A group of Australian artists from Our Neon Foe, artist run collective and studios travelled to Durden & Ray Gallery in downtown Los Angeles in 2022, to present Shimmer, an exhibition featuring Sydney and LA artists, just post pandemic boarder lockdowns and travel restrictions.

Teaming up with 3 LA artists Our Neon Foe collective curated a show on level 8 of the Bendix building including a performance and sound event with 3 performances on the rooftop to bookend the opening night. Kate Brown and Priscilla Bourne lead the international exhibition project in collaboration with LA Durden and Ray gallery directors Steven Wolkoff and Max Presneill.

Exhibiting artists

Carl Baratta (LA) bush fire paintings, Ciaran Begley hacking technology, Kate Brown window scores and seatbelt installation, Priscilla Bourne drawing and scrunched painting, Kit Bylett video work, Angie Garrick silk scarves, Adrian DeGiorgio colour field painting, Drew Holland handmade paper and marble dust paintings, Sophie Kitson air dried clay ceramic and jewels, Simon Lawrence talking plants, Owen Lewis textile dog with gum leaves, Audrey Newton resin painted on mylar, Ty Pownall (LA) large scale plaster and mixed media sculpture.

Rooftop performances

Laurence Quinn- mobile phone vibrator motors, rooftop railing, PA system, Ryat Yezbick (LA) and collaborators- text written by people of LA during covid lockdowns spoken and performed by her collaborators with mouthfuls of water sipped from water bottles, Kate Brown- live vocal and sound performance with electric triangle.

Curatorial statement

Shimmer is a stunning phenomenon on the surface of water, like dreams that are only just lucid on top of the watery unconscious. The artworks have a shimmer-like effect of mirroring artists’ underlying desires. Part of the shimmer process is being heated just below boiling point while bubbling gently.

Shimmer is the fugitive gleam escaping

Shimmer is the captive dream evaporating

Shimmer is the oil slick bamboozling the eye

Shimmer is the intangible fog engulfing our cities, sharpening surfaces, levitating objects in the dream swell

This is the tale of two cities - Sydney and Los Angeles - baking in heat haze and barely clinging on to reality. Cities that are held together by arterial roads and just the barest suggestion of a shared experience, like a vast cloud defined by the evasive words of a poet.

Skating beneath kaleidoscopic surface-level slicks, the reality barely ever accords with the appearance.

Our Neon Foe is a gallery, a studio complex and a loose collective of artists who curate monthly exhibitions of emerging Sydney and international artists. During COVID, many of us escaped into alternate worlds of imagination, shifting unconscious states, living just as much in our beds as out of them. The new (un)reality allowed us a new freedom, as we shimmered in and out of our old identities, bringing buried fantasies to light.

Curatorial statement written by Elliot Waugh and Priscilla Bourne on behalf of the artists at Our Neon Foe Gallery.

Kate Brown presented an instructional conceptual window score ‘Haloes’ installed on the gallery windows responding directly to the LA skyline and reflections using vinyl cut outs and bronze window tint. The changing LA light and landscape against instructions to ‘inhale the skyline and place it upon a reflective window that you can see’ repositions the body against its surroundings and takes the body outside of it’s present reality.

Another suspended seat belt piece was installed in front of the window score to further connect the outside skyline into the gallery space. LA is renowned for it’s bad traffic, and this piece from a previous installation titled ‘In Azimuth, 2017’, (observing everyday objects and their functions and exaggerating and changing their function) seemed conceptually connected to the site and window score.

During the curated rooftop event, Kate Brown performed a solo vocal piece with her electric triangle instrument, a large brass triangle amplified with a lapel microphone. When played like a flute the harmonics inside the triangle distort and disorientate as the amplified sounds are not too dissimilar to a distorted electric guitar. The concepts presented in her works in the Durden and Ray gallery exhibition were extended to this performance moment.