Honey Trap 2 ????

The names of the two women associated with the Julian Assange sex crime debacle emerged this week and to my surprise It seems that I know the younger one of these women personally. She was part of an exhibition called Nordic Stories that I presented in collaboration with curator Rachel O'Dowd at Elastic Residence in 2007. I also taught her Video and Performance on her BA Hons Fine Art Course at the University of Wales Newport. I have thought a lot about the whole issue as it is very complex and as has been stated elsewhere, one can not be sure what the motives for reporting these events to the police really were ( beyond the revenge, woman scorned type stuff that has been trotted out by right wing, left wing and Islamic press)
It is interesting to read the Naomi Wolf comments in the Huffington Post as she points fun at both Interpol and the two women. This is counterbalanced by Amy Siskind who also in the Huffington Post points out that Ms Wolf was not being much of a sister here.

The only way I can think about this is by putting myself in the shoes of the younger woman, who is same age now, as I was, when, as a Mature Age (26) year old student, I went back to finish my degree at Art College, after a gap spent as part of the political poster making group JILLPOSTERS in Melbourne. I was a radical feminist and yet I managed to get really drunk one night and I woke up at someone else's place with one of my fellow students grinding away on top of me to my absolute horror and disgust. This was before the concept of "date rape, but I remember feeling violated but also full of self blame because I allowed things to get out of control(By drinking myself into a stupor). Ms Wilen approached the police ostensibly because she wanted Assange to be tested for STDS, she may have been encouraged by the slightly older woman as Sofia is shy and socially awkward in a nice way - however although I have not spoken to her I can guarantee that she must also have been feeling violated by the encounter that she had had with Julian Assange. Whom is certainly guilty of taking advantage of the undoubted charisma and sway he has, by having his way with these women (Both of whom seem to be beautiful blonds)and no doubt others. This is very common behavior for men in this power position and numerous examples could be cited here.

I was tested for STDS and HIV after this encounter with a fellow student which luckily I was clear of ... but unfortunately I did get pregnant as a result of this drunken night and had an abortion
These are very real fears that Sofia must have had as she approached the Police Station.

However I am a huge fan of Wikileaks and do not for a moment believe that they are really holding Assange because the Swedish Government cares about this complaint, but instead because he is wanted in the USA and the Swedes want to send him there with the help of our own Blimey.

Please see these links
rixstep
groundsforappeal

Link to Sofia's Art here
http://vimeo.com/sofiaw

Honey Trap

I have not posted here for a while, but these days with the combination of the Arrest of Mr Wikileaks, fellow Australian Julian Assange in London and also the emergence of a cohesive student movement for the first time in three or four decades, I felt compelled to write something. Please see post that follows-
VIVA LA REVOLUTION!!!!!

More Photos I _____ My Beuys

see link to flickr for the full set

Photos from I _____ my Beuys

I ______ my Beuys @ James Taylor Gallery

A Durational Performance by Deej Fabyc

Artist Deej Fabyc has been worrying and troubling familial relationships in her work for many years. The new work takes the concept of the familial in a different direction as she claims notable art world figures as members of her family. In this work Fabyc is developing a complex maternal relationship with a life size effigy of Joseph Beuys. Over three hours on Saturday, Mr Beuys will be tended to with a variety of intimate gestures, as the Artist slowly moves through the James Taylor gallery. Finishing up in the Five Years space

3-6pm Saturday 31st of October

The James Taylor Gallery

James Taylor Gallery

Collent Street

Hackney

E9 6SQ

Directions

Bus: 26, 277, 388, 425

Train: Hackney Central, Hommerton and London Fields

Maria Lactans the Incredible Miracle Photos

Maria Lactans the Incredible Miracle

I am presenting this Incredible Miracle at Fete for the Wicked on the hour 1pm to 9pm
That's nine performances in 9 hours. I dont want to spill too much information before hand; but yes it does involve fluids and I am going to be assisted by a couple of my Ex Students from Newport School of Art Media and Design live artist Kieron Da-silva Beckerton (Graduated in 2007) and media artist Glen James Pearce (Graduated in 2008)

Deej Fabyc mothers Beuys

This one is just being a bit playful this where I am at now the project will develop further over Autumn


Well here is the sculpture in development as a mighty fine portrait


Doesn't he look forlorn?
Looking at this image led me to create a life sized rendition of Mr Beuys with which to play out a series of motherly vignettes .... Stay tuned for the film the photos and the performance

CAT HOUSE CAMP

Go to Flickr to see more photos by Hugo Glendinning from Cat House Camp




Photo by Hugo Glendinning

Well most of May was taken up with building this project at Artsadmin..... More photos soon!!

DEEJ FABYC
Cat House Camp

Toynbee Studios, London
27 May - 31 May 2008

Venue Information:
T 020 7650 2350

Performance and Installation 27 May 2008 6pm-8.30pm
Installation only 28-31 May 2008 1-6pm

The performance on 27 May is free but spaces are limited – please RSVP to advisoryservice@artsadmin.co.uk.

Deej Fabyc with Oreet Ashery, Andy Warhol, Hugo Glendinning, Sarah Pucill, Kim Fielding, Adam Fearon & special guests.

For some time Deej Fabyc has been working on a new transnational large-scale installation, film & performance project, in association with her Artsadmin Residency Bursary.

This project developed from the starting point of looking at the Shooting paintings and the film Daddy by Niki De Saint Phalle. During May 2008 she will build a circular hut inside the Fire Room at Toynbee Studios, made out of recycled materials, and in particular, water bottles, to test some of the ideas in the larger project. She will invite significant female live artists, including Oreet Ashery, to present their own work in tableau on the evening of the 27th of May, in tandem with the documentation of the event in an intrusive collaborative fashion by renowned photographers Kim Fielding & Hugo Glendinning and film maker Sarah Pucill and video artist Adam Fearon.

Inside the hut, Fabyc will be sleeping, but you have to work to find a way in. Andy Warhol's Sleep (loaned by MOMA NYC) will be projected on the side of the Hut. Fabyc is quoting herself stealing a Warhol idea in Paris 15 years ago; before she had ever seen even a still of the film.

Artists RanK* at the Sun and Doves

Artists RanK*

A lecture performance by Deej Fabyc

It does not matter whom I talk to in London at private views, everyone has an opinion often a very strong opinion about the Artfacts Web site. This is the international site that has worked out a ranking system for artists via verifiable web presence in group and solo exhibitions worldwide. Some artists are very annoyed that they cannot seem to get their exhibitions listed, some are just annoyed at their “rank” and others profess to wish to be deleted from the system. Many are uncomfortable with the whole notion of ranking and the fact that It seems like if you are represented by a gallery that pays to be on the site you are more likely to get your shows listed. The curators I have spoken to have all said that they use Artfacts as a research tool sometimes. I first became aware of the site when an exhibition I was in, in Germany in the year 2001 was listed on the site. I am the 9743 artist to have been listed on this site, which is now up to over 185,035 artists represented by at least one exhibition. When I first saw Artfacts it was not ranked, it was just that those artists who were more represented in the International exhibition circuit had more shows on their CV’s. At that time the site was not Web 2 enabled and one had to rely on the busy archivists at Artfacts finding your show.

Now more than 114,000 artists are ranked on the site however the ranking is not that simple as the 114,000 artists are all ”ranked’ at 50,000 or below with sometimes up to 100 artists occupying the same place value, if they all have previously had no rating and have all been entered at once in the same show. 

It is of course an interactive system and as I run an internationally based not for profit, project space called Elastic Residence in London as well as having curated a few other exhibitions over the years I have been in a position to really test out how the system works and watch those artists whom I have worked with CV’s change overnight sometimes from having had no visibility on the site at all. When the system is so seemingly random and flawed both by the site methodologies and the often poor archiving of even major museum shows why bother getting in a stew about it? Treat it as a game over which you have some control in the user defined content.

For my Performance in Mark McGowan’s (Rank 13594)  The Guy Hilton Gallery Presents, Live on Stage  at the Sun and Doves in South London on the 18th of April I will be humorously colliding Artfacts with Facebook or Stalkbook as it is now known, another Web 2 phenomenon

Home Front

Woman with Opera Glasses 1898 American Optical Company Archive of the Museum of Vision

Home Front: For my second project in development for my Artsadmin Residency Bursary, I am making a bleeding building. To be developed as a live event and as a film project presented on location in the Fair English Countryside and viewed from a distance by a distinguished audience/participants holding opera glasses to their faces in order to see the violent spectacle.

Stakehead

Well I was in at studio 5 at Artsadmin working today on the artefacts for the "Eyes Looking at You" performance in development for my Artsadmin bursary. Bobby Baker was working on her next event in the Fire Room next door. The sound track she was working with was causing me a lot of anxiety ... I guess that means that the work will be very powerful, I hope to see it next week. Made some adjustments to my own work...see photos above & below.

SAY IT

Am off to throw rotten tomatoes at a wall in a gallery in North London....

Climate for Change is organised by Mark Hammond.




Circle Community Projects are hosting the project in their 40, 000 sq ft space, opposite Camden Art Centre (in the old Alan Day Mercedes Dealership building).
(photo Paul Sakoilsky)
Did the deed and had a good chat with Paul Sakoilsky where inevitably Hermann Nitsch a (favourite subject of his) came up in the discussion. He also made some kind suggestions about tomato hurling techniques.

The Tomato Conspiracy

Score
1 female performer
1 female “tomato hoody” costume
1 box of ripe tomatoes
3 union jack darts
6 red buckets
shredded newspaper
coffee grounds
human hair
worms from compost

Dartington Residency

h
In April 2007 I spent nearly four weeks around Dartington College responding to the site and producing new medium format photo works. The entire time was imbued with the prickling coldness created by the fact that my curious, fierce, dreadfully posh and much loved Aunt was dying. She died on the last day of the Residency in her home town for most of her life, Chichester.

This led me to develop a new performance work inspired by her life and my grief at Rules and Regs in Southampton.

In March 2008 I will be presenting a new work at Dartington College developing further concepts dealing with the nature of funerals and other ways of letting go of loved ones. I will also be showing the photographs I made last April as light boxes in the Gallery.




Press release:

Quiet Bells Sprung.
An exhibition by Deej Fabyc

Curated by Lindsay Hughes

13 – 21 March 2008.

Preview: Thursday 13 March 6pm – 8pm.
Performance 20 March 1 pm at The Gallery forecourt

For more than twenty years Deej Fabyc, has worked solo and collectively using live art/performance combined with digital media, drawing, sculpture and photography, exhibiting widely in Europe and United States. More recently she has exhibited at Castlefield Gallery in Manchester and the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. Having spent a number of years in Australia and now based in London, Fabyc is director and founder of artist run space Elastic Residence, Whitechapel, London.

Continuing the artist’s residency programme at The Gallery, Dartington College of Arts, Fabyc spent four weeks on the site exploring her working processes in April 2007. Work produced will form her first solo photographic exhibition at The Gallery. Fabyc has utilised the landscape as a site for reflection, where she will present new medium format photographs, made in the grounds of Dartington Estate, looking at myths of the woods and family relations.

Leaves Fall Yet They Return

A ceremony with Deej Fabyc in collaboration with some local heroes

A performance will take place at the end of the exhibition, which has been developed in response to the fact that a family member died whilst she was at the residency. Fabyc is asking the public to come forward with personal stories of their bereavement from which she will make medals created to have personal significance to each receiver.

A ceremony in collaboration with some local heroes.
Have you lost a child, a brother or sister, parent, close friend or lover?
Artist Deej Fabyc would like to give you a medal for your experience of loss. She would interview you for half an hour in confidence and develop a personalised medal for you that recognises the important memories you have of the loved one. You would need to be prepared to come to an intimate award ceremony at the Gallery at Dartington college of Arts on the 20th of March at 1pm in order to receive your award. It is suggested that you may need to have been bereaved for more than a year, but that is your decision.

The Medals

Medal In Memory of John

Jack Russell Terrier

Brown Paisley on his Chair

A crucifix

A Pipe

A Bottle or Two

The Expression: "Said The Actress to the Bishop"

Medal In Memory of Dave RJ

A Book

a Globe

Musical Notations

a Football

The Expression: " Equal Rights for All"

Medal in Memory of Jean

A Star Pincushion

A Silver Salt Cellar

A Quill Pen for Poetry

A Cameo Broach

Some Toy Animal Eyes

The Expression " Give us a Butchers"

Medal in Memory of Ursula

A car

toys and games

writing a quill pen

a glass raised

yellow Kitchen table and xw golf 

Travel

Amnesty Logo

The Expression: "Look I'm Doing the Ton!!"

Medal in Memory of Margaret and Harry

Black and Gold

Poetry quills

Sea and Fishing- a life ring

Pears 

Pine Cones

Flowers

The Bible

Baking

Wild Wallpaper

The Gallery, Dartington Hall Estate.Totnes. TQ9 6EJ. Tel: 44(0) 1803 862224

Niki de Saint Phalle... says it like it is

Sometimes it is so strange that things come up when they do. I have been given the generous opportunity to work with Artsadmin this year to develop new work using the "shooting paintings" of Niki de Saint Phalle as starting point for a series of live works. Then I get an email letting me know that the Tate Liverpool, is presenting a retrospective of her work. So I cleared a space in my life to get up to see the show last Thursday. Last year I was reintroduced to Niki de Saint Phalle's work by an ex student from Newport School of Art Media and Design in Wales - Sofia Wilén.

I had seen "Daddy" before on video but it was great to sit through the whole thing in the gallery. I wonder if Kubrick had seen the film when he made Eyes Wide Shut ?

The aspect of Nikki de Saint Phalle’s work that calls out strongly to me is her strident, emphatic process of telling like it is (or was). She rushes into the dark side of human relations and pulls at the underlying evil and love. She is not a "demonic provocateur" as Jonathan Jones calls her in the Guardian. Her "shooting paintings" started as a representation of her anger at a lover. She threw darts at his portrait in the form of St Sebastian and progressed to a more generalised anger at church and state and in particular colonial imperialism. She was making clear links between incest on a personal level and institutionalised infantalisation of women and non-western peoples. An angry woman is prone to becoming a pariah and there are few examples of women who have successfully expressed this anger in Modern or Contemporary Art.

To be emphatic, strident and overt are strategies most prone to disaster in contemporary arts practice. This kind of work has always been the stuff that gets me going... SAY IT LIKE IT IS!!!

The work above was part of an exhibition I had at 200 Gertrude st Gallery, Melbourne in 1994. I asked Sydney CID to shoot at the work in their underground firing range in Surry Hills. The work which was made of collage and drawing applied to an old formica table top, was part of a series of works called Eat me Babe

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Eyes Looking at You

a performance in development

above: costume designs for Eyes Looking at You

Score
1 male camera operator/collaborator
1 male “art gallery black” semi formal costume
1 box of ripe tomatoes
1 set of plastic tie cuffs
1 ring hook attached to gallery wall
1 female performer
1 female “tomato hoody” costume
20 audience members signed up earlier in the evening
20 costumes made from polyurethane busts with long black robes beneath.
Audience of 50+

Duration: five minutes plus up to one hour mingling with the evening audience prior to commencement.

Method:

Camera operator-collaborator Kim Fielding mingles with the crowd acting as a hyperactive paparazzi. Up to twenty audience members are signed up to wear the costumes above and given an instruction sheet - Deej Fabyc wearing a 'tomato hoodie' costume walks into the foyer area of the space and gives tomatoes to the costumed audience members. They are then organised into a semi circle. Fabyc stands in front of them and lies on the floor in sacfificial pose raising the expectation that the tomatoes will be thrown at her. Kim rushes in and takes numerous intimate close ups of Fabyc's prone figure. Fabyc's arm suddenly shoots out and grabs the camera. Raising herself up, she wrestles with Fielding having placed the camera to one side. One of the costumed audience/participants comes forward and safeguards the camera.

Meanwhile Fabyc succeeds in zip-tying Fielding to a hook on the wall attaching a pig mask to his face. Fabyc stands back and recites a list of world leaders. As each name is called out a tomato is hurled at Fielding. This continues until the tomatoes are finished. At which point Fielding is cut free and dragged away. Finis

This page is for updates about my current or recent residencies

The problem of writing proposals, is always how to transcribe the vision that tends to come to me complete. How to present the image that is already so alive and multidimensional in my mind into two dimensional words. Success in communicating the idea depends on really making others see the potential of the image.