Imagine you’re at the launch of a regional arts festival in the year 2050? What wild and adventurous art will you be promised? What big questions about life in regional Australia might the artists be asking? Will it be all about technology, or is physical art-making still essential?
Perhaps you’d see the DNA of extinct birds as weavings? A music performance that every member of the audience helps to create? A new way to step into a painting mixing Wiradjuri storytelling with cutting-edge technology?
VISION 20/50 an (im)possible festival is regional arts organisation Arts OutWest’s speculative, hypothetical festival project that positions artists as engineers of an optimistic future. The ambitious nine-month project will wrap up with a public event in Bathurst on Thursday 12 December 2024.
“We tasked regional artists, across multiple arts disciplines, to imagine an artwork that could only be made in the year 2050, and to imagine the world in which that artwork could exist,” said project director Adam Deusien.
After a series of public workshops and a call for ideas, the nine selected artists participated in a residency weekend facilitated by Deusien and All Tomorrow’s Futures artist and futurist Ana Tiquia.
“Centring the power and imagination of these artists, the project reflects an ambitious, flourishing vision for the future of regional arts,” said Mr Deusien.
The artists – who normally work across music, painting, conceptual art, photography, weaving, film and theatre – have pushed into new, hybrid artforms with their invented works.
“The sense of play the artists have brought to the project is exciting,” said Mr Deusien. “But they’ve also thought deeply about the world they want us to live in.”
Forbes artist Ro Burns takes us to a future without contact sport where Forbes’ Spooner Oval is now a pattern of nectar-producing plants that support a bogong moth colony. Her artwork is an annual celebration of the moth’s mass emergence.
“The work challenges the community to consider the unthinkable – the loss of culture, and cultural icons and the re-evaluation of priorities in the face of environmental and social upheaval,” said Ms Burns.
Kandos filmmaker Gus Armstrong invites us to fall into a pile of sentient mulch for a moving out-of-body experience. Wiradjuri painter, Kelso based Kris Kennedy, sees “a future where technology and tradition coexist, where our stories thrive, and our connection to Country is revitalised.”
Jennifer Roberts and Wendy Murphy, carillonists at Bathurst’s 1933 War Memorial Carillion, explore a futuristic concert where the one-and-a-half-tonne brass bells vibrate through the city of Bathurst and the audiences’ bodies.
Will we really experience all these works? Well, not exactly. Being ‘impossible’ creations the ideas will be shared as a festival launch. Arts OutWest is the peak regional arts body for the NSW Central West.
It is one of 15 regional arts development organisations across the state, receiving funding from state, local and federal government and working with a wide range of partners to deliver support and run strategic arts projects in the region.
The artists are Kris Kennedy (Kelso), Isabel Fox (Bathurst), Rosalie Burns (Forbes), Steven Cavanagh (Hill End), Leanne Wicks (Kandos), Jennifer Roberts and Wendy Murphy (Bathurst), Cindy Fox (Bathurst), Gus Armstrong (Kandos) and Bryan Cutts (Lithgow).
The artists worked with photographers Carolyn and Neil Hide, filmmakers Wade Jackson and Jonathan Sequeira and designer Karl Shead to create visual representations of their idea. In a world embracing AI this was deliberately very hands-on, prop and lighting based work in the Charles Sturt University state-of-the-art creative studio.
The nine works will be launched at VISION 20/50 an (im)possible festival on Thursday 12 December 2024 at Keystone 1889, Bathurst. For more information and to purchase tickets, visit: www.artsoutwest.org.au for details.
Image: Artwork by Bryan Cutts