Gemma Weston | | atractivoquenobello

Episode #01 of quarterly podcast Status Effect is now streaming on Soundcloud, as part of a programme commissioning new long form audio pieces by artists, curators, arts writers and arts workers, running from November, 2015 to January, 2016.

Focussing on social structures within the contemporary art world, the podcast aims to explore how these collective environments are composed and navigated, and as such is interested in topics surrounding subjectivity, reprioritising, diplomacy, protocol, social anxiety, the possibility for care and empathy, social mobility and labour.

Produced by Andrew Varano, the first episode features contributions from Francis Russell, Jaakko Pallasvuo, Dan Bourke & Gemma Weston and George Egerton-Warburton, as well as music from Perth, Australia-based band Erasers.

See the Status Effect website for details. **

Better known for its mining booms and beaches, the town of Perth in Western Australia isn’t exactly what you’d call a creative capital. A 20-hour flight and worlds away from London, the clear skies and hot weather tend to foster a culture of sport and the outdoors, rather than any semblance of the cosmopolitan lifestyle. Urban it might not be but there is a fascinating element of the unreal in the wide roads and sprawling suburbs of this most isolated and bizarre of coastal cities.

Artist Jessie Mitchell. Photos courtesy of OK Gallery.

With high rents, misguided governmental policy and physical distance against them, artists tend to seek out places east across the continent in cities like Melbourne and Sydney, or even overseas to find their audience, leaving few behind to contribute to the region’s greater cultural map. But there are some who stay and are making the most of it. One of them is the independent OK Gallery, run by artists and curators Gemma Weston, Jamie Macchiusi and Andrew Varano. Perched off one of the city’s high streets and across the road from the famed private men’s sauna, white walls and a freckle floor houses exhibits that are sometimes of a time and often of a place.

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