Liz Allan

WHAT THE

1. At a market stall a sign advertises 'While You Wait' illustrations for "Tales, Stories, Yarns, Urban Legends, Anecdotes, Accounts, Gossip, Folklore and Histories of… Rebellion, Impropriety, Transgressions, Disobedience, Misdemeanours, Falls from Grace, Delinquency, Infringements, Notoriety & Miscreance, etc." Both second-hand and original tales are welcome. For four weekends from 9am - 4pm I stand, wait, greet people, sit and actively listen, audio tape, and illustrate those tales of passers-by who stop in. We sit either side of a small card table that has been dressed with a cloth. In addition to the recording equipment there is a small wooden mannequin, a drawing aid, on the table. Sometimes a small crowd gathers to listen. When the passers-by finish recounting their tales I wrap their illustration in brown paper, sealing the package with a stamp, a record to take away. I keep an audio recording of the tales and a carbon copy of the illustrations, the latter of which I pin on a board fixed to the back of the stall. The illustrations are rudimentary, similar to visual note taking. Over the course of a month, 50 or so stories filled the board. Under the board and on a makeshift bench, the audio recordings are available for listening to with headphones. The exhibition and exchange happens over four weekends at a weekend craft market in Christchurch City, New Zealand.  

2. A commercially hand painted, street level billboard at the entrance to the gallery, amongst other signage, advertises 'Visible Mending' by Garment Repair Services. It directs people into the building behind. Within the building and at the bottom of the stairwell, two small pointing-finger signs further direct people upwards and into the back room of a gallery. Here they encounter one of six visible menders standing or sitting behind a counter ready to barter their services across its faux wood surface. Behind the mender stands a small false wall, papered in seventies print wallpaper, its facade-like form is reminiscent of a stage prop. The false wall supports several objects such as a full length curtain, a shelf holding a potted fern plant (whose fronds echo the pattern of the wall paper), several vintage tools of the mending trade, and a clothing rack to store and display the mending in-progress. Four of the menders have answered handwritten tear-off advertisements located next to sign up sheets for gallery helpers just outside the galleries back room and are artists with the requisite needlework skills. The fifth and sixth menders are my mother and I. The people who bring garments to be visibly mended are gallery visitors. The bartered transactions include, among other things, cardboard boxes, a mixed-tape, a puppet show and heirloom recipes. Transactions are recorded in a logbook. Menders receive their negotiated exchange and gallery visitors receive their garments, mended visibly in the style of the mender they encountered and bartered with.    3. Across a busy road from a gallery and fixed to the back fence of a large commercial shopping mall, three billboards measuring 2.4m x 3m, display the latest work of a collective of four artists. The billboards meld together a cacophony of original and found imagery with digital and photographic montage techniques. The first billboard displays an image of fireworks exploding in circular bursts against the dark night sky and is situated to the left of the composition, foregrounded by a scene that is bordered in Hazard tape. This scene contains a pile of strewn clothing, above which a layered collage of a digitally degraded woman opens curtains to reveal a background of wide yellow and black diagonal stripes - echoing the bordering hazard tape. The second billboard shows a cropped image of a naked woman's upper torso, her breasts mostly obscured by a pair of hypnotic swirl-filled a-ok hand gestures made with purple fingers. The second and third billboards are partly obscured by digital watermarks: the second reads 'The Gayze Off(TM)' the third 'Queerstock'. The watermark in the second billboard has been scrawled over in fluro green to read The Gayze'z' Off(TM) and in the third billboard a matching fluro green lipstick lies in the foreground. In the background of the third billboard a central portrait shows a shell-like cut out of black, windswept hair in a soccer-mum style and which semi obscures an upside down image of a group of five women. The third panel is bathed in a golden sunlight. The title - 'The Gayez Off!!!'