Slow Art:
Real life connection
The Ian Potter Centre for Performing Arts
Monash University Clayton Campus
FREE TICKETED EVENT
Past Event
Creators of Progress Festival’s feature art installations discuss their processes and how they forge community connections through making art. Hear from speakers Chaco Kato and Dylan Martorell of the Slow Art Collective, and Konstantin Dimopoulos, the artist behind The Blue Trees, about an inspiring range of their art experiences in global settings.
Konstantin Dimopoulos
Konstantin Dimopoulos is a conceptual and social artist and sculptor whose art practice is grounded in his sociological and humanist philosophies. He investigates globally relevant questions related to ecology and the human condition through his socio-environmental interventions and conceptual proposals, which argue for the potential of art as a means of social engagement and change.
Konstantin was born in Port Said, Egypt, to Greek parents and grew up at the mouth of the Suez Canal until the age of eight, when the family moved to Wellington, New Zealand to escape political upheaval. With this diverse cultural and political history, Kon has created art interventions on issues including emigration, environmental ecocide, homelessness, and genocide.
The Blue Trees is an ongoing environmental art installation about deforestation where the artist uses a vibrant blue to temporarily transform living trees into a surreal environment. The Purple Rain is a textual and visual response to homelessness; and his light works continue this thematic exploration of social issues using a commercial advertising medium.
Dylan Martorell
Transience, improvisation and collaboration form the basis of Dylan Martorell’s music-based art practice. Housed within the conceptual framework of musical diaspora, his work is drawn to ways in which music travels through space and is affected by changes in geography, climate, culture and materials to become an agent for cross-cultural reciprocation. Focusing on the use of site-specific gleaned materials and incorporating elements of upcycling, DIY culture, robotics and alternative power sources, Martorell’s projects focus on concepts of transience, sustainability and community based group dynamics.
Martorell has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally including major projects, biennials and residencies in Thailand, India, Indonesia, UAE, Taiwan and Singapore.
Along with Chaco Kato, he is a co-founder of the Slow Art Collective, an artistic collective that focuses on creative practices and ethics relating to environmental sustainability, material ethics, and collaborative process-driven practices where the focus is on the act of making.
He performs both in a solo and group capacity and is a founding member of Snawklor and Hi God People.
Chaco Kato
Chaco Kato is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, drawing, installation and community-based projects. Collaboration and negotiation are crucial tenets of her work, with collective actions and communal discourse often performing as the primary material of her work.
Kato’s ambitious projects are often catalysed by simple impulses and frameworks, including reciprocity, negotiation and craft practices of weaving and knotting. These processes open up an intimate space, providing a rich dialogue with everyday materials and processes. Informed by the spirit of ‘zen punk’, the aesthetics of bricolage and ‘rhizomatic’ systems outlined by theorists and philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, Kato is drawn to working with elements of chaos and order, which, importantly, all share common principles with zen or more for Animism Shinto.
Kato’s work openly embraces and questions the world. She embeds art in everyday life and habituates new ways of thinking and experiencing the world. She is also the founder member of Slow Art Collective, with Dylan Martorell, which focuses on sustainability, collaboration and community by deploying DIY survivalist aesthetics.
