2004
Mask 28
One of a series of text masks worn in daily life for the first half of 2004.
Art Collector
Edward Colless
Pg 227, Issue 30,
October 2004
Freakleys performances are masochistic comic routines of vengeance against her own desire to be an artist. Standing hidden behind a painting on a false wall in a gallery she viciously explodes, ‘What are you fucking looking at!’ if someone inadvertently ventures too close to the artwork- which is the invisible artist, not the false painting. So far, her most successful self-accusation has been a lump that hysterically gurgled and screamed from underneath a hallway carpet adjacent to the art schools gallery. An old walkman tape recorder, muffled by the flooring that it has been roughly pushed under, played back Freakleys’s inarticulate non-verbal manifesto regressing to infantile gibbering, at least either until the batteries died or – with Kafkaesque scorn – someone trod on it and squashed it like a bug. Freakley’s new project pushes this theatrical self negation towards a sort of artistic prostitution, renting her own body out as a portable exhibition space. Artist Running Space is a registered business with strict rates, $5 per day per arm, $15 for the torso and so on, for which fee exhibiting artists are allowed to have their work displayed at one public appearance or event of their choice.
un Magazine
Jessie Angwin
pg38-39, Issue 6
Summer 2005
'Danielle Freakley’s Artist Running Space (ARS) frightens me. Since October 2004, she has been reinventing herself after Frankenstein and releasing her monsters on an unsuspecting public. ARS is her latest performance work, for which she dresses up in a white suit and tie and puts a box over her head. Her performances violate public art spaces and satirise the concept of the Artist Run Initiative (ARI). Yet, unlike other ARIs in Melbourne like Contemporary Artist-Run New Initiative (CARNI), Dudespace in Brunswick or Axes Art Space in Camberwell, Freakley’s Artist Running Space actively seeks out its audience and mows it down like suburban grass.'
'For each show the exhibiting artists have nominated the place where Freakley will display the work. Her ARS performances have occurred in locations such as aquariums, men’s toilets and art galleries, and herein lies the scary part of the performance: she can go anyplace at anytime, limited only by the awareness of her own mortality and the authorities. Perhaps this sounds familiar, yet to call her an ‘art terrorist’ is too simplistic. Rather Freakley is utilising the escalation in public fear to draw attention to how creativity might exist in public spaces. It is debatable if either art or terrorism can really change the world, but what is clear is that both are fuelled by passion – and Freakley is a fanatic.'
Danielle Freakley
1982 born in Perth, Australia
Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia
Education
2004 Masters (First Class) Visual Arts, VCA,Melbourne
2003 Honors, Fine Arts, VCA, Melbourne
2002 BA Fine Arts, WAAPA, Perth
2006 ‘The Quote Generator’ Gertrude Cotemporary Art Spaces (forthcoming) ‘We Must Support Ourselves’ Curation, Spacement, Melbourne.‘Space Games’ Containers, Commonwealth Games Art Program. Next Wave, Melbourne
2005 ‘Artist Running Space’ Mori Gallery, Sydney
Group Exhibitions
2006 ‘Text Me’ Spacement, Melbourne (forthcoming)
‘Dystopia’ Office of Utopic Proceedures, VCA Gallery, Melbourne (forthcoming)‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of in choosing Happiness’ AVA Gallery, London.‘Simulton, 100 Seconds’ Timirasue, Romania ‘I am, You Are’ Canada
The Quote Generator (forthcomming)
Poohead Dance School (forthcomming)
Collections
Edith Cowan University, Stephen Mori, Helen During, Edward Colless, Knight Landersman (Art Forum), Karen Lovegrove and other various collections in New York, LA and Australia.
