http://mis-design.tumblr.com/slowartcollective

Tony Adams, Chaco Kato, Ash Keating and Dylan Martorell are four Melbourne-based artists who collaborate under the umbrella of Slow Art Collective. Their shared concern for environmental issues leads them to develop sustainable art practices that highlight the need for social change.

For ten days the Slow Art Collective will build and install a makeshift dwelling, filming the process and streaming it live to the Potter. This temporary human shelter is designed for use in ‘emergency’ conditions. Whether these conditions come about through a natural disaster, such as flood or fire, a man-made event, such as nuclear fall-out, or a more localised—yet no less devastating event—such as the advent of homelessness, is unspecified. Collingwood provides a context where discrepancies in living conditions are transparent.

Bunkering down in a subterranean landscape designed to be a transit zone, one through which customers pass swiftly between ordering and collecting their meals, Slow Art Collective asks customers to pause and consider the contingency of human welfare upon the built environment, the nature of ephemeral dwellings, and the purposes to which design might be used.

http://www.art-museum.unimelb.edu.au/art_exhibitions_detail.aspx?view=179&category=future

Mis-design is a five-part, multi-site exhibition with two projects situated in the Ian Potter Museum of Art and three spread across inner-city Melbourne. A sixth, affiliated project, initiated and programmed by the State of Design Festival and the Victorian College of the Arts, will be located at the Victorian College of the Arts. Mis-design conceives of and affirms a future for art, outside of the art world, as a parasite in the complex machinery of consumer culture.

This provocative multi-site project brings together local and international artists in commercial and non-commercial spaces in Melbourne’s CBD. The project features the work of two renowned US artists, Adam Kalkin and Andrea Zittel, along with new work created by local artist-groups including the Slow Art Collective, the Pacific Women’s Weaving Circle and Flatland OK.

The work of local artists is staged as a series of ‘interventions’ in commercial retail spaces, while Kalkin and Zittel mis-design the space of the art museum.

The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication titled ‘Art in consumer culture’ by guest curator Grace McQuilten, published by Ashgate http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409422402.

Mis-design is supported by the Victorian Government through Arts Victoria.

The Besen Family Foundation.

This project has been funded by the Curator Development Initiative which is administered by the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA).