Image: www.ngv.vic.gov.au
Muso Jae Laffer thought up a nice little gig for Sunday afternoons – Unplugged Live, where he chats with visual artists and musicians at the National Gallery Victoria (Australia). Last Sunday he spoke to artist Ann-Marie May, whose works Untitled (Construction of coloured rays) and RGB Mobile are on display in The Kaleidoscopic Turn exhibition. Wanting to explore the links between song writing and visual art in terms of the creative process, Laffer asked May about how she develops a work. They happen as she makes them, May said, she begins to create her 3D works with the intention of producing overlapping shapes and colours, geometric and organic, and to have the work project something outward through the material to activate the space around it. May doesn’t necessarily, or even usually, start with a drawing, she begins a work by hanging things, found or made, from something else, all the while considering how light is transformed by each new addition or modification to the growing piece. The artistic result is something both contained and random; bursting with energy, where the produced, resolved aspect of the work dances with light freed from the tension created between the material objects in space surrounding its source; light is produced by and liberated from, while itself releasing, elements of the work.
Whether sculpting or song writing, you pick up your materials or your instrument, and get on with it. Alex Gow’s fourth album with Oh Mercy, When We Talk About Love (the title comes from the name of a short story collection by US writer Raymond Carver What We Talk About When We Talk About Love) has just come out. Gow played three songs, the love ballads Cool Water, Lady Eucalyptus, and I Am a Man, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar. He maintains that he’s gotten over any fear of coming across as foolish, he just wants to ‘make something beautiful’.
Gow described song writing as ‘the pursuit of pleasure’ and referred to his work as completely ridiculous. ‘You have to be a particular kind of arsehole to assume that anyone cares.’ Later Gow described himself as ‘too hip to be square, too square for the geeks.’ Disingenuous? Never! He’s doing something right if he’s in a position to commission Ken Done to produce his CD cover art.
Gow’s vocal sound is a bit Jeff Buckley, a bit Neil Young, with a yearning in his voice that is surely tearing at people’s heartstrings. His lyrics and music are resolved, poetic, plaintive and poignant, breaking no artistic barriers in terms of sound or language, his are conventional love songs about his own feelings, derived from folk/country, although he’s quick to disassociate himself from any musical labels, and talked about the liberating experience of being in Nashville and being neither American nor a Country and Western performer.
Unplugged Live are free events. Go along to hear what local artist are up to – a perfect Sunday afternoon’s entertainment.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
National Gallery Victoria ​
Every Sunday
5 Jul – 9 Aug, 2pm
