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“Your work escapes all logical categories, including such stable
categories as body/mind, reason/madness, normal/abnormal, nature/culture,
pleasure/need, female/male. It caresses jouissance; a bliss without clear
outlines, an orgasm without a body; it laughs at reason and makes fun of its
prudent categories. I am a poet and I rely upon words, but your work leaves me
tongue-tied, jumping up and down gesturing hysterically. Your work has no need
of words, it simply shows and does not tell; it highlights a place beyond the
Symbolic and its fascist structures. It shows another place woven in lace. Your
work makes nonsense of structuralism and its obsessive search to reduce
everything to deciphered structures and symbolic transactions. It puts under
suspicion philosophy's grand claim to be a master discourse, a universal
meta-discourse, that tells the undeniable story of Reason to all times and all
people. Your work tiptoes around such skiting hierarchies, and is a concrete
flight from representation, that subverts, disturbs the categories, and the
perceptual and moral "certainties" that rely upon it.”
JOHN NAJJARR, Poet.... [on Vogan's ’MIMOSIS’ ]
B I O G R A P H Y
Cathy
Vogan is a multi-award winning Irish-Franco-Australian singer, performer, composer,
media artist, and writer, living in Sydney, off and on, since the 70’s. She has
shown her work throughout the world, including the UK, France, Germany, Italy,
Switzerland, Japan, Brazil, the USA and Australia, and for the last 12 years,
maintains a high profile online, through her numerous websites. Her
artist's site: VOGANIA.COM receives up to 40000 visitors
per month, and her French site CHEZ-ALICE,
created in 1997, has been cited in Google’s Top 40 Arts Alternative.
Born in Ireland into a musical family, and raised
there until adolescence, Cathy Vogan - aka CaTV - was a professional singer in
the theatre and cabaret from the age of 3-11 years, and won two major British
talent awards before she was 10, She then gave up the stage ”forever”, at the
tender age of 14 and decided to become a gymnast… After a brilliant school, but
restless 4-year university education in English, Foreign Languages, Psychology,
Mathematics and Philosophy… Ms Vogan joined the Ensemble Theatre in Sydney, under the tutelage of Zika Nester and Hayes Gordon.
In 1982 she began another 4 years of study at Sydney College of the
Arts, and in her third year, won her first of 8 awards at the 1986
Australian Video Festival for her
student film ‘Dear Me’. Vogan
represented Australia the following year in the same event at Sydney’s
prestigious Roslyn Oxley Gallery, with her much-noticed video installation: ‘Australia Is…’. Receiving offers, she went to live in Paris for 16
years, where she co-founded, with French artist Dominik Barbier, an art-and-broadcast post-production house called Fearless Studios. Having an in-house broadcast facility enabled Vogan
to go on to create a vast oeuvre of award-winning films, installations, and
live events for a French and International audience.
Within the context of her years at Fearless, Vogan produced and collaborated with many other
artists, writers, filmmakers, composers and choreographers; such as Alain
Renais, Pierre Schaeffer, Moebius, Julia Kristeva, Terry
Gilliam, Robert Longo and Orlan. In 1992, Vogan and Barbier began a 3-year collaboration with the
German playwright, Heiner Muller, for the making of the film ‘I was Hamlet’ (1993); and subsequently, for a large-scale stage
production of Muller’s play: ‘HAMLET MACHINE’, where Muller was to direct the actors. The 13-screen event, with 4
stages and a mostly live musical score, took 7 years to create, and was
performed - posthumously for Muller - in Amsterdam, Lyon and Marseille over
2002 and 2003.
Vogan began her academic career in 1989, tutoring at the University
of Paris VIII, and was a lecturer at
the European School of Visual Arts for 5 years prior to returning to Australia in 2003. Other European
institutions that have welcomed her creative, hands-on variety of teaching
include the Ecole du Frenois in
Lille, and the Kunsthochschule in
Cologne.
Among Vogan’s numerous awards to date: the 1993 Berlin Videofest
award for the film ‘METHUSELAH’; both the Video Leggere Grand Prix of Palermo, and the Videokunstpreis in 1997 for ‘THE SYNCHRONIZER’; the Amnesty
International Freedom Art Award (Critic’s
Choice) in 2006 for the
installation ‘Menu, Title, Return’; and in 2010, a Platinum
Auddy award for her song “PIRATE OF THE GOLDEN HEART”
Back in Australia, Cathy Vogan has worked harder and produced more art
and music than ever. She taught at the Australian Film, TV and Radio School for 4 years, and lectured in digital media at the UNSW
COFA for 2 years, while studying MAYA 3D
animation, Shake Compositing, and Logic Studio (audio engineering), to assist
in the driving of her “one-woman creative team” - which has hardly slept for 7 years... She then got back into
broadcast, acquiring the Apple Certified Trainer certification to affirm the highly technical and professional aspect of
her practice. Apple Australia were happy to have Vogan as a ‘Support Partner’
in 2007 and 2008, where she performed the role of creative trainer to the ABC
Nationwide network and Disney
Pictures. As a broadcast designer-author, Vogan has
also brought home a number of memorable products, such as the stunning “First
Australians” 7-box DVD edition for the SBS network.
With personal interests gradually drifting back
towards music - this time as a composer as well as a performer - Vogan decided
in 2007 to revive, produce and join the legendary industrial music group:
<SPK>, along with original member, Tone Generator (aka Dominik Guerin). K.Osmosis, the writer and performance artist joined them for
the band’s first release in 25 years: ‘DESPAIR’ - a partly archival DVD with web-links to the new <SPK>’s
ever expanding work-in-flux:
”SPK were sold out by one of their number, who turned the band
into a metal-bothering synth-pop outfit; now he's composing film-scores in
Hollywood, living it large in the belly of the beast. Yum Yum. That SPK are
over. But a new SPK has exploded, with the help of Cathy [Vogan], like dead
stars whose light is brighter than ever.”
ORLANDO HARRISON, Alabama3[“THE SPIRIT SPEAKS”]
The <SPK> site also contains a wealth of
previously unseen relics, including William S. Burrough’s type written notes for The Final Academy, and Vogan’s 1997 film: ‘100 Years of Cruelty’ with Julia Kristeva, on Antonin Artaud and The
Theatre of Cruelty. The ‘DESPAIR’ DVD has remained Tesco Records top-seller for over two years now, and at the label’s
request, ‘CaTV’ (Cathy Vogan)
engaged to continue producing <SPK> material, for a new release in 2010.
In April 2009 however, Sue McCauley and Keith Deverell from Greyspace provided a major diversion... On behalf of the Melbourne
International Film Festival, they invited
Vogan to create a live half-hour show for the event. This became the
multi-media spectacle ‘MIMOSIS’ - a hybrid theatrical presentation of a
story about “mirror neurons and ogres”, which mixes 4-screen video projection
with live action, and pre-recorded sound with live music and vocalizations. In
four months, Vogan composed a 23’ version of the musical score, while filming
and post-producing some 80 minutes of imagery for the piece’s synchronized
4-screen background projection. She also rehearsed for the portrayal of
multiple characters; pre-recording and post-producing their voices – both
male and female, young and old. On July 2009, Vogan was joined onstage at the
Ding Dong Lounge in Melbourne, by the musicians George Washingmachine on violin, Jon Fox on percussion, and Alla Bekker, on accordion. The musicians also took part in the action. Onscreen
actors included K.Osmosis, Void Riot, Hobart Hughes and Mark Rogers.
In January 2010, Vogan released her debut album:
'MIMOSIS LIVE' at Melbourne International Film Festival, and is now in the
process of finalizing a more sizeable DVD entitled 'MIMOSIS – DARK
MATTERS', half of which contains her “darker collaborations” with <SPK>’s
K.OSMOSIS.
M I M O S I S
Live at Melbourne International Film Festival 2009
