"The vast and sombre tapestry of this museum of this museum hangs before us - solid, durable, and superb. It is a magnificant story."
Shmon Dudas, Museum Gazette

  
     

The Museum of Modern Oddities (MoMO)


Conceived in 2000 and intended to continue to at least 2010, MoMO is a surface sampling of the everyday, accessed through the pockets and bags of participating audience. A huge success at the 2000 Melbourne Festival, it is a unique performance situation that encompasses visual art, installation practice and museum; a site-sensitive 'institution' that manifests ephemerally and as such is informed, shaped and scaled by the site in which it inhabits.

Previous manifestations have included a totally portable MoMO housed in 70+ suitcases presented in the public areas of the New Melbourne Museum during the Melbourne Festival 2000 and inhabiting an old hardware shop complete with hardware. This manifestation entailed a three-month residency in situ and resulted in a 10 week public season. Other associated MoMO-ian events have included visual arts installations in public libraries and 'canned art' displayed and for sale on the shelves of a supermarket.

MoMO is a museum created for and with the public and is conceived as a free public event. On tour, it is an ongoing cultural exchange and may consists of the some of the key collections initiated in previous manifestations of MoMO. These collections may be added to during each new manifestation of the museum and new collections will be initiated.

· The Publicly Curated Exhibit - this ever growing exhibit is a collection of ephemera donated and curated by the public, displayed in sealed plastic panels.
· The Archives - a selection of artefacts will be on display including Jock the Racing Possum, Future Fossils, and the Ahmet Yacek soap collection from Turkey.
· The Register of Nick Names - the Register comprises hundreds of entries, each with a background story.
· The Museum of Contemporary Feet a photographic collection of museum visitors feet, each with footnotes contributed by the 'donor'.
· The touring collection from the Museum of Collected Longing, an extraordinary collection of letters in response to the question "What is it you long for"
· The AZ of Found Objects an ever evolving collection of alphabetical ephemera.
· Sound Bites an audio collection of particular places at particular times.

At the Market, MoMO will 'live' in an On Display exhibition booth in the Playhouse foyers. It will be manned by MoMO staff employing a range of sales tactics that one might expect to find in a supermarket.

Items might be - cans of genuine indigenous land (complete with a songline or dreaming), genuine mini plastic didgeridoos (looking remarkably like yellow biro tubes), a range of MoMO fridge magnets, and calendars, incredibly valuable second-hand postcards bunches of bananas, mangoes and paw-paw, the secret life of the cabbage, listening to the unknown inner world of the cabbage, the amazing properties of mandarin peel as espoused by Geraldine Landers the daughter of orchardist Mr Landers. Or just a pile of junk that the artists use to springboard into conversation and confusion with the 'audience'!

The booth references the whole trade show/market world, with giveaways, demonstrations, delicatessen products and free massages and presents a range of products, including the MoMO book, and MoMO-related stock. It will be an ironic take on market, culture, selling and tourism an ambiguity, a play, a true performance realisation of what MoMO is.

Also available at the booth will be tickets to the MoMO Walking Tour of the Festival Centre. This tour will be run at certain times and require booking. It will reveal some of the finer features of what once was South Australia's biggest icecream factory. Some obscure tales will be unraveled!

www.oddmuseum.com

 

 

 
Neil Thomas and Katy Bowman

Neil Thomas has an international reputation for innovative, exciting and highly successful public performance works. He has played street theatre and theatre for over 15 years and for the past six years has specialised in Australia and Europe in the creation of performance window installations and site-specific public art.

Urban Dream Capsule, which premiered in Melbourne as a commission by the 1996 Melbourne Festival, went on to be an enormous success at the Gent International Street Theatre Festival, the 1999 Festival de Theatre des Ameriques in Montreal, the 1999 London International Festival of Theatre, the 2000 New Zealand International Festival of the Arts. It has won numerous international awards as is much sought after internationally (see www.urbandream.com)

Neil performed his solo piece Blue Boys for the 2000 Singapore Arts Festival, the 2000 Galway International Arts Festival and the 2000 Dublin International Theatre Festival. Other major works include commissions from the 1998 Festival of Perth, The Omnibus of Dreams, a taste of heaven, an installation performance work on a working public transport bus, and Caravan Poetic 'a string of unique caravan worlds strewn across the Melbourne city-scape during Melbourne Festival.

In 1999 Neil Thomas, Katy Bowman and Michael Douglas formed the arts organization MECCA (Melbourne Experimental Centre for the Contemplative Arts); a non-profit organisation dedicated to creating contemporary public art events. He created for MECCA a site-specific installation canned in a local Melbourne supermarket Piedimontes in May 2000 (see www.alphalink.com.au/~surreal/canned.html)

2001 has been a busy year for Neil with performances of Urban Dream Capsule in Perth, Chicago and Galway, Blue Boys in Tralee, Ireland, and a 10-week season of the Museum of Modern Oddities (with Katy Bowman) in a disused hardware in Collingwood, Melbourne. Neil has recently been invited to create a work for the Sydney Opera House.

Plans for 2002 will see Neil in Sao Paulo and Berlin with Urban Dream Capsule and in Zurich with MoMO.

Katy Bowman is a multi-disciplinary artist working in the realm of visual theatre and public art, with over 20 years professional experience as a performer, devisor, designer and director.

Acknowledged as an innovator in the fields of puppetry and visual theatre, her work has been presented in a number of award-winning seasons as well as nationally and internationally (see www.alphalink.com.au/~kbowman).

Katy has worked with companies including Handspan Visual Theatre, Chamber Made Opera, Spare Parts Puppet Theatre, Polyglot and Back to Back Theatre in various roles including performing, writing, puppet making, devising and directing. Since 1985 she has directed the visual performance ensemble Transfigurations, creating and performing visual theatre and sculptural performance works for theatre and non-theatre contexts.

Transfigurations has been presented at major events nationally and internationally, including 1989-95 Melbourne Festival, (which commissioned the outdoor works Sticks and Stones, The de Chirico Piece, The Coracles and Millennium), the Sydney and Adelaide Festivals, Southbank Brisbane, Southgate Melbourne and in Japan, Singapore, Italy, Slovenia and Hong Kong.

Other major works by Katy include You Are Here, a caravan installation as part of Caravan Poetica for the Melbourne Festival 1998, and The Cone Project, a seven-week long sculptural, performance installation at Southgate and the Victorian Arts Centre, presented by Handspan Visual Theatre in 1999. The Cone Project was restaged in 2000 for a showing at the 4th Australian Performing Arts Market and at The Big Rig at the Adelaide Fringe.

During 1999 and 2000 Katy was an artist in residence (supported by the City of Yarra) at the old council nursery in Edinburgh Gardens. With Neil Thomas and Michael Douglas, she formed MECCA (Melbourne Experimental Centre for the Contemplative Arts); a non-profit organisation dedicated to creating contemporary public art events.

Exhibitions have included Forgotten Places, a group exhibition at the Girder Institute at Melbourne Fringe in November 1999, Cabinet of Curiosities exhibited at the North Fitzroy Library, Wonder Cabinets at Fitzroy and North Fitzroy Libraries and Branching Out, a solo exhibition at North and East Melbourne Branch Libraries in March 2001.

 
 
Performance installation
...Up to 6

Mr Henry Boston
Agent/Producer
C/o Cultural Pursuits Australia
PO Box 202
North Perth WA 6906
Tel +61 8 9444 3633
Fax +61 8 9201 0588
cultural@iinet.net.au