘viaduct’ archway workshop is generously made available to the Big Fag by the City of Sydney’s Accommodation Grants Program.
John Demos works broadly with ceramics, installation, print media, mixed media construction and experimental forms of drawing and painting.
Demos works on surfaces such as paper, wood and found materials, he fills them with algorithmic patterns, shapes and text. These recurring motifs provide a sense of linearity to his work. With each new work, Demos builds his aesthetic vocabulary to explore the complex systems of humanity and the natural world, including the sciences, education, language, mathematics and the nature of invention.
In the 2011 exhibition Framing Gravity, Demos was supported with an artist grant from Hawkesbury Regional Gallery in order to create a new time-based installation titled Creation, which saw the artist move his practice from the studio and into the gallery to continue to shift, re-organise and build layers to the work.
Demos was a studio artist for many years at Project Insideout, North Ryde and currently studies a range of short courses in different mediums at National Art School.
In 2013 he was awarded a grant through ArtsNSW and Accessible Arts which funded a 6 month programme at the ARI, the Big Fag Press where he produced a series of experimental lithographic offset prints which were then exhibited at John Demos at the Big Fag at The Cross Art Projects, Kings Cross. A short documentary was made of the entire project. Demos has since been a speaker at Accessible Arts’ 2013 Symposium Supported Studio Networks: Possibility & Potential, and a presenter at their 2014 Arts Activated conference on Creating Connections.
His work has been published in RealTime Arts and on ArtsHub.
He is now an integral part of the Big Fag Press, and often produces his works out of their workshop at Jubilee Park Oval, Glebe.
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We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
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Runway Journal is produced by a voluntary board and pay our contributors above industry rates. If you have found some delight in this content, please consider a one-time or recurring monthly donation.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches.
We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway is supported by