Extended Time, a double album by Evelyn Ida Morris in response to Elizabeth Newman’s Un-titled

On Monday June 19, Evelyn Ida Morris will be launching her double album, Extended Time on air with Hope St Radio, and in-person and Neon Parc, VIC.

Evelyn Ida Morris writes:

I am excited to invite you to the launch of my double album, Extended Time. The work is an 83-minute piano improvisation, responding to the paintings of Elizabeth Newman. This work was recorded at Drill Hall Gallery, on Ngunnawal Ngambri country, and mixed/mastered on Boon Wurrung country. This album artwork is an extension of this responsive collaboration, with Elizabeth Newman conceiving of and designing the album artwork, which was then put together by Duncan Blachford of Tempo Haus. The album will be available for purchase at the event, only 150 copies available.

When: Monday, June 19, 6.30pm
Where: Neon Parc, 15 Tinning Street, Brunswick
Wurrundjeri Land

There will be drinks from Hope Street Radio who are also streaming the album. Other surprises as well – I might do a reading of a story I love.

Neon Parc is wheelchair accessible, there will be dimmed lighting and it will be a quiet event. There will be some seating and also some limited mattress/cushions for options regarding sitting. Audience members are encouraged to engage with the work however they choose – walking, sitting, leaving, sitting somewhere else, whatever impulses occur to you – given that it is a durational piece.

It would be lovely to see you.

The album was recorded during Evelyn Ida Morris’s two hour performance of a live “soundtrack” to Elizabeth Newman’s survey show Un-titled during the show, which took place at the Drill Hall Gallery in November 20 – January 23, 2022. The durational piano response explored relational possibilities between the visual and the aural, and was improvised after Evelyn spent time reflecting on Elizabeth’s paintings

Un-titled was a survey of the work of Melbourne artist Elizabeth Newman. Newman’s body of work, be it collage, installation, text-based, textile or found object, is infused with painterly notions of re-presentation.

Hovering around the edges of signification, embracing affect and the act of becoming, her art pivots around reversals of positive and negative, challenging the limitations of language while paradoxically affirming the plasticity of our systems of understanding.

“For me” Newman says, “art-making is an expression and manifestation of the artist’s subjectivity. It is some Thing of the subject made incarnate.”

“I like to bring ‘the nothing’ into being, for some reason. Making a cut, finding a hole; pointing to a void…” says Newman. “I am not the active agent in the art making. I let the work make itself and show itself to me, and then ‘I’ have a look at it, see what I think about it, and see what it is ‘about’ …”

Elizabeth Newman is represented by Neon Parc, Melbourne, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney and Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles.