Artworks 2003 - 2007
Candle Light 2007
Digital animation,
Production team Simone LeAmon and Daryl MuntonIf you want to spare your eyes and your mind, follow the sun from the shadows behind.
Friedrich Nietzsche To a Friend of Light
Candle Light is a digital animation featuring LeAmon’s design for a small portable lighting product. Drawing on the image of the candle and accompanied with words by Friedrich Nietzsche, the product aspires to be an intermediate agent for expressing things we hold dear to each other.
In time 2006 Exhibition Gardens Melbourne
In autumn the historic grounds of the Royal Exhibition Buildings in Melbourne turn a carpet of orange and brown. This landscape is often blown south into the city grid with leaves amassing in the corridors, doorways and foyers of the financial district. In time is a performance conducted in the early hours of the last Friday in autumn in 2006, wearing a self-made suit of cardboard armor LeAmon works tirelessly to rake the few remaining leaves in the grounds of the Royal Exhibition Buildings into a large pile. A work about time, labor and the temporal encounters in life of which we are destined to experience over and over.
Post Object Confession: Head Light 2006, Melbourne
Late on a winters evening in 2006 LeAmon stripped down to her bikinis outside the Euroluce Lighting showroom in Melbourne. Placing a minor’s light on her head she walked through the city streets and beyond to her home in the inner suburb of Abbotsford. In Post Object Confession #5 LeAmon reveals herself and walks the city limits to bring the light home. A performance about light and shadow LeAmon’s small frame appears on video courtesy of urban and commercial lighting whilst her own eyes perform like lamps, unable to see the shadows she casts.
Supersystem Concept for 5 Products 2005, 1000 Eventi, Salone del Mobile Milan
How do a bed, timepiece, light, kettle and purse relate and why does Simone LeAmon kiss motorbikes when she is Milan? A Supersystem Concept for 5 Products is a design proposal, which explores the notion of lifestyle products in the company of general human affections such as desire, comfort, disappointment and love. Working in collaboration with digital artist Daryl Munton and photographer Liz Looker, LeAmon uses digital technology, performance, photography and text to construct a suite of narratives titled Post Object Confessions in which motorbikes and kissing, headlights and bikinis, freeways and kangaroos come together to inform designs for a light, daybed, timepiece, purse and kettle.
With a portfolio of hand-rendered helmet graphics LeAmon walked the vast outfield of the Phillip Island circuit at the 2004 Australian Motorcycle Grand Prix giving impromptu presentations to people wearing Dainese racing apparel. LeAmon used the occasion to seek out the manufacturer’s clientele and ask their opinion on what makes a good helmet graphic. A photograph was taken with each person as a parting gesture and shown to the manufacturer in the company of new designs.
Kissing Moto Milan 2004
Kissing Moto Melbourne 2005
LeAmon has kissed motorbikes on the streets of Melbourne, Milan, Padova and Sydney. A performance series conducted between 2003 and 2006 LeAmon is seen standing at traffic intersections waiting for motorcyclists. Darting in and around the stationary traffic she makes her way to the riders and asks; excuse me, can I please kiss your motorcycle?
Bodywork is a 3D digital model of the artist/designer Simone LeAmon’s body sporting a custom designed exhibition suit styled in the fashion of motorcycle leather. Exploring the categorisation of creative practice and production, Bodywork uses the space of the practitioner’s own body to speak of the disciplinary and corporate cultures of art and design.
Supersystem Play 2003, Gertrude Contemporary Artist Spaces, Melbourne
The Supersystem performs the role of a conceptual and visual hinge between the abiding themes of desire, use, comfort and play in view of constructing an environment of objects and images. It is an object – a piece of ‘use-art’ that can be played with to reconfigure soft-micro landscapes for resting, lying, sleeping and dreaming within. Appearing in the shape of an ellipse, it unfolds and comes apart in six varying forms, one must arrange, sit, bounce, balance and rely on the practice of ‘play’ to define its use.
Moto Showroom: The Return of Desire 2003, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne
MOTO Showroom: the return of desire is an adventure emerging from a dialogue between desire and design. Conceived through the exploration of a design methodology MOTO Showroom attempted to construct the world of the artist/designer’s practice. A strategic organization of ideas on gender and design are woven though a schema of works transfixed on the image of the motorbike and notion of the artist/designer as ‘racer’. MOTO Showroom embraced the expressive capacities of digital technologies in order to conjoin the modes of art and design practice and reveal design process within a fantastical narrative.
Heartland 2003, computer animation
Heartland is a 3minute computer-generated animation built with Maya software. Including live video and custom artwork the narrative follows the adventure of a female ‘Superbike racer’ enmeshed with her motorcycle in a process of reconfiguring the physical/psycho space of her world - a world in which the motorcycle eventually dissolves leaving behind a trail of ephemera. Heartland explores the ‘dissolving object’ of the post object age. It converses with the theoretical language of the cultural frame of design and enriches the debate on manufacture and serial production.
