Friday, September 18, 2009

Street Fashion and Cultural Enlightenment

Last night my posse & I headed out for a night of art, free beers, street fashion and cultural enlightenment. Yes it was Friday night in Sydney and China Heights Gallery was launching “Old Friends New Minds” a new solo show by Mark Alsweiler. This is a very quirky show & I was able to knock off a quick “Artists and Openings” portrait of Mark himself with one of his large cut out works. Mark was pretty easy to spot as the artist too since as you can see from the portrait he was wearing a curiously similar hat as his painted subject (right behind him) is depicted wearing.

Mark Alsweiler

As regular readers of this blog would know I use art openings not only to keep up-to-date with new creative work, I also like going to art openings to see what people are wearing. Recently I have been noticing the return of the extreme tight jean, well extremely tight jean leg anyway; it seems the crotch may still ride low 90s style if you like them like that. For those of you who may not be aware I am a tragically old man and I must say its nice to see the tight legged jean back in style. Back in the early 80s I became something of a dab hand at tapering the legs of my jeans on my mothers trusty Husqvana sewing machine and, short of actually asking someone I suspect these “New” tapered leg jeans are available off-the-shelf and probably in stretch denim which was yet to be invented back in my day... No doubt stretch denim makes the logistically difficult task of getting the jeans on and off a much more simple affair.


Taperd Jeans & pointy Shoes no socks.

Brown Shoes

Whilst checking out Marks charming art and art patrons jeans and shoes at China Heights we “discovered” Sneaker Freaker was having a “Cool” new product launch at another favorite gallery of ours, Palmer Projects just a little way down the hill.

Wall Portraits at Palmer Projects

Its an interesting proposition launching a product at a hip indi gallery space. Usually the art is real art and the “promotion” is just the beer. Sadly this was not the case down the hill at Palmer Projects although the good people at Becks seem to have provided quite a few cases of beer to help make the night a big success...

Palmer, Pictures & Crowd

On our arrival at the Sneaker Freaker launch we were confronted with just four large “Portraits” of “Cool” people wearing ear-bud headphones & some clear display cases with, yes you guessed it, ear-bud headphones inside.

Black Mini Boots

Now apart from the fact that I am a bit miffed that no-one asked me to shoot the portraits for a very reasonable advertising day rate; there is some pretty serious competition in the people-wearing-ear-bud-headphone world of advertising and photography. Also am not sure that presenting audio equipment “Under Glass” like it was precious artwork or some kind of jewelry is a particularly enlightened idea. Lets face it, even if like me you might just be turning up for a few free drinks and a bit of social intercourse; even the type of "Style Influencer" that this sort of launch is meant to impress is hardly going to be "influenced" by a few pack shots on the wall, no art and no Artist!

i pod therefore (i Think) am i i am

So I got to thinking about art and sound & I thought that if I wanted to have a cool launch of some headphones at an art gallery, it just might be a good idea to get some sound artists involved with the project instead of a photographer! Now as cool as sound artist Rik Rue (photographed here at SNO Gallery in Marrickville) certainly is, I suspect he is quite likely outside of Sneaker Freakers target demographic.

Rik Rue

Still, there are plenty of sound artists around and a real art collaboration would have brought a level of true credibility to an audio products launch in an art gallery. And if we could have “sampled” the product (not just the Becks) we might have gotten a much better idea of just how “Cool” these new headphone are...

Product launch re-curated!

By way of lending a helping hand I decided that I myself would “collaborate” with the Sneaker Freaker installation and “re-curate” one of the jewel cases which I have duly documented here. And funnily enough, people just love collaborating with "art"; within minutes of my “indi-collab” the Ear-Bud-Jewel-Boxes were literally bristling with empty Becks bottles!

www.chinaheights.com

www.palmerprojects.com.au

1 comment:

Style On Track said...

I am loving the hat on the guy in the first picture :)