Get your jump on

It's so funny how, when you're so busy because you have so much stuff to get done, you can think of a million things you would like to be doing with your time once you own it again. Here's one of mine:


This is an exhibition by artist Rik Lee showing at Lamington Drive in Fitzroy. Here's the description from the gallery's site:

ONE LAST LATE NIGHT

Earlier this year Rik Lee was diagnosed with chronic insomnia. He tried reading and late night television, but they failed. So he gave in and spent his nights listening to bad music and drawing pictures.

The result is One Last Late Night, his first solo show at Lamington Drive Gallery. One Last Late Night is about love, hate, idealism, going out, staying in, good intentions, bad timing, debt, teen angst, pink Cadillacs, fast food and all the other things you think about when you can't sleep.

Rik's favoured mediums are grey lead pencil, water colour, ink and textas. His delicately rendered illustrations of girls, boys, animals and iconic objects from popular culture are idealistic, romantic and emotive. The imagery is often accompanied by excerpts of hand-drawn text to create open-ended narratives.

I myself have been rather sleep deprived lately and I have certainly noticed the strange things it can do to your brain.

Anyhoo this weekend, after hopefully catching up on some much needed sleep, I'm still planning on doing a bit of a jump photography experimention in between all the other madness. I don't know yet how I'm going to trick -I mean convince- people into jumping for me. I fear the secret may involve bribery...

Since having the jump idea leaping around my brain (and this is why I love having a blog, these ideas can actually come to you while you're posting - it's such a good way to sort out the clutter in your mind) I remembered an exhibition I saw when I wandered in to the Australian Centre for Photography on a sunny day in Sydney earlier this year. It was called Hyper and the images were by French photographer Denis Darzacq. Here's one:



I love the seeming weightlessness of the figure in this image. He looks like he's floating or dangling like a puppet on an invisible wire. On how Darzacq got these shots and the backdrop he used, the run-down on the ACP site says:

"The astonishing photographs that make up Hyper involve no digital manipulation, just close collaboration between young dancers and sportspeople as they jump for the camera to form strange, exaggerated poses and body gestures. Denis Darzacq was drawn to the trashy, consumerist nature of the French Hypermarkets (the equivalent of our supermarkets) and the hyper coloured backgrounds they provided. These supermarkets offered a sharp juxtaposition to the sublime, almost-spiritual bodies that appear to float in their aisles."

While I don't expect to achieve anything anywhere near as magnificent as this, it does make me excited to muck around with jump photography with some friends this weekend.

Mood: Fleetwood Mac, needing real coffee and looking forward to the Local