Gary WARNER
BIO
Gary Warner lives and works in Sydney.
Born in Brisbane in 1957, Gary works across a wide range of visual, performative and sonic media. His work is polyvalent in approach and has a life-long passion for artist collaborations and for representing both natural and human made phenomena through the blended lens of Eastern and Western Philosophies.
During the late 1970’s and early 1980’s Gary was an active participant in the underground art and music scenes in Brisbane, producing posters, record covers, sound art cassettes, mail art, super 8 films, performance events, and the photocopy ‘zine ‘Decay’ which ran to 8 issues.
He was directly involved in a range of early Brisbane-based artist-run culture projects and artist-run space initiatives in roles as artist and curator, including Red Comb House at 190 Roma Street and One Flat at both 19 Edmonstone South Brisbane and in George Street Brisbane CBD. He collaborated with John Nixon in the Anti-Music scene and the Society for Other Photography and was a Guest-Curator at HIP DEEP, Video Art Exhibition, Bureau Art space in 1989. During the period 1985-1993, Gary curated and presented a series of programs of video art and Super 8 films at the One Flat spaces, Brisbane Independent Filmmakers and the IMA.
During the mid to late 1980’s Gary continued his long term collaborations with Queensland artists directly engaged in Brisbane based artist-run space activity, predominantly at One Flat in George Street, where he was involved in various of the weekly Friday night impromptu performance events staged in the gallery and surrounding streets. On trips to Brisbane in 1986, he collaborated with Performance Artist, Michelle Andringa for her work, Performance Week, Motion Hobbyist on Location, presented ‘Scientartica’ a solo performance evening at That Gallery, and the exhibition and performance ‘Capitalogic’ at the Institute of Modern Art.
Gary created and presented numerous ‘expanded cinema’ events involving Super 8, 16mm and 35mm slide projections to accompany performances by various Brisbane bands including Zero and The Swell Guys.
With long-time friend and colleague Adam Wolter, he presented the performance installation ‘Music for Three Computers’ at Bellas Gallery in 1987, and the computer art project ‘Without Number’ at the Queensland Art Gallery in 1989. And with artist Eugene Carchesio he presented a collaborative performance event at the IMA, made numerous sound art recordings and the two-screen Super 8 projection ‘Zoom Back Camera’.
Gary has been actively engaged in the research and development of the Australian Arts and Culture Sector during this time in a number of significant roles including as a Project Coordinator at the Australian Film Commission (AFC) from 1985-1993, and as Chair of the Coordinating Committee and Co-Curator of the Third International Symposium on Electronic Art staged in Sydney in 1992. At the AFC, Gary devised and managed the national No Frills Fund (1985-1988) which provided grants of up to $5000 for experimental film and video projects, and then developed the New Image Research Fund to provide assistance to artist projects exploring the potentials of the nascent new media technologies including interactive CD-ROM, video laser disc and early computer animation. He proposed that groups of Australian artists be funded to attend important international new media arts festivals such as Ars Electonica, SIGGRAPH and the ISEA series, and was responsible for assisting many artists to expose their works to international audiences and opportunities through this informal funding mechanism.
From 1993 – 1995 Gary was employed as Executive Producer of Multimedia for the innovative Museum of Sydney project, in which he brought together a production team including various ex-Brisbane creatives including artist Tim Gruchy, writer Ross Gibson and computer animator Alistair Ferguson. The Museum of Sydney broke new ground in the use of multimedia in the museum environment, with some of the first applications in Australia of large -scale video wall installation, interactive laser disc, multi-channel soundscapes and Macintosh computers used for both content production and museum display.
In 1996, Gary was invited to work on the creative development of the new Melbourne Museum campus, and in 1997 he returned to Sydney to establish his digital media production company, CDP Media, to specialise in production of new media for museums, galleries, botanic gardens, public art projects and visitor centres around Australia (see www.cdpmedia.com.au for details).
He has been involved in the development, production and installation of two projects at the Australian Pavilion in Venice – in 2001 with Lyndal Jones for the Venice International Art Biennale, and again in 2008 for ‘Abundant’ at the Venice International Architecture Biennale.
Over the past decade (to 2015), Gary has been working principally with artist colleagues such as Fiona Hall, Julie Rrap, Barbara Campbell, Mark Titimarsh, Janet Laurence and many others, producing video, soundscape and digital media for a wide range of exhibition projects.
In 2014-15, he staged two solo exhibitions at artist run spaces in Sydney – at Sydney Non-Objective (SNO) in October 2014, and at Articulate Project Space in February 2015. These shows involved the design and production of unique analogue instruments such as ‘the social lamellaphone’ a large circular thumb piano designed for collaborative improvisation and a ‘3-pendulum harmonograph’ for the production of geometric drawings. The exhibitions also included various photography, video, soundscapes and performances such as Amplified Musicalities in collaboration with artist Vsevolod Vlaskine.
As of March 2015, Gary maintains a small studio in Oxford Street, Darlinghurst, is the custodian of 25 hectares of off-grid Sydney sandstone bushland an hour north-west of the Sydney CBD, continues to collaborate with artist colleagues on various shows and projects, describes himself as a dharma wanderer exploring the values and expressions of Zen and buddhism, and is working on a solo curatorial project about the sacred lotus to be staged summer 2016-17 at the Museum of Economic Botany in the Adelaide Botanic Gardens.
He is also curating the group exhibition ‘FIELDWORK: artist encounters’ at the Sydney College of the Arts Gallery, opening July 2016. The show includes new works by Brisbane artists Eugene Carchesio and Carl Warner.
Art Practice Keywords:
Artist, Video Art, Super Eight Filmmaker
Artist Role Keywords:
Sound Art, Installation
Collaboration/ Collaborator names Keywords:
Collections
Various Private Collections