Gertrude Street Projection Festival
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Gertrude Street Projection Festival

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“It’s quite beautiful,” says Parkinson, detailing his personal experiences with the projection festival. “It’s one of those things that’s only there for a couple of weeks then it’s pulled down, but it really changes the nature of the street and brings a great vibrancy to it. It’s certainly a way that the community can come together and galvanize a little; there’s a lot of interesting dialogue going on with the public-housing there and with how people are intermingling there. I think it’s festivals like this that give an opportunity for cultural assimilation to happen, and [it] brings people from outside the Fitzroy, Collingwood [region to] Gertrude Street to check it out.”

 

Parkinson has always maintained an interest in community affairs. This affinity has translated to teaching English in East Timor as a volunteer, assisting the United Nations Development Programme during the 2006 East Timorese crisis, working with the United Nations Development Fund for Women afterwards to encourage political participation by East Timorese women and abolishing violence against women, and his current work: working with Affirm Press and Arte Moris, an East Timorese free art school, to create Myths and Murals, a nation literacy and street-art project to celebrate and educate people about East Timorese identity and mythology.

 

In fact, Parkinson’s experiences in East Timor have shaped his photography skills — he published Peace of Wall: Street Art from East Timor in 2010 through Affirm Press — and his life, as well as establishing his notion that the urban culture and landscape of a city is reflective of its people.

 

“It’s so shifting and changing,” enthuses Parkinson, explaining his penchant for urban culture and landscape. “It’s a fascinating space within Melbourne urban [culture]. Look [at] what’s happened in five, six, short years. Gentrification is taking [a] hold of different bastions of creativity and cultural expression; they’re changing the urban shape,” ‘urban shape’ referring to the changeability and constant fluidity of Melbourne street-art and architecture.

 

“It’s not necessarily for bad or for better,” he assures. “It’s just the reality of things. Things go in ebbs and flows, and I think, at the moment, we’re undergoing a lot of urban change and development; migration and different cultural groups [are] having different impacts on its aesthetic.” Whether this be the erection of suburban mosques, or graffiti reflecting the turmoil between different racial groups. Each day we have to interact with urban culture, regardless of our volition, and it shapes our perspective and reflects our communal identity. It’s this idea that inspired Chris Parkinson’s project-artwork, Subtext, for The Gertrude Street Projection Festival. 

 

Subtext is Parkinson’s first projection-piece — “a logical progression from [photography]” — and is a black-and-white collection of vague letters and symbols projected onto the concrete landscape of Leonard Street, Fitzroy. The projection-piece delves into the connotations of language and its asemic nature, a fascination of Parkinson’s as it originates from an urban context.

 

“[Subtext] is a response to my own interests in asemic writing and graffiti, and all that kind of stuff,” says Parkinson, expressing that the only difficulty in creating Subtext was his “daughter’s tears”. “[My interests] stem from an urban context and it’s a way that I’ve been exploring how to write graff[iti] with a camera.”

 

This progression is uncannily similar to how graffiti-artists Greg Lamarche (One Shot, Simple Pleasures) and Steve Powers (Exterior Surface Painting Outreach) moved towards the fine arts sphere by exploring the iconography and symbolic nature of language; Subtext sees Parkinson transition from documenting graffiti with a camera and to creating projection-pieces that create a pensive, asemic series of images, something the Youth Arts Development Officer has wanted to do for years. However, despite his excitement at the exhibition of his first projection-artwork, Parkinson is more excited about immersing himself in the experience of Gertrude Street Projection Festival.

 

“My lovely, lovely ladies gave me a leave pass,” enthuses the father of two, who is excited about having a night out. “[I think] just seeing all the different works will be fantastic, and I think the young people that we’ve been working with at the Yarra Youth Services — what they will be projecting onto Atherton Gardens [Light Storeys] will be quite a significant achievement. I’m looking forward to seeing all the different kind of art forms that have rolled into this festival; we’ve got different buskers, break-dancers, musicians and theatre groups. I’m looking forward to seeing how [they] interact with one another, and how the community benefits and vibes off it. It should be good.”

 

BY AVRILLE BYLOK-COLLARD