Happenstance is delighted to announce that we’ll be having a stall at the third annual MCA Zine Fair this Sunday 23rd May 2010! The Museum of Contemporary Art in collaboration with the Sydney Writers’ Festival presents guest speakers, bands and a zine fair in the MCA’s Foundation Hall. The event has seen astounding growth in recent years, attracting Sydney’s finest zine makers to showcase their work.

You will all be able to sell, buy or trade zines, listen to live bands and enjoy free guided tours of the exhibitions. Remember to come by the Happenstance stall, say hello, have a yarn and of course, pick up a copy of the magazine! You will also be able to pick up a copy of Happenstance from the MCA gift store.

When: Sunday 23rd May 2010
Time: 11:00am – 5:00pm
Where: Museum of Contemporary Art
140 George Street, The Rocks
Cost: FREE

Hope to see you there!
The Happenstance team x

Photograph by Rozie Wong, courtesy of Flickr

Get excited kids! The bi-annual Finders Keepers Sydney Markets start tonight!!

The indie market favourite will be showcasing the work of over 70 emerging and contemporary Australian artists and designers.

Finders Keepers opens Friday 7 May from 6pm to 10pm and runs Saturday 8 May from 10am to 6pm at the CarriageWorks in Sydney’s inner west.

Grab your friends and support our friends at the Finders Keepers by checking out all that the market has to offer, including fashion and accessories, books and zines, textiles and homewares and arts and crafts.  Bag yourself a one-off find while supporting our local talented and independent craftspeople.

What makes this event even more awesome (is that possible?) is that the market has FREE entry for all and features live music, with the CarriageWorks cafe and bar open all day.

When?
Friday 7th May from 6pm – 10pm
Saturday 8th May from 10am – 6pm

Where?
CarriageWorks – 245 Wilson Street, Eveleigh NSW 2015
Pedestrian entrance is at the corner of Codrington Street and Wilson Street

For more info, click HERE.

Jin Hien Lau is a pretty cool guy.  He illustrates Happenstance’s Versus and doesn’t afraid of anything.  One of the most interesting illustrator/animators in Australia at the moment, his first solo exhibition opens 6pm to 8pm this Thursday April 1 at Books Kinokuniya.  You’d be a fool not to check it out.

The Uncanny Visa runs from Thursday 1 April to Thursday 14 April at Books Kinokuniya.

Kinokuniya Gallery
Books Kinokuniya
Level 2, The Galeries Victoria
500 George St, Sydney

Anne Nicholson is a celebration of originality. Creative from a young age, her artistic endeavours have spawned an impressive body of work. The willowy, ashen beauty from Wollongong belies her 24 years as she speaks of her fervour for graphic design.

By day, Anne works as a graphic designer and stylist at a small design studio in Wollongong. She escapes the daily grind by immersing herself in eccentric DIY projects such as zine making and, what she dubs, “functional art”; think canvas totes, bookmarks, greeting cards and envelopes, key rings and stationary. Most recently, she has added photography to her repertoire.

Similar to her personality, her creative aesthetic is colourful and light, with a hint of sarcasm. She explores her penchant for art via illustrator, photoshop, cheap acrylics, felt-tip pens, lino stamps, off-cuts of paper and fabric, watercolours and stencils. “My love for each is varied but just as strong as the next.”

After graduating with a diploma in graphic design, she collaborated on her first zine which was brilliantly entitled ‘My Feet Were Dirty but Now They Are Clean’. Experimenting with a montage of colours, it was jam-packed with clever thoughts and delightful drawings.

‘Mr. Over Achiever’ was her first independent zine, so it comes as no surprise that it is one dear to her heart. She goes on to reveal that the inspiration for the comic zine was a fellow zinester who was always trying to trump her. Well, she sure showed him!

Be sure to keep your eyes peeled for her numerous fresh zines in the works including a brief comic about an unnamed, peculiar delivery driver and an innovative sketch-fest of her closest friends.

As a proudly independent publisher, she appreciates the importance of local zine fairs in getting to know who and what is out there. Describing zine-ing as rewarding, she revels in its creatively diverse nature; “whatever you are into, you can find a niche for it”.

Anne is hard at work building herself a career in the graphic design Industry. But what is her advice to fellow up-and-coming artists? “Use social networking to its complete advantage” by means of blogging, networking or becoming a contributor.

Check out all her great work on http://www.wemakezines.ning.com/profile/AnneNicholson

Contact her on  annemakesthings@hotmail.com

If you haven’t made plans for next Humpday (10th of March) head down to ma. gallery! If you do have plans, cancel them and we will see you there anyway for Blind Spot, a group show featuring the works of Angela Jones, Laura McClintock, Isobel Philip and Irit Pollak.

“… something slips, passes, is transmitted, from stage to stage, and is always to some degree eluded in it- that is what we call the gaze”
- Jacques Lacan

Here, attention is directed to the images – tangible or other – that silently slip out of the eye’s reach. Images that lie unobserved are placed under the microscope, as each artist uncovers and explores ways of seeing the invisible.

Blind Spot
10th March 2010
ma. gallery from 7pm
27 Dick St Chippendale

Laura McClintock

Irit Pollak

Angela Jones
Isobel Philip

You may know of Nic Warnock if you’ve happened to catch Onani, Bed Wettin’ Bad Boys, Circle Pit, or Family Jewels over the last few years. We’ve also wrote him up a bit in our last issue (”Little Labels, Big Sounds”). On top of being in 9345987234 bands Nic runs R.I.P SOCIETY, a record label which specialises in “Australian music of the NON Fitzroy cafe, late 20’s dinner party, chin-scratchin’-thick-rimmed-glasses-gimme-arts-funding and Nick Cave/Lou Reed worship variety.”

Keep an eye out for the following new releases from R.I.P SOCIETY coming out February 25th:

RIP006: Royal Headache 7″
Four tracks a heap of you are probably already familiar with: Splash, Surprise, Eloise & Girls. Embraced by young punks sceptical of all things garage, as well as those annoying old dudes that spend all their money on rare Easybeats records. Royal Headache’s music will warm the heart of even the crustiest old scrooge.

RIP007: Kitchen’s Floor – Regrets 7″
Three new tracks: Orbit, Regrets & Still Night. The third track Still Night is a real winner and one of the most down of their downer hits. This EP won’t disappoint those into Kitchen’s Floor’s album “Loneliness Is A Dirty Mattress” from last year. A bit of a different sound, more raw and tattered which suits the hopeless atmosphere of these songs.

RIP008: Bed Wettin’ Bad Boys – Worst Band In Sydney / Best Band In Sydney 7″
Think indie rock before indie rock meant you were a sweater wearing nerd (aka Replacements, Meat Puppets) with a heavy dose of suburban punk, overdriven guitars and a rowdy Australian quality about it. Not the most hip or liked band around probably because they get way too drunk and talk too much shit in between songs. Anyway this 7″ delivers and it shows that they can actually write good tunes.

The month of May kinda seems a long way off, but that’s not stopping us getting excited about the launch of the gorgeous (and nicely typography-heavy!) 17th Biennale of Sydney website.

Get in on the ground up: hurry and apply for the last of the volunteer positions, or register online for the first week festivities by 28 February.

This time, the Biennale is based on the curatorial theme “THE BEAUTY OF DISTANCE: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age”, and will once again take over Sydney’s public spaces with a showcase of new and recent works from local and international artists.

Internationally-acclaimed artistic director David Elliot curated the biennale specifically for Sydney as an iconic modern world city, and to explore the nexus between visual and other art forms.  Presenting highlights on the website, Elliot says: “I’m very excited to be presenting the 17th Biennale of Sydney. The aim of this Biennale is to bring together work from diverse cultures, at the same time, on the equal playing field of contemporary art, where no culture can assume superiority over any other.”

And that sounds pretty damn alright to us!

The Bieannale of Sydney runs from 12 May until 1 August 2010 across a number of venues and in a number of different forms.  Check out the website for more details.

Looking for Gaffa Gallery? Don’t worry they weren’t a casualty of the whole financial crisis…

You may remember Gaffa as a quaint little artist run gallery tucked away in the streets near Central Station. Well with their Inaugural Relaunch Exhibition taking place this Thursday night, you’ll see just how busy they’ve been over the last few months to come back bigger and better than ever. Expanding into a multi-level gallery with 3 separate floors as well as a cafe and shop thrown into the mix, this is going to be one of Sydney’s finest new art spaces.

Gaffa Gallery still remains as dedicated as ever to nuturing cross-platform collaboration, collectivity and cohesion within the contemporary arts community. Pop on down this Thursday night to check out the future of arts in Sydney.

Inaugural Relaunch Exhibition
11 February – 23 March 2010
281 Clarence Street, Sydney CBD, NSW 2000
artists // Ella Barclay, Vernon Bowden, Zoe Brand, Benjamin Backhouse, Kath Fries, Mark Gerada, Andrew Lavery, Sean O’Connell, Marcelle Robbins, Sumugan Sivanesan, Mike Turner, Geoffrey Farquhar-Stil, Rohan Wilson, Melinda Young

Whether it be your iPhone calendar, your moleskine diary, or if you prefer the good ol’ fashioned writing on your hand, mark it down: This Wednesday night our friends at MAgallery connect four emerging artists from Sydney and Melbourne at the exhibition opening of BLUE MOONS. Featuring the works of Leon Hawker, William-Guillaume Saussay and Persistently Plastic (Phil Soliman and A. West). MA’s doors will be open from 7pm.

A. WEST // ARTIST STATEMENT:

My art is a creature. I love it, yet I abuse it and I am cruel.

My art is always a rebellion. Although morbid and cynical, I occasionally rejoice in a tiny scrap of carnal empathy.

I bathe myself in contrast and paradox.

Oil and blood splatters mirror the way we cover the natural with the manufactured. We use oil to destroy environments, societies, cultures and even our own skin.

I encourage viewers to touch the works.

PHIL SOLIMAN // ARTIST STATEMENT:

The works in this show reflect my interest in how photographs of humans are looked at and interpreted.

Millions of photographs of people are taken every day, and distributed all over the world. On social networking sites, on thumb drives, in pornographic magazines, in newspapers, on billboards. They evoke the whole spectrum of emotions, from love, desire and nostalgia, to hate, anger and intense adulation.

Photography is also a scientific tool, capturing images for research, engineering and other uses. Our understanding of ourselves and the Universe has been advanced immeasurably by photographs of horses in motion, milk droplets, distant galaxies, the surface of the earth, and the interior and exterior workings of human beings.

Our skin is such a wonderfully useful organ, incredibly complex and durable, yet we only think of it in terms of its appearance. Its colour, for most of us, is of utmost importance, appealing to our deepest political and aesthetic ideas. Nevertheless, it is almost impossible to look at the surface of a human without thinking about the physical and emotional activity happening underneath. I wanted to examine this idea by capturing the surface of a man in a highly objective, scientific way, while imbuing the work with a sense of subjective beauty and sensuality.

BLUE MOONS opens THIS Wednesday, February 10 from 7pm – 9pm, MAgallery Sydney: 27 Dick St, Chippendale. (Also viewable from today through to Feb 15 by appointment only)