The Museum of Natural Mystery
Open by Necessity
268 Charles St (entrance on View St)
North Perth
Western Australia, 6006
mail@naturalmystery.org
The Museum of Natural Mystery is an avenue for the presentation and dispersion of contemporary art practice. Currently operating as a residential gallery space in North Perth and a studio within Fremantle Arts Centre.
Nathan Barnett
An excursion
Friday 11 May, 2012
6pm - 10pm
You rummage though a pile of old dead branches.
It’s the end of the day. A moist floral bush evokes the scent of sticky bud.
You glimpse a feral rabbit as it braves dusk. Later, you see an exquisite dog, off its leash and of a formidable size. You reprimand yourself for finding green waste collections interesting.
A car with a sports exhaust further disrupts your progress.
You mistake the gentle flapping of black sheet plastic draped over a diamond fence for the movement of a person and it frightens you momentarily. It is virtually dark now. A piece of material catches your eye. Over a short brick fence you lean, you pick it up and you walk to the boot of the corolla that you borrowed from your housemate and you put the material in.
You stare in to the drain that runs in off the curb. As you walk around to the driver’s side door you can hear water running beneath you.
Here, everything is laid out horizontal. Sandy, blighted grass smells like cat shit and eucalyptus rotting in the undergrowth.
A hose winds along a paved driveway, and gets itself coiled at the base of the garden tap.
You hear the exhaust fan of a nearby bathroom.
The aberration of a bad paste-up you saw on a factory wall continues to cloud your afternoon. You enjoy the pared curvature of a well-maintained hedge. You notice the understated fern-frond ornamentation of a side gate that now appears auratic with the coming on of the street lamps.
You thought you might be able to find something to use out here but now you feel as if appropriating anything would be displacing it. You need to piss somewhere – anywhere, and you start driving though the smaller streets looking for some kind of reserve with sufficient cover.
When are you at work and when are you not? It drifts from on to off, like one of those bulbous timer buttons that begins to un-push itself the minute it is pressed.
You can’t find anything else to make something out of.
So you go home and write about your sculpturally unsuccessful day as if it were of singular importance.
Jacob Smith
Purple Rain: Wine O' the Times
Friday 27 April, 2012
6pm - 10pm
Purple Rain: Wine O’ the Times blends DIY and self sufficiency with a sense of wizardry to create something that, if not exactly palatable or aesthetically pleasing, will a least get you drunk. An ode to traditional forms of alcohol production and consumption, Purple Rain... captures the sense of wonder and achievement that comes from 'making your own', simultaneously revealing and enshrouding a 10,000 year old production process.
The first wine I’ve tried from the troublesome 2012 vintage reflects how growers would’ve had their hands full with the challenges brought by this vintage in Western Australia; January's thunderstorms being the main issue. Good canopy management and hands on parcel selection techniques were essential in maintaining fruit quality.
The 2012 ‘Wine O’ the Times’ multi-varietal blend by Jacob Smith is an honest expression of the vintage and the terroir in which the grapes were grown. The wine has a persistent length that stays with you long after the wine has left the palate. Characters of earth, herbs and backyard soirees under generation-old grape vines are evident in this wine.
The fruitful bouquet of bubblegum, candy and strawberry shortcake contradict the dry, sour apple palate. The wine lacks any real texture in the mouth feeling more like a cider than a hand crafted wine. Truly this wine is an expression of where it comes from and informs this critic of the hard work growers and wine makers have faced this vintage.
Liam Beatty
Traianos Pakioufakis
Natural Mystery
Thursday 5 April, 2012
6pm - 10pm
An exhibition re-affirming the natural mystery of the still life as a persistent herald of sincere romance.
Thomas Jeppe
Nature of Submission
Working discussion: Thursday 23 February 2012
Fremantle Arts Centre 6.30pm
Exhibition: Friday 24 February 2012
The Museum of Natural Mystery 6pm
"Can I talk to ya for a second" - Knowledge Bones
Thomas Jeppe presents Nature of Submission in two parts; a working discussion at Fremantle Arts Centre and an exhibition at The Museum of Natural Mystery.
The horse approaches - anticipation, commitment, optimism, challenge; they launch - the peak of the jump, fully airborne, the crux, the float, the ultimate; they land - the return, resumption, the crash of reality after a moment of weightless joy, defying gravity. These are all attractive aspects of this beautiful action, where even the sad resignation of the return to earth has romance to it. But then the true nature of the engagement is revealed as the horse returns to the circuit. Around and around and around.
Katie Lenanton
Cat Cafe
Friday 6 January 2012
6-10pm
The Cat Cafe functions as a shrine to Katie Lenanton's legacy of fat cat ownership while mimicking the cat cafe culture created in Taiwan and popularised in Japan. It is a celebration of cat kitsch, market bargains and deep feline love. It features real life kittens, once live cats and ice cream flavours chosen by the Museum of Natural Mystery's directors.
Small groups of patrons are allo-cat-ed a pet-n-sheshin' where they can enter the space, play with the kittens and sample coconut vanilla or salted liquorice ice cream. It's up to them if the cat gets the cream. Past cats are memorialised alongside images of idealised flat faced felines and gifts from artist friends Daniel Bourke, Annabel Dixon, Kelly Doley and Jessie Mitchell.
The exhibition's centrepiece is Fatty, Katie's second fat cat who died of lymphatic cancer in 2011. Taxidermied by the skilled craftsman Michael Buzza from the Guildford Museum of Natural History, Fatty is captured chilling in her favourite pose. Atop her left paw is a replica black and white miniature gifted by Katie's grandmother in 1990. This marks the beginning of her collection of cat paraphernalia.
Clare Peake
Pilot
Friday 25 November 2011
6-10pm
25 Nov - 02 Dec, 2011
Open by appointment
Clare Peake's work connotes a landscape that is neither wholly real nor strictly imaginary, the maps are the keys to themselves.
In Pilot, Peake presents a concise array of sculptures and drawings that track a basic form as it oscillates and evolves to make a diagram of itself.
Ben Barretto
Wail Songs
Saturday 24th of September 2011
6-10pm
Ben Barretto's art practice to date can be discussed as a single ongoing series of performative experiments that investigate the idea of an assisted painting. These experiments often result in an uncertain dialogue between the processes of the performances and the aesthetics of the paintings produced by them; does one inform the other and which is more important to the work?
Continuing this trajectory in Wail Songs, Barretto dons the hat of 'composer' and by rearranging his familiar materials (scrap timber, oscillating fans, paint scrapers, canvas) he will construct a painting with sound, further examining the tension between process and product. The work will be undertaken and exhibited at The Museum on Saturday the 24th of September from 6-10pm and on Sunday the 25th of September from 12-4pm.
Benchwork
Supply and Command
Saturday 3rd of September 2011
7-10pm
In mid 2010, Daniel Bourke and Clare Wohlnick founded a small graphic design and printing business called Benchwork. The business was an attempt to financially sustain their own art practices while retaining a rigorous design standard and learning new skill-sets as they went. Supply and Command is a presentation of the successes, failures and accidents that have occurred during their short stint in the business world.
Please join the artists for a performance with accompanying powerpoint presentation at 7.30pm on Saturday the 3rd of September. The gallery will remain open from 12 - 4pm the following Sunday.
Tom Freeman
18th and 19th century prisoner art
Friday 22nd of July 2011
7-10pm
...On the top floor of the local museum in Peterborough UK sit a handful of small carved bone models. These sculptures were made by French prisoners of war at the turn of the 19th century, out of conflict between French and English cultures, two countries that sit somewhere within Tom Freeman's near and distant heritage.
In 18th and 19th century prisoner art Freeman futilely attempts to mimic the intricacy of these craft pieces using a range of materials at hand as well as extending their architectural patterning through ink, paint and texta works on paper.
The museum will remain open from 12-4 on Saturday the 23rd. A feedback etc. session will take place between 2 and 4pm. If you would like to attend or would like to know more about this, please contact us.
David Egan, Patrick Miller & Andrew Varano
Magical Signs: Exchange and Utopia
Friday 17th of June 2011
7-10pm
A presentation of work by the Museum of Natural Mystery regarding the establishment of a utopian system for the curation and exchange of good creative work. Coinciding with the exhibition will be the release of a document outlining the Museum's policies and practices.
The Museum will remain open on Saturday the 18th from 12-4pm.
Jason Hansma
Gentle into that good night
Sunday 8th of May 2011
7-10pm
DE: Let’s talk specifically about your show at the Museum. Tell me about cones.
JH: They reference listening cones (ear trumpets), used to try to connect to the unknown throughout history. There forms are also used for the distillation process of taking an amount of information and making it more finite and thus more consumable, which I don’t know if I agree with yet. For this specific work they were presented on a table with objects that reference the unknown, stars and fabric of the universe. So this landscape is about creating a situation where we try to come to terms with ideas of understanding through distillation.
