Artists

Brian Fuata

Justy Phillips

Mabel Juli

Sarah Jones

Pip O’Brien

Date: 20-Feb-2016 – 20-Mar-2016

Location: Contemporary Art Tasmania

To place a call is to dial into a future. It is to enter a code for an intended but as yet unknown destination. It is to wait, to want, and to hold. To have placed a call is to have gotten through. It is to have located the fullness in nothingness where desire has been and gone. It is the attempt to have pinpointed the origin of the echo where there is no longer any sound, to have ended waiting to have gotten through, to have desired and to have watched desire dissipate in its fulfilment. To have memory.

Everything in between is calling.

To be calling is to always have the end of your finger resting on each key of the code of contact. It is to unremittingly perform the choreography of dialing. It is as present in tapping as it is in receiving —it’s instantaneous— my tongue in your ear, my finger in your eye. The Address is writing-as-hearing each tone of a message delivered in Morse code: The noise is happening in real time and meaning is forced to follow, it is the sound that calls. Calling-is-happening-is-desire and can only ever repeatedly ask are you there? Anything more is communicated after the fact— in translation— in the break in transmission.

Are you there?

The four works brought together for The Address elicit the modes and technologies of publishing, where publishing is the performance of making (something) public. Together, the works describe the cyclical ‘call and response’ act of dialling into the future: of waiting, wanting, holding…

Works by Brian Fuata, Justy Phillips, Mabel Juli, Sarah Jones and Pip O’Brien perform a poetic address to audiences past, present and future, through inextricable but differing modes of dedication, publication and circulation.

Brian Fuata is a writer and performance maker who presents works in a range of spaces including theatre, gallery, domestic and made environments.

Mabel Juli is a Darrajayin Woman and an artist who primarily paints the Ngarranggami (Dreaming) stories of her country.

Justy Phillips is a graduate of the Royal College of Art, London and immigrated to Australia in 2003. Based in Tasmania she works with site-based installations and textual narratives.

Sarah Jones and Pip O’Brien have been working together since 2011. Their collaborative practice explores publishing as an embodied event in the production of text-based installation, video works and artists’ publications. The Address is the first iteration of an ongoing project initiated by Jones and O’Brien.