LES FUTO FEBRUARY - Q/A

         LES FUTO

       WINDOWSPACE-BEEAC

       Q/A with the artist

       Sunday 5 MARCH @ 11 am - at the window

       79 MAIN ST BEEAC

       0419 305 001  

        Info:  http://windowspace-beeac.blogspot.com.au

           

EMERGING ARTISTS' OPP

Each year four $5,000 scholarships are awarded through The Freedman Foundation Travelling Scholarship for Emerging Artists. This scholarship assists four artists with the cost of overseas travel, to undertake formal study or, undertake a residency or mentorship (planned program with a professional artist) or, undertake informal study for a planned research project. Individual applicants are eligible to apply for funding of up to $5,000 + GST. Apply now. Terms and conditions here. Applications close: 11.59pm AEST Saturday 6 May 2017.

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KATY BOWMAN at YARRA SCULPTURE GALLERY

2017 Summer Residencies Program at Yarra Sculpture Gallery

Yarra Sculpture Gallery’s Summer Residencies Program is open to all artists via EOI to have a large working and research space for two months (Jan & Feb) to plan and produce artwork towards an exhibition on completion.

This year we are delighted to have three artists in residence: Katy Bowman, Anne-Marie Kuter and Michael Porter.

During her residency, Katy Bowman has been making a series of mobiles working with a variety of materials as a means to explore ideas around line, colour, movement and space.

Anne-Marie Kuter’s residency explores rhythm, repetition and colour by making artworks from her collection of acrylic paint and bangles sourced from work, op shops and friends. Her interest stems from using items destined for the waste bin or given away as no longer valued by the wearer, and then re-configuring them into something of beauty.

New Zealand-born Michael Porter uses found objects and machinery parts from industrial waste to configure and create monumental, robotic figures in the landscape.  Yarra Sculpture Gallery’s vast spaces have allowed him the opportunity to experiment with larger-than-life scale and monumentality.

Come and meet the artists at the Opening, hear them speak about their practice and benefits of working as artist in residence at Yarra Sculpture Gallery.

Exhibition Opening: Saturday 18 February, 3-5pm

Image: Katy Bowman Shifting Contingencies 2017 Mixed media Variable dimensions

Yarra Sculpture Gallery is supported by the Room to Create Program.

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WHEN

16 Feb – 26 Feb 201711:00am – 4:00pm

WHERE

Yarra Sculpture Gallery
117 Vere Street
Abbotsford 

MORE INFO

yarrasculpturegallery.com.au

LES FUTO - FEBRUARY 2017

LES FUTO

GYRE CONSEQUENCES, 2017

WINDOWSPACE-BEEAC – February 2017

 

Art asks the hard questions – it has no master beyond its maker.

Today many artists engage the environment in their thinking and making.

Les Futo is one of these and focussed on making work that will cause the viewer to think.

His current journey began in late 1990, at the time of the First Gulf War. Opposed to war-mongering he adopted a ‘leg’ of a protest walk between Bendigo and Melbourne. By the end of his 40 km he had a pocket-full of lighters – disposable but not bio-degradable, plastic objects. Now he has more than 9000 which form just a part of the ‘swag of stuff’ he has chosen to gather to speak to the world – aware of the fact that scale impresses, and colour attracts.

When he is not shaping his collection, as sculptor employing ready-made elements, Futo is a stonemason – his material sensitivities thus embrace both ends of human endeavor, the disposable and the enduring. Working with diametrically opposed media is a provocative place to be and creates a tension in Futo’s output. He tames this tension with a focus on colour, wrapping the tonalities of weather-worn objects into deceptively dynamic simple shapes and forms.

In ‘the window’ on this occasion, Futo’s work hints at that of Joseph Cornell (1903 - 1972), setting up another tension, containment. Cornell worked with new and deliberately acquired objects within frames, and in this sense his work is much more akin to window-dressing and allied consumption, by contrast Futo’s work with the found is perhaps more accurately a part of the now venerable tradition of ready-mades, think Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), in fact a urinal.

‘Futo’s found’ are smaller, more fragmented elements so in a sense his work relates also, to European, (for example Hungarian Miksa Roth, 1865-1944), and Byzantine mosaics. The objects he employs contrast with ancient mural narratives in the sense that the material, rather than the image, conveys the ‘story’. Yet another tension that makes art such a good provocateur.

Where Carolyn Cardinet, WINDOWSPACE-BEEAC exhibitor Sept-Oct 2015, repurposes and surprises with her quirky use of the found and discarded, Futo uses his ‘swag of stuff’ as the medium and with some reverence for each element in the whole, like a brushstroke, ‘they all have a story’, ‘everything has a home’ and their placement on the ‘canvas’ is itself tender and meaningful. Futo claims also to delight in the search, the constant watch-out of the hunter-gather, the thrill of the chase as he sees what we pass over and he delights in later bringing to our attention. He muses over the creation of a time-capsule – ‘I want the future to see how fucked-up we were.’ Like Duchamp, Futo might claim: “I was interested in ideas—not merely in visual products.”

AS