Loading

unfurl /6 writing+art

May 2021 — writing+art /paintings /drawings /poetry /playlists /video

/Steve•COX /Tara•MOKHTARI /Anna•JACOBSON /Anne•CASEY

/Stephen•J•WILLIAMS

unfurl /6 contents

+

A separate UNFURL page specifically for news about our contributors …

UNFURL is free. Subscribe and share …

Introductory images

Masthead image

Study of a Boxer (pencil on paper, 2020) Steve Cox

Following images

Women marching in March 2021.

Contact UNFURL

Use the messages page on the UNFURL website to contact artists and writers. They often have works for sale or are available for readings or commissions. UNFURL will forward your message.

Steve COX /paintings and drawings

Steve Cox is an artist and writer. He has a forty-year exhibition history and his work is held in major public and private collections throughout Australia and internationally. As an arts writer, since 2000, he has contributed articles and reviews, and has conducted interviews with artists, for numerous newspapers, journals and magazines, including The Guardian; VAULT: Australasian Art & Culture; Gay Times, UK; FilmInk.com, amongst others. Cox writes on a range of subjects, including contemporary and historical art; LGBTQI issues; social issues; cinema; contemporary music.

Between 2013–2014, he was the London Arts Editor of NakedButSafe magazine. In 2019 he was on the judging panel for the Young Arts Journalist Award (YAJA). Also in 2019, he was the inaugural Writer in Residence for Brunswick Street Village, an innovative building complex, which espouses green values and arts in the community as a primary concern. During the residency, he produced a collection of fifty poems, on a range of subjects.

(non) Fiction

A complete record of Steve Cox's non (Fiction) exhibition at William Mora Galleries, March 2020.

Steve Cox’s latest exhibition, ‘(non) Fiction’, features a mixture of reality, invention, and literary allusions. Ranging across 80 works, the imagery focuses almost exclusively on heads —human; animal; fictional; and non-fictional. Peter Pan jostles with Federico Garcia Lorca. Dickens’ Artful Dodger sits adjacent to a London doctor. The infant Picasso stares across at a weeping faun. Odd hybrid creatures abut actual human portraits. The paintings are hung in several groups in William Mora Gallery’s larger space. In the smaller space, the artist showcases his drawings, which, again, are a mixture of invented heads, portraits of friends or acquaintances, and figures from fiction. Cox makes no distinction in the exhibition between the actual and the fictional—raising the question: How real is reality anyway? The intimate scale of the works (the smallest are just 13 x 10 cm) draws the viewer in to the subtle layers of sometimes delicate paintwork. This exhibition marks a return to oil paint for the artist after several decades of concentrating on works of acrylic, ink, gouache, and collage on paper.

Works known to be sold are asterisked in the list below the image gallery.

Paintings and drawings in the gallery (above), left to right, top to bottom …

  1. The Boxer (pencil on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  2. Pete (oil on board, 2020) Steve Cox
  3. **Animal (oil on board, 2020) Steve Cox
  4. The Benevolent Giant (pencil on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  5. Study of Harry Blake (pencil on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  6. **Study of Mahmoud (pencil on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  7. Weeping Faun (oil on board, 2020) Steve Cox
  8. The Young Soldier (oil on canvas, 2020) Steve Cox
  9. Isaac Sleeping (pencil on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  10. The Gamekeeper (pencil on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  11. Study of Terry McKellen (pencil and gouache on paper, 2020) Steve Cox
  12. Study of a Young Man (oil on canvas, 2020) Steve Cox
  13. Joan of Arc (oil on canvas, 2020) Steve Cox
  14. Study of Chris Athanasiou (pencil on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  15. Study of Zeb, London (oil on board, 2020) Steve Cox
  16. Shepherd (pencil on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  17. Christopher Marlowe (oil on canvas, 2020) Steve Cox
  18. Study of a Spanish Gardener (oil on canvas, 2020) Steve Cox
  19. Teenage Emperor (oil, mirror and collage on board, 2020) Steve Cox
  20. Self Portrait (oil on canvas, 2020) Steve Cox
  21. Minor Royalty (oil on canvas, 2020) Steve Cox
  22. Kendi Ayodele (pencil on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  23. Victorian Kiss (pencil on paper, 2020) Steve Cox
  24. Young Man Weeping (oil on canvas, 2020) Steve Cox
  25. The Witch of the Frozen Tundra (oil on board, 2020) Steve Cox
  26. **Pablo Picasso Aged Six (oil on canvas, 2020) Steve Cox
  27. Young Sasquatch (oil on board, 2020) Steve Cox
  28. **Sam Watching 'All About Eve' (pencil and gouache on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  29. **Hybrid # 2 (oil on board, 2020) Steve Cox
  30. Young Man in a Car (oil on canvas, 2020) Steve Cox
  31. Study of A. J. (pencil on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  32. Study of Harry Wang Wei (pencil on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  33. Devin Graham (pencil on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  34. **The Chieftain (oil on board, 2020) Steve Cox
  35. Study of Michael (pencil and ink on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  36. **Wandering Ape (oil on board, 2020) Steve Cox
  37. The Petty Criminal (pencil on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  38. **Little Bastard (oil on board, 2020) Steve Cox
  39. **Study of Michael B. Williams (ink and gouache onboard, 2020) Steve Cox
  40. Trent the Rent Boy (pencil and gouache on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  41. Tjebi (pencil on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  42. **The Artful Dodger (oil on board, 2020) Steve Cox
  43. Drunk Young Man (pencil and gouache on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  44. Crazy Bitch (oil on board, 2020) Steve Cox
  45. Wader (pencil on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  46. The Polish Girl (oil on canvas, 2020) Steve Cox
  47. The Maori Kickboxer (oil on canvas, 2020) Steve Cox
  48. The Elephant in the Room (pencil and ink on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  49. The Dark of the Sun (pencil and permanent marker on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  50. **Study of Rashid Tahan (pencil and gouache on board, 2020) Steve Cox
  51. Study of Selim (pencil on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  52. Study of Raymond, Hyde Park, London (oil on canvas, 2020) Steve Cox
  53. Study of Mike Lane (pencil on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  54. Study of Mehmet (oil on canvas, 2020) Steve Cox
  55. Study of Mauro Assandro (pencil and gouache on paper, 2020) Steve Cox
  56. Study of George A. (pencil on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  57. Study of Galib Zaaroub (pencil on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  58. Study of Brian Firkus, A.K.A. Trixie Mattel (pencil on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  59. Study of Bearded Man (pencil on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  60. Study of Alice W., (pencil on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  61. Study of Aaron (pencil on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  62. **Study of a Regency Dandy (ink and gouache on board, 2020) Steve Cox
  63. Study of a Boxer (pencil on paper, 2020) Steve Cox
  64. Peter Pan (oil on board, 2020) Steve Cox
  65. **Scarecrow (oil on canvas, 2020) Steve Cox
  66. Raskolnikov (oil on canvas, 2020) Steve Cox
  67. Pete Bridgestock (pencil on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  68. Oscar Wilde in His Last Few Hours (pencil and red wine on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  69. My History Lesson (pencil, gouache and collage on paper, 2020) Steve Cox
  70. Martin (pencil and gouache on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  71. Marcel - out of it (pencil and gouache on paper, 2020) Steve Cox
  72. Lord Fuckingham (oil on canvas, 2020) Steve Cox
  73. London Doctor (oil on canvas, 2020) Steve Cox
  74. Hybrid (oil on board, 2020) Steve Cox
  75. George (pencil and gouache on board, 2020) Steve Cox
  76. **Federico Garcia Lorca (oil on canvas, 2020) Steve Cox
  77. Desmond Watching Television (pencil on primed board, 2020) Steve Cox
  78. Cyclopean Monkey (oil on board, 2020) Steve Cox
  79. Carlos (oil on canvas, 2020) Steve Cox
  80. Bill Sykes from 'Oliver Twist' (oil on board, 2020) Steve Cox

Anna JACOBSON /poetry and video

Anna Jacobson is a writer and artist from Brisbane. Amnesia Findings (UQP, 2019) is her first full-length poetry collection, which won the 2018 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. In 2020 Anna won the Nillumbik Prize for Contemporary Writing (Open Creative Nonfiction), was awarded a Queensland Writers Fellowship, and was shortlisted in the Spark Prize. In 2018 she won the Queensland Premier’s Young Publishers and Writers Award. Her writing has been published in literary journals and anthologies including Chicago Quarterly Review, Griffith Review, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite, Meanjin, Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry. Anna’s poetry chapbook The Last Postman (Vagabond Press, 2018) is part of the deciBels 3 series. She is a PhD candidate at QUT specialising in memoir. She holds a Master of Philosophy in poetry (QUT 2018), a Graduate Certificate in Museum Studies (UQ 2019), a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Creative and Professional Writing) (QUT 2015), and a Bachelor of Photography with Honours (Griffith University 2009). She was a finalist in the 65th Blake Art Prize, 2019 Marie Ellis Prize for Drawing and 2009 Olive Cotton Award for Photographic Portraiture. She won the 2009 Queensland Poetry Festival Filmmakers Challenge. Her website is <www.annajacobson.com.au>.

«This is a video work of my 'Separation Ceremony' poem that appears in my poetry collection Amnesia Findings (UQP, 2019). ‘Separation Ceremony’ features stop motion photography of myrtle leaves, cinnamon bark and cloves, together with my great grandfather’s spice box. The work is inspired by the Havdalah prayer, also known as the ‘Separation’ ceremony, which separates the Sabbath from the rest of the week through the smelling of spices in a spice box.» —Anna Jacobson

Tara MOKHTARI /poetry

Dr. Tara Mokhtari is a Persian poet, born in Canberra, residing in New York City. Poetry is deeply ingrained in Persian culture and in the spirit of Persian people, and Mokhtari’s mother, Pari Azarmvand Mokhtari, is a world expert in Hafez. Mokhtari wrote her first poem at age 13, and a few years later, upon pausing to take a breath between the first two stanzas of Stevie Smith’s poem ‘Black March,’ Mokhtari made the conscious decision (which was likely made in and by the universe much earlier) that poetry was her life’s work. As a postgraduate student at RMIT University for both her PhD and Masters creative projects, Mokhtari wrote verse novels, which accompanied critical dissertations on modern poetry and poetics. Stevie Smith remained at the center of Mokhtari’s research during these years.

While poetry is her most enduring love, Mokhtari writes across the creative media. She was a founder and the in-house playwright of Canberra theatre company, The Nineteenth Hole (est. 2001), and was commissioned to write a play for Canberra’s preeminent independent company, Free Rain, when she was just 18. These plays earned multiple awards and nominations. Mokhtari went on to write for screen on assignment, most recently writing an original sci-fi feature film for Crick Films (Canberra) and a feature adaptation of a New York Times best-selling book for Barry Navidi (London/Los Angeles).

Mokhtari’s first collection of poetry, Anxiety Soup, was published in Australia by Finlay Lloyd Press (2013). The poems are connected thematically as snippets of daily life that shift the existential core of the speaker in some way. Mokhtari’s co-edited book of essays, Testimony, Witness, Authority: The Politics and Poetics of Experience, was published in 2013 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. In 2012 and 2011, Mokhtari edited the English translations of two books by Dr. Hashem Rajabzadeh (Rikkyo University, Japan) who is a recipient of The Order of the Sacred Treasure in Japan for his lifelong work in introducing Persian culture to Japan.

The culmination of her work—creative, scholarly, and pedagogical—is Mokhtari’s book, The Bloomsbury Introduction to Creative Writing (2015), which is now in its second edition and has been translated into Simplified Chinese. The book has been adopted by university programs in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, approaches creative writing as a form of knowledge that, for the writer, is symbiotically linked to experience.

Mokhtari is part of the wonderful faculty at CUNY Bronx Community College’s Communication Arts and Sciences department, and lives in Brooklyn with the world’s greatest cat, Malake. Mokhtari has given guest lectures at SUNY Oswego (NY), BRIC TV (NY), Victoria University (Melbourne), This Is Not Art Festival (New Castle), and her works are published in magazines and anthologies in the US, Australia, Prague, and beyond.

Dear AG © Tara Mokhtari

Anne CASEY /poetry

Anne Casey is an award-winning Sydney-based Irish poet and writer. A journalist, magazine editor, legal author and media communications director for thirty years, her work ranks in The Irish Times' Most Read, and is widely published internationally. She is author of the critically acclaimed collections, where the lost things go and out of emptied cups, which was selected for Best Dressed in 2020 by Sundress Academy for the Arts in the USA (curators of the prestigious Best of the Net awards) and for Books of the Year 2019 by The Lonely Crowd magazine in the UK. Her third collection will be published by Salmon Poetry in 2021. Anne has won poetry awards in Ireland, the UK, the USA, Canada, Hong Kong and Australia. She is currently undertaking a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Technology Sydney, supported by an Australian Government Scholarship.

Website: <anne-casey.com>

Social media: <@1annecasey>

Stephen J. WILLIAMS /about unfurl

Image: Stephen J. Williams (oil on canvas, detail, 2000) Margaret Gold.

This happened …

Late in 2019, the Australian prime minister (marketing guru and shitty-pants Scott Morrison, ‘Sco-Mo’ to you) and his theatre assistants removed the federal administration’s arts appendix. One moment the word ‘Arts’ appeared somewhere in the names of government departments, and the next it had gone. Snip! And he chucked it in the bin.

Well, not exactly… ‘Arts’ was removed from a department’s name. To compensate, the yarts (as they are called in Australia) got an office. The Office of the Arts: <https://www.arts.gov.au/>. Never have the arts and government been so closely aligned than in this uniform resource locator.

There were articles in newspapers, outrage on the arts websites, and a long rash of angry emojis at the end of comments on Facebook.

The conservative government in Australia, returned at the May 2019 election by a slender margin, had decided a feature of the victory after-party would be to show the country’s angry, artistic child the door. “Your mother and I are tired of you! Always with your hand out, and never a word of thanks! Get a job!” And then, the ‘clap’ of the fly-screen door and a barely audible ‘clack’ of its tiny snib that seemed to say, “And don’t come back.”

Making art is a patient, lonely business. Making any progress seems to require years of practice and a bit of luck. Guidebooks and internet articles about being an artist, full of advice and clichés, pile up very quickly. Be yourself. Tell your truth. Talent is important, endurance essential. In the age of Instagram, sexy drawings and a bubble-butt are handy, but not essential (or so they say). Governments are not needed, but academic sinecures, supervising doctorates in novel-writing or discussions of queer theory, good if you can get them. When universities are financially sous vide, as they will be emerging from the 2020–forever pandemic, place bets at long odds that the arts will be favored for rehabilitation.

Governments, truth be told, don’t want to help. The governing classes are too busy ‘governing,’ which might as well mean lying, or fudging, or crying crocodile tears, or making a killing on the stock market, or taking a holiday in Hawai’i. To be the governor is to be the winner, the one who calls the shots, to be ‘the decider.’ From their high station in life these decider-governors have a role in narrating our social experience. They have a role we give them in legislating to tell us what is and is not important. (Have you noticed how very often our prime minister tells us what is important, and how very important is the very thing he is now saying?) It’s been a long time since governors of any stripe have shown us how the arts and sciences are important. Business, the economy, the stock market, and jobs are important. Wages growth, arts, and science, women, not so much.

UNFURL, my arts publishing project, was a reaction to artists’ reactions to government biases against the arts. Who needs government money anyway? I thought. It turns out, lots of people working in the arts need audiences, and it’s not easy to find and maintain audiences without government assistance. And, even within my narrow range of interests—writing and visual arts—the connections between arts activity and funding are deep. Poetry is not the malnourished tenant of the attic it was in Australia in the mid-1980s. The long lists of books for review and the number of official insignia on web pages are two possible measures of this.

At the same time, long-established literary magazines have had their funding cut. There is money for the arts, so long as it is going to places where the expenditure can be seen to be spent. Government wants the internet to sing “Hey, big spender!” while it cuts funding to Meanjin and others. It may be partly Meanjin’s fault: it has had nearly thirty years to figure out how to get its great store of content online for prospective subscribers to access, while the failure to do so begins to look like obstinacy.

UNFURL asked writers and artists to promote their own work to their own social media contacts while doing the same for other artists and writers: it’s a tool for artists to find new audiences and readers. UNFURL /1 started with a couple of writers I knew, Davide Angelo and James Walton, and a writer whom Angelo recommended, Anne Casey. Susan Wald, also published in the first UNFURL, was a painter whose work I liked and who had an exhibition planned for early 2020. I wanted to establish a process that could lead to unexpected choices. I would try not to make selections. I wanted artists to select or recommend other artists; and I wanted those artists to choose for themselves what they wanted to show with as little mediation as possible, encouraging people to show and to publish work they liked, and that might not have been selected (or grouped together) by an editor or curator.

Government wants the internet to sing “Hey, big spender!” while it cuts funding to Meanjin and others. It may be partly Meanjin’s fault: it has had nearly thirty years to figure out how to get its great store of content online for prospective subscribers to access, while the failure to do so begins to look like obstinacy.

It is more efficient to work on all one’s secret agendas simultaneously, so I should also admit my concern that belle-lettrist aesthetics (including the idea that poetry is language’s semantics incubator) and faux-modernist experimentation have combined to make poetry mostly irrelevant and a branch of marketing. —One only has to look at the writing being selected by the selectors to see that something is wrong with the practice of selection. As much as possible, I think, best to leave artists to make their own choices; and if there are mistakes, then, we’ll know who to blame.

And then, in March 2020 … then was the actual end of the world-as-we-knew-it. Those crazy ‘preppers’ I’ve made fun of started to look like visionaries. “Where the fuck is my bolthole, goddammit!?” and “How big is your bolthole, my friend!?” could have been common questions in some circles. People who could afford it, and had somewhere to go, did leave town. Gen-Xers lost their hospitality jobs, decided that they couldn’t afford their share house rent, and moved back ‘home.’ Artistes no longer had audiences. Artiste-enablers, stagehands, administrators and carpenters, were also out of work. COVID-19 put the arts and sciences back in the news.

The intersectional tragedy of pandemic and conservative political hostility to the lefty arts seemed to many like another opportunity to turn indifference into punishment. It was hard to disagree with pundits who have been cataloging this punishment.

UNFURL, possibly because of all this, has done quite well. By the time UNFURL /5 was released, writers and artists could expect to reach about two thousand readers within a couple of weeks of publication. (Each new UNFURL number provided a little boost to the previous issues, so that all the issues now clock up numbers in the thousands.) Eighty per cent of readers were in Australia, and most of the rest in the USA, Canada, UK and Ireland. The male:female ratio of readers was almost 50:50. The largest age group of readers was 18–35 years. (Though if everyone is ten years younger on the internet, maybe that’s 28–45.)

It’s difficult to read poetry on small-screen devices, so I did not expect UNFURL to be read on phones. The visual arts component of UNFURL is quite effective on phones and tablets, however. It seems likely that readers interested in the writing in UNFURL resorted to their desktops and printers. Sixty to seventy percent of downloads of UNFURL were to mobile and tablet devices.

I learned that women writers (poets) had a ‘stronger’ following among women readers than men had among readers of any kind. It was very apparent, with Gina Mercer, for example, that a very significant number of readers returned more often, subscribed more often, and were women.

I learned that women writers (poets) had a ‘stronger’ following among women readers than men had among readers of any kind. It was very apparent, with Gina Mercer, for example, that a very significant number of readers returned more often, subscribed more often, and were women.

I learned that social media isn’t the be-all and end-all of connecting with an audience. Old-fashioned email also works really well. Some artists and writers had no significant social media presence but used email effectively to communicate with friends and contacts.

Visual artists be like Molly Bloom; writers be like Prince of Denmark.

I also learned that visual artists were, generally speaking, more enthusiastic and positive about using social media, and even better at basic stuff like answering messages. Visual artists be like Molly Bloom; writers be like Prince of Denmark.

I found that both writers and artists did things in UNFURL other publications might not permit (requiring, as they mostly do, first publication rights). Philip Salom published groupings of new and old poems. Alex Skovron published poems, prose, paintings, and drawings. Steven Warburton published a series of pictures about how one canvas evolved over several years. Robyn Rowland published poems and their translations into Turkish for her readers in Turkey. Ron Miller published a brief survey of his life’s work in space art.

All that and more to come.

Gander

Internet roulette

🔴

Our father https://bit.ly/3nMCFSw / Nolan https://bit.ly/3lNPj1P / Books https://ab.co/3nKJOCO / 6000+ https://bbc.in/3lNYOy8 / Lies https://bit.ly/3noNCKk / Deplatforming https://bit.ly/3aJjCDQ / Great boxing https://bit.ly/2QTpdjN / Charitable status https://bit.ly/2PfgtE8 / Spider-man https://bbc.in/3dMb8xL / Monster https://bit.ly/3e7J3Ql / Pain https://bit.ly/3dWaxbu / Rowling https://bit.ly/3se2YSw / Feelings https://bit.ly/2R0S8T1 / 'Getting' it https://bit.ly/31zXdUk / Driving https://bit.ly/2NrhiZ9 •

Unfurled already

UNFURL is edited, designed, and published by Stephen J. Williams. St. Kilda, Victoria, Australia (May, 2021), ‹bit.ly/unfurl6›.

A PDF (portable document format) version of UNFURLS can be downloaded from the UNFURL home. These PDFs are a complete screenshot record of the words, images and links in each UNFURL.

Warhol and Basquiat: detail of an exhibition poster.
Created By
Stephen J. Williams
Appreciate