The Big Budgie
PUBLIC ART
Public Art. Alejandra de la Torre visited us, in Melbourne on March 2020. We had the opportunity to develop this huge mural at Rose St Artist Market.
Alejandra coated one of the market walls with this awesome budgie, another typical Australian animal.
Rose Street Market is an open-air artists’ market where everything for sale is hand made. Melbourne art market icon, founded in 2003.
Public Art. Rose St Artists Market. Melbourne. 2020.
O.O.A.A.
[Orden Opresor Altamante Angustiante] [Order Oppressive Highly Distressing]
Group show. We have the pleasure to host this interesting exhibition in our website. Curated by the independent artist and curator Omar Jerez. 14 photographers from 4 different continents have been shot during the state of alert. This is O.O.A.A.
The exhibition is formed by Lucía Carretero, Mara Catalán, Elisa Ceretta, Anna García Solana, Rafael Tanaka Monzó, Carlotta Gambato, Lle Godoy, Haruki, Juan Jerez, Inma Liñana, Julia Martínez, Alan Pfeiffer, Ehrior Sanabria and Adam Wiseman. Each of the 14 members participates with a single image taken by a mobile device. The global character of the project in the existing social problems gives us a tour of Madrid, Valencia, New York, London, Tokyo, Barcelona, Panama City, Paris, Abano Terme, Granada and Melbourne.
In O.O.A.A. the fear of the unknown, the invisible and its possible consequences show globally how human beings radically change their habits and routines in situations of stress and uncontrolled fear. The state of alarm has become an everyday term for many citizens. This new routine of life has brought back situations and behaviours that were part of times past. As in Nazi Germany, for example, it was common practice for civil society to monitor and inform the Gestapo of any citizen or situation that might lead to suspicion of their loyalty to the regime.
This dynamic has become common practice during the pandemic. Citizens have become police officers, judges and executioners of their peers, observing through their balconies or windows the movements of others. Humanity witnesses how these new “policemen” reprimand, threaten or even attack citizens for being outside their homes. Citizens who, in many cases, they were not “breaking the law”. The tension of citizenship coupled with the false “moral superiority” of which many displays, have awakened a fainthearted and violent side.
Based on this disturbing behaviour, the sample is an exercise of direct reflection on where we are going. Fiction has been mixed with reality. Establishing a conceptual metaphor by transforming the figure of photographers, a figure that always observes, into the element to be observed. Since all the photographs appear the photographer referred to.
Omar Jerez