From outgoing chair, Gabriel Curtin to our outgoing co-director, Charlie Freedman a thanks that is audible in full below. A sausage dog, a shield shrimp and a kingfish embodied.
"Thank you for your sensitivity, sensibilities and righteous humour. Like a Daschund by the canal, you can lift the day of whoever encounters you or zero in on their desires, needs, worries and console, commiserate or celebrate.
You are a master angler, constantly searching and learning with infectious delight, at times casting in the unlikeliest of pools, trawling for connections, abundance, joy, and always sure to share what you catch.
You care greatly for this fragile little artist collective that at it’s core seems kind of wild and unlikely, like a shield shrimp. Their eggs lay strewn across dry areas for a long while until a rain comes and they wriggle into life. Your work at this ARI is a great blueprint for organisers, collectives, communities, a reminder that possibility is everywhere, we just need to water it and then treat it carefully."
We want to thank you, from the bottom of our tiny collective hearts. For your generosity, deeply creative thinking, critical views and important perspectives. We have had the privilege to flourish due to your profound eye and focussed vision on great artistic practices that don't live or adhere merely within institutional thinking. You have further opened up this space to alternative art cultures, whilst maintaining the gallery a place of showing. This has been immensely inspiring and stimulating to witness and partake in. Therefore it is easy to say, that with your vision and hard work you have laid a foundation for art makers and lovers in this town and beyond, that will continue to flourish. For that, we are eternally grateful.
Bon voyage!
WTS
… and of course, a final word from Charlie in full below;
Blow it up
On the day I was offered this job in January 2020, Marti and I were parked on the street somewhere on the suburban fringes of Melbourne. We were waiting to collect a photo enlarger from someone off Gumtree when Beth and James called my phone.
When we scurried back to the car it was pouring with rain and together we held the enlarger under a blanket, talking about how to build a darkroom in the desert. Something about a talking picture, thousands of words.
In the WTS archives there are many words and many photos. Pip McManus, one of the founders, told me about slide nights they used to have in the 90’s. Pip and her comrades would take photos, sometimes scratch them, manipulate them and blow them up on a slide projector. Enlarging the images enabled everyone to see the process in detail, compositions revealed by the light.
25 years later, Bridget and I used to have “Big Picture” meetings once a week. We would each come prepared with a list of ideas for projects, artists and organisations we’d like to work with and other dreams we hoped to realise for WTS. We’d blow up the negatives, imagining together.
I resist a list of things that were realised, to emphasise that nothing exists in isolation from another, there are no highlights, there is one big, and infinitely many scalable, picture/s.
One picture, or rather an aperture in focus came from one in my face recently when I imagined and indulged my sweet tooth in a dense meditation on dentistry at the Lofty’s a few weeks ago. It was a long bow that probably makes even less sense to be read, though hopefully captured something about what it means to be open, radically. So nervous about this speech was I that I forgot to feel in this moment of absurd and artful sincerity, equally radical generosity, that came before it.
Not too many moments later, in the middle of a night, there was a clock-like crash in my house.
In the morning, like most I’ve had in Alice, I woke up thinking about Watch This Space, about how it is made up of many tiny fragments of many big relations. I stared at the broken remains of my new timepiece, remarkably the ‘numbers’ of the clock face, curious figures of furiously joyful ideas donated by close relations and painted by one on the most disastrously fragile polymer clay, remained entirely in tact.
I gathered the discs and the shattered links between them, reassembled the clock on our kitchen table and photographed it to reference for repair. That week though I was digging up pipes in our front yard, aimlessly trying to repair a blockage that was casting a violent smell in the kitchen. I came back in to find Marti, barely able to see over her belly, gluing it all back together. Maybe fragility only exists in the inability to repair.
At 3 o’clock on my broken clock, a small hand points with permanent conviction towards a champagne and sickle. Time to indulge in collective upheaval, abundance, synchronise the delight. Pop a bottle, make the body wobble. To watch this space is to organise with joy.
I think of all these relationships, the copious generosity and care for WTS, connections fractured, re-routed to find pockets of energy to propel the collective. Blow up the negative and you’ll find all it’s fragments glittering.
The list of individuals to attribute these fragments is near infinite, but all are encompassed by a thanks to WTS. Because a collective never felt so real, in all of its triumphs and all its gaping wounds. For the trust I’ve been given, felt, I feel double for those in charge of it’s future. As WTS celebrates 30 years next year, two new Caretakers and a new Chair share nearly 30 years of living in Mparntwe between them. They are surrounded by voices and ideas that are generous and generative, Arrernte leadership that is present and emerging and a collective that promises to hone in, bellow out, seep down, to dance and dazzle. To blow it up.
Love,
Charlie