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Photography, Drawing, Poetry:
A Live-in Show, 1978
Installation, Drawing, Photographs
The Live-in Show was my first solo exhibition. In it I wanted to change the experience of the gallery goer from one of white walls, hush, hush, don't speak, say what you really think when you get out of here - to one of sit down, relax, absorb the work at varying rates, discussing as you go, integrating the experience of being in a gallery with other life activities.
Micky Allan, 2008
Old Age, Babies, Fruit, Gladioli, Performance Photos, Breakfast Table, TV, Bed, Drawing Table, Garden Furniture, Poetry Book, Autumn Leaves
The set-up was different in Sydney to the initial one in Melbourne where I slept in the gallery overnight, literally 'living in'. People could make breakfast or lunch, watch TV, draw or read the poems at the desk, chat with me.
The art work ranged from 'high art' works carefully framed and mounted (Babies, Old Age) to works pinned to the walls (Gladioli, Performance) to 'low art' incidentals such as photo postcards, plastic animals and other paraphenalia that one might have casually interacting on some surface at home.
It was the first major showing of my hand coloured photography and even at this point revealed my interest in crossing borders between media and in synthesising range.
Life and art divisions were intended to be blurred but the show's purpose was not really to display 'my life as art' or to focus solely on the diaristic, as the feminist context of the times tended to read it. The Babies series asked 'what do babies know?', the Old Age series explored different experiences of ageing, the Performance photos compared notions of performance both on and off stage and the drawn gladioli placed near autumn leaves linked art and nature; my concerns were for the universal as well as the particular.
Micky Allan, 2008