Jacqui Shelton makes work that explores the complications of performance and presence, and how voice, language and images can collaborate or undermine an understanding of self and its relation to the world. Recent work looks to Irish language, folklore and family stories to consider ways and tools for acting responsibly under the intersecting forces of settler-colonialism, climate collapse and capitalism.

Jacqui am based between Naarm, Melbourne, and Dja Dja Wurrung Country

Jacqui Shelton makes work that explores the complications of performance and presence, and how voice, language and images can collaborate or undermine an understanding of self and its relation to the world. 

Jacqui Shelton

LISTENING IS CREPUSCULAR. MUSIC IS A SHADOW.

MORGUE OARS LISTENING IS CREPUSCULAR. MUSIC IS A SHADOW. (The anemone and glow-worm help me to unconsciousness) In listening to music, we can speak of perspective as the conscious foregrounding and projecting of specific objects and events. We can also speak of an inversion of perspective by focusing on that which might initially be ‘backgrounded’ in listening (a constant aim of music analysis and psychoacoustics). But this is still just a projection of listening, a desiring-listening. Is it possible to listen without any foreground?  Would this involve something like ‘backgrounding’ consciousness? (Hiddenness is something intentional but also something we are thrown into, refusing to bend to our will) Music itself is saturated by noise (a whiteness, not necessarily physical noise, partly the noise of listening?) but how do we hear its intensity? What is its aesthetic blackness? (“darkness makes sight concentrate to such a degree that besides pain it sometimes brings blindness to the eye if it lasts too long … \[d]arkness is not the pure state of privation but is of visible nature deriving from the conjunction of the privative and positive entities”) (Is a crepuscular listening that which is emerging or receding in consciousness?) The image of musical shadow can be used to unpack a notion of aesthetic ‘darkening’ and reduction in the treatment of compositional materiality, process, and perspective (in both performer and the listener). Chiaroscuro paintings by Adam de Coster, and the use of Claude Glass mirror in 18th century landscape painting techniques, can provide a conceptual camera obscura in which Black Metal is viewed through Wandelweiser aesthetics. James Rushford is an Australian composer-performer. His work is drawn from a familiarity with specific concrète, improvised, avant-garde and collagist languages. Currently, his work deals with the aesthetic concept of musical shadow. As a composer, James has been commissioned by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (Glasgow), Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Neon (Oslo), Speak Percussion (Melbourne), Ensemble Vortex (Geneva), Ensemble Offspring (Sydney), Decibel (Perth), Melbourne International Arts Festival (2006/2008), Norway Ultima Festival (2011), Unsound Festival (New York 2014) and Liquid Architecture Festival (2010). As a performer, he has presented work at STEIM Institute (Amsterdam), Logos Foundation (Ghent), Issue Project Room (New York), Instants Chavirés (Montreuil), Constellation (Chicago), Café Oto (London), Super Deluxe (Tokyo), Blank Forms (New York), Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Cave12 (Geneva), Send & Receive Festival (Winnipeg), WORM (Rotterdam), Centre for Contemporary Art (Warsaw), Only Connect Festival (Oslo), Now Now (2011/2012), Adelaide Festival (2014), Melbourne International Jazz Festival (2011) and the Tectonics Festival (Adelaide 2014, New York 2015, Tel Aviv 2015). He has also performed as a soloist with the Krakow Sinfonietta, Australian Art Orchestra, Michel Pisaro, Eyvind King, David Behrman and Jon Rose. James has collaborative projects with Joe Talia, Golden Fur (with Samuel Dunscombe & Judith Hamann), Ora Clementi (with crys cole), Oren Ambarchi, Klaus Lang, Kassel Jaeger, Anthony Pateras, Will Guthrie, Annea Lockwood, Graham Lambkin, Francis Plagne, Tashi Wada, the visual artist Michael Salerno and the writer Dennis Cooper. His music has been published by Pogus (US), Prisma (Norway), Bocian (Poland), Penultimate Press (UK), Another Timbre (UK), Holidays (IT), Black Truffle (AUS) and KYE (US). James holds a Doctorate from the California Institute of the Arts, and was a 2018 fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. \* \[website]\(http://www.james-rushford.com)

James Rushford is an Australian composer-performer. His work is drawn from a familiarity with specific concrète, improvised, avant-garde and collagist languages. Currently, his work deals with the aesthetic concept of musical shadow.

James Rushford

(image: img_0684.jpg)
Ventriloquy works:
MEL DEERSON  AND BRIONY GALLIGAN
Theatre curtain for heaven and hell. 2018. Velvet, polyester. Dimensions variable
Hell-o and Limb-o. 2019. Gouache on paper. Dimensions variable
Hell/o
or
Angels in love with their bodies
All the works are collaborative, by Mel Deerson and Briony Galligan

Melissa Deerson & Briony Galligan

"She opened her mouth wide, and he looked into it." "Himmel! the roof of your mouth is like the dome of the Panthéon; there is room in it for 'toutes les gloires de la France,' and a little to spare! The entrance to your throat is like the middle porch of St. Sulpice when the doors are open for the faithful on All-Saints' day; and not one tooth is missing—thirty-two British teeth as white as milk and as big as knuckle-bones! and your little tongue is scooped out like the leaf of a pink peony, and the bridge of your nose is like the belly of a Stradivarius—what a sounding-board! and inside your beautiful big chest the lungs are made of leather! and your breath, it embalms—like the breath of a beautiful white heifer fed on the buttercups, and daisies of the Vaterland! and you have a quick, soft, susceptible heart, a heart of gold, matemoiselle—all that sees itself in your face!” Excerpt From: George Du Maurier. “Trilby.” Apple Books. Eric Demetriou is a Melbourne based artist and musician working with sound, sculpture and performance. Hunter gatherer retooling various gleaned object and found materials to transform them into industrial-sized instruments of noise and silence. (Website)\[https://www.ericdemetriou.com/]

Eric Demetriou is a Melbourne based artist and musician working with sound, sculpture and performance. Hunter gatherer retooling various gleaned object and found materials to transform them into industrial-sized instruments of noise and silence.

Eric Demetriou

Bureaucratic agency/Agents of Bureaucracy
Drawings + Installation
The voice of governance, policy, and compliance form a framework over all other frameworks in a society and thus set the tone of the ideal voice to achieve. This particular voice is generally instructional, operational, or legal. Although this voice sounds and reads robotically, it is created by humans to be followed by other humans. The goal is to transcend manual behavior in favour of automation.
A society is not a dichotomy between ventriloquist and ventriloquised; Perpetuating and internalising an automated voice, agents of bureaucracy are themselves ventriloquists and ventriloquised. Agents of bureaucracy are the mouthpiece for a bureaucracy's otherwise acousmatic voice. Their personal inner voice is supplanted by their own ventriloquy and this goes on to ventriloquise a population.
Ultimately, there is no master ventriloquist; there are only the ventriloquised ventriloquising. This work seeks personal agency for the bureaucratic agent; to insert a sense of self into this voice, a self which persists despite being ventriloquised.
Gabriella D'Costa is an artist and public servant in Melbourne, Australia. They are the first ever self appointed artist in residence of the Australian Taxation Office. Their work seeks to highlight relationships between the bureaucratic and the dreamlike - how both manifest the human desire to impose systematisation and meaning upon fragments of data and experience.

Gabriella D'Costa

The processes ‘the body’ undergoes during a vocal performance are acknowledged by representing the body as a machinic entity via sound to combine present actions and potential connections within a continuum.

The processes ‘the body’ undergoes during a vocal performance are acknowledged by representing the body as a machinic entity via sound to combine present actions and potential connections within a continuum. These representations imagine the body as an abstract entity, interacting within complex systems to produce change and transformation. In doing so ‘the body’ in performance focuses on the ways it connects with other objects within an environment. In order to rethink ‘the body’ as a set of new possibilities, which imagine it as an extruded system, it is exhibited as a set of capabilities and limitations. Rather than being bound by its skin, the body resonates and attempts new connections in any given environment. It thereby opens up new sensory functions and becomes embedded in new systems.

Kate Brown is a Sydney based interdisciplinary artist working specifically with the human voice. She is fascinated by how the voice sits in the body, how it is produced, and projected out to be placed elsewhere. Accordingly, she has been focusing on live event-based performances in installation environments and gallery contexts. Kate’s focus is deeply embedded in experimental practice where she aims to harness the body’s potential and capacity to produce sound across spaces and at times technology.

Kate is specifically interested in the sounding structures of the body, the way it resonates and produces the normally unheard sounds that the body is capable of. Through this exploration she has given access to ways within her own workings with the voice that have surprised and triggered new ways of sounding.

Kate Brown is a recent MFA graduate from Sydney College of the Arts. She has exhibited/performed at Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Kudos Live 2017, The Now now, New contemporaries 2017, Desire Lines 3.0, National Experimental Arts Forum, Perth W.A, Love/ City Festival II & III Melbourne, Gaffa Gallery, Firstdraft gallery, Sydney Non Objective Gallery, Factory 49, 107 Project Space and Airspace. She has been in residence at PACT Centre for Emerging Artists, Gunyah Artist in residence, Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, Anyplace Project Space, Artist@work Albury Art Gallery and The Lockup Cultural Centre Newcastle.
Kate has presented her Master of Fine Arts research at Sound Thought, Dialogues: Sound and Music across the Arts, Glasgow University's annual festival of music, sound, performance research, 2016 and Burnt Poetry: Ivor Davies and Destruction and Creation in Art and Word, Cardiff University, Wales, UK, 2016.

Kate Brown is a Sydney based interdisciplinary artist working specifically with the human voice. She is fascinated by how the voice sits in the body, how it is produced, and projected out to be placed elsewhere. 

Kate Brown

Melody Paloma

Internal Transcriptions
MP Hopkins
2019
video/sound, lumen prints and performance
Read through me were some texts that were about speaking/voice/language and I heard myself doing this reading to me. Inside somewhere – behind eyes/nose/mouth (in head?) – the reading through me about thinking about reading about speaking was voiced. I said it. I spoke it into another dummy (speech to text software) and they turned it back into writing. This writing returned to me, from me, and more re-reading/re-hearing/re-speaking took place. At some point a final text emerged. This text was used as a score to inform a video/sound work, a series of lumen prints and a live sound performance.
(image: internal-transcription-1.jpg)

MP Hopkins

Steven Rhall
Aboriginal Art Affects
Installation, dimensions variable (2019)
Centred within the encounter of art and audience, Aboriginal Art Affects critiques traditional exhibition modalities in the presentation of art by First Nation peoples. This work positions gallery, artwork and audience upon a figurative stage, borne by a framework of hierarchy and power. Upon this stage, measures of agency are apportioned (to each performer) through negotiations of activation – expressed as ideas of support, response, and affect.
How are elements within an exhibitionary framework (of art, audience and gallery) interdependent on activation and the formation of performative roles particular to each body (and their associated traditions within said framework)? How does each performer express themselves via the body of (each) other? Aboriginal Art Affects uses ideas of activation and stasis within the architectural and institutional body of the gallery to both approximate this framework and associated ideas of affect.

Steven Rhall

At LIFENESSLESS Tim Dwyer will present a audio cut-up piece for the end of civilisation made from samples of debates, murmurs, proclamations, cries and shrieks in the voice of a black hole.

Tim Dwyer

As part of \[Anachronism Effects]\(https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/events/anachronism-effects), Ash will present 'You, as a paragraph', a monologue for the mediated voice. Engaging with the ventriloquial tropes of possession and dislocation, the performance draws on her previous work with the excessive physicality of the (at times seemingly autonomous and absurd) speaking voice. The presentation here is supported by CBK Rotterdam

Ash Kilmartin

"Self reflective delirium is the only way to outwit the uncreative constraints of predictability. If you can’t make science get you there, maybe a mock séance will."

Ceri is a multidisciplinary arts practitioner who develops participatory art forms intended to enhance the conditions for collective idea generation. This approach to practice often avoids categorisation, as the outcomes are intentionally defused in the wonder/wander of everyday life. The gifting of metaphorical objects to instigate philosophical discourse stems from Ceri’s recently completed PhD research at RMIT, The Making of a Knowledge Casino (2016). The creation of low tech props for treating the urban condition as a 3D movie set were used to enable mutually inspired activities for people that may not consider themselves artists, but may become script writers of their own way to play. A link to his presentation can be found here: (Website)\[https://vimeo.com/200086947] Over the past ten years Ceri has been a sessional tutor and guest lecturer in the School of Art and School of Architecture and Design at RMIT and has an ongoing engagement within the Art in Public Space and MFA post-graduate programs. Ceri has presented work at Melbourne Comedy Festival (2017), Liquid Architecture (2015), RMIT Project Space (2014) and run workshops at West Space, Blindside Sound Series and Testing Grounds. Ceri is also one half of Public Assembly. Public Assembly. We are an art and design practice focused on the dynamics of social space, investing time, investigating place and achieving unique creative interactions. (Website)\[http://publicassembly.com.au/]

Ceri is a multidisciplinary arts practitioner who develops participatory art forms intended to enhance the conditions for collective idea generation. This approach to practice often avoids categorisation, as the outcomes are intentionally defused in the wonder/wander of everyday life.

Ceri Hann

Danielle Freakley mostly works in performance, social practice, interactive systems and sculpture and is Seychellois Australian. Her works can distort social communication and relationships, exposing lurking historical and private subtexts in day to day life. People can often accidentally collaborate with her, just through bumping into her socially in daily life.
She is a first selection finalist of the Arte Laguna Prize - Venice Arsenale, exhibited at Tate - Liverpool Biennial, PERFORMA - Performance Biennial of New York and in various other biennials, triennials, national galleries, state galleries, contemporary art spaces, kitchen floors, snake temples, theme parks, clothes, bins, beaches, conversations, trainstation toilets and graves.

Danielle Freakley

Because they Sound: Granulation as Reanimation

Jake Moore Phonism (2018) Installation, speakers, stands, black fabric, audio and power cables, computer, audio interface, generative audio, dimensions variable. Voice is a sound heard, not uttered – but what is the least information necessary to evoke Voice in the listener? When animals are killed or die they cross-over from object to substance; from body to meat and bones. The word animal finds its root in the Latin animalis "animate, living; of the air," from anima "breath, soul; a current of air." Speakers also breathe, literally inhaling and exhaling to excite a space, to give it life. But all sound, like life, is temporal; subject to entropy and decay. The moral question of whether we have the right to raise the dead sounds ‘horror-ble’ or fantastical at first, but the question is closely bound to whether we have the right to take that life in the first place. Both a form of playing (with) god. While the dead animal can not generate it’s own breath, it can still re sound. Granular synthesis pulverises, dissects, dismembers, and minces sound. But granulation also prolongs what would normally be transient phenomena - sounds that live and die - and sustains them indefinitely; breathing life back into them. It holds the window between life and death open, indefinitely. Jake is a conceptual artist based in Melbourne, Australia.They have worked on a number of short films and music videos, presented talks on subjects such as Noise, Rhythm, and Entropy, and contributed work to various group exhibitions and online publications. Their practice engages with both qualitative and quantitative methods in an effort to collapse the clear distinctions perceived between various subjects and objects. Working with drawing and panting, process and instructional work, programming, sculpture, composition and sound design, installation, robotics, video and animation; Jake’s goal is ultimately to raise questions that encourage conversation between different disciplines allowing the formation of new ways of understanding and engaging with the world. (Website)\[http://jake-moore.net/work.html]

Jake Moore is a conceptual artist based in Melbourne, Australia.They have worked on a number of short films and music videos, presented talks on subjects such as Noise, Rhythm, and Entropy, and contributed work to various group exhibitions and online publications. 

Jake Moore

Rachel Yezbick is a Los Angeles based, visual artist whose work grapples with contemporary morals in the face of decentralized global conflict. Through video, performance, installation and drawing, Yezbick explores culturally specific ideologies that shape desires of belonging, intimacy and aspiration. She has taught at numerous colleges and universities, has moderated panels with esteemed pioneers in art and technology, and is a published author. Yezbick’s work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at New City Space, Glasgow; Garden, Los Angeles; and in group exhibitions at REDCAT, Los Angeles; The Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art; Printed Matter, New York; Materials & Applications, Los Angeles; the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; and Glasgow International 2018. (Website)\[https://rachelyezbick.com/]

Rachel Yezbick is a Los Angeles based, visual artist whose work grapples with contemporary morals in the face of decentralized global conflict. 

Rachel Yezbick

The Thing\* Which Makes the Thing That Thing Which It Is Medium: Digital Video, 14 Minutes, 2009 “Simon” Ventriloquist's Dummy, 2009 This work was made for my honours year at VCA in 2009. When you do honours you’re supposed to come up with a project you spend the whole school year doing. I had no idea what to do until I saw a photograph in a book of a man sitting with a ventriloquist's dummy with his own likeness on his lap. I was making lots of work at the time that featured myself in it, (which I’m slowly trying to stop doing) and thought I could steal this idea. I found someone on the Internet who makes ventriloquist’s dummies to make it for me. The whole time I was making the work I was too embarrassed to try and make him ‘talk’.

Simon Zoric

It explores things and bodies and voices held in-and-out of sync, in the wrong time or place.

OPENS
6pm, Fri, 31. May

Exhibiting artists
Ceri Hann; Danielle Freakley; Eric Demetriou; Gabriella D'costa; Jacqui Shelton with Alice Heyward and Megan Payne; Jake Moore; Makiko Yamamoto; Mel Deerson and Briony Galligan; MP Hopkins; Simon Zoric; Steven Rhall

## Performances
Ash Kilmartin; Ceri Hann; Jacqui Shelton, Alice Heyward and Megan Payne; Diego Ramirez; Jake Moore, James Rushford and Rachel Yezbick; Kate Brown; Makiko Yamamoto; Mel Deerson and Briony Galligan; Melody Paloma; MP Hopkins; Sonia Leber and David Chesworth; Timothy Dwyer

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Liquid Architecture Co-artistic Director Joel Stern has been invited by Gertrude Contemporary to curate the 2019 edition of Octopus , an annual exhibition program, initiated in 2001, showcasing experimental and ambitious curatorial research and practice.

The exhibition is called Ventriloquy. It explores things and bodies and voices held in-and-out of sync, in the wrong time or place - through new works and performances by Australian and international artists.

For writing and documentation see the catalogue [here](https://gertrude.org.au/docs/octopus-19-catalogue.pdf).

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Reviews
[Comedy and Chaos](https://memoreview.net/blog/octopus-19-ventriloquy-at-gerturde-contemporary-by-audrey-schmidt?utm_source=Gertrude+Contemporary+-+New&utm_campaign=320e2b8de2-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_03_08_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_49f1338bf9-320e2b8de2-219093621)
By Audrey Schmidt
MEMO REVIEW

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[Ventriloquism for dummies: art gallery explores dislocated voices](https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/ventriloquism-for-dummies-art-gallery-explores-dislocated-voices-20190601-p51tgx.html?utm_source=Gertrude+Contemporary+-+New&utm_campaign=320e2b8de2-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_03_08_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_49f1338bf9-320e2b8de2-219093621)
By Hannah Francis
THE AGE

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[MOUTHING: Octopus 19: Ventiloquy](http://unprojects.org.au/un-extended/reviews/octopus-ventriloquy/?utm_source=Gertrude+Contemporary+-+New&utm_campaign=320e2b8de2-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_03_08_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_49f1338bf9-320e2b8de2-219093621 )
By Thomas Ragnar
Un Projects

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[Octopus 19: Ventriloquy](https://www.artandaustralia.com/online/discursions/octopus-19-ventriloquy?utm_source=Gertrude+Contemporary+-+New&utm_campaign=320e2b8de2-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_03_08_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_49f1338bf9-320e2b8de2-219093621)
By Toby Juliff
Art+Australia

Li(quid)stening
Architecture

Ventriloquy

Featuring:

Performances

Ventriloquy

Featuring:

Performances

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