Outdoor Art Exhibition Saturday 12th October at the Surry Hills Festival 'Art Alfresco'. See works by Pinky Bhatt, Carla Hananiah, Stefan von Reiche, Phillip Joshua, Anthony Sawrey, Youjia Song and student works. OUTDOOR ART CLASS at 12midday and 2pm. Surry Hills Festival Prince Alfred Park Cnr Cleveland and Chalmers Street, Surry Hills

HOUSE FIRES AND OTHER SOCIAL EVENTS Anthony Sawrey 2007 If you have been living in a cave, then maybe you haven't noticed that for many people on earth, mass media is very widespread and intrusive. In fact living in a cave is no sure guarantee that you will reach the necessary escape velocity to be free of it. Even without watching television or picking up a newspaper we are never far from its influence, but for artists who want to engage with the culture of the everyday, its presence continues to be a rich source of ideas. I have always had an interest in the mass media, especially its inanities such as the cults of celebrity, the diversion of sports, and the coverage of accidents and mayhem. To feed this interest, I would search through media material from video to print to put together collections of images for future projects. Such methods for gathering material were normally limited by the availability of media to source these images, but now in the 21st century, with the emergence of the World Wide Web, all this has changed. Now I can access as many images as I want without having to be a cataloger or an archivist but merely a browser, a user, a lurker. Like one of those freeloaders in a newsagent, standing at the shelves scanning random magazines until I'm thrown out, I can pick and choose the Images that appeal to me at that moment and not have to worry about buying the medium so to speak. I have the freedom to indulge in the message without lumbering myself with the entire package. This is why the web is such a mine for me, because the images that I'm interested in circulate so frequently that I don't have to worry about letting a interesting image slip through my fingers like before. I like the lack of quality control that is characteristic of web media, those random, unexpected elements that have appeared in the flow. Digital artifacts, compression distortions, odd colors, funny screen calibrations, dead pixels, blurring, and so on, the effects are endless. When I find an interesting image, I can use digital imperfections to distort representations and alter the assumed meaning(s) of a mass media image. The process of image transference from the hot house of the digital realm to an archaic medium like paint brings all these possibilities in account because the change of context from monitor to gallery space, from virtual space to physical space freezes the flow and changes our habitual interpretations of them. Different histories clash. Suddenly images that usually pass in a blur take on new significance. The change in speed and environment prompts different emotional responses and reconfigurations. This conflict is what I am looking for when I paint media images, to turn supposedly familiar content into something unquantifiable with uncertain boundaries. Nothing is as it seems, nothing is true. All assumptions are false and all that is certain is that context changes everything.