A for Art, Airmail, Australia ~ A4 letter size ~ A4 Art Exhibition. If you can send a letter airmail to Australia, why not airmail a letter-size artwork for exhibition?

Visual artists who want to exhibit their work internationally are often inhibited by freight costs and regulations. To overcome these obstacles, artists put their work on-line and discover how the Internet overcomes the tyranny of distance and takes them beyond parochial limitations into the global art community. The World Wide Web provides a conduit for true cultural exchange as it offers artists the opportunity to reach a wider audience, view a variety of works by others and receive feedback on their own. Web sites and virtual galleries display images while message boards, news groups and the e-mail provide a forum for discussions on media and methods, theories and ideas.

Inta Goddard and I each have a web presence and both wanted to bring a selection of art out of cyber space into a real place where the local off-line community could view original works of art by members of the wider on-line community. Distance and costs created problems until the idea of A4 ART emerged. We visited web-sites, e-mailed artists around the globe and invited them to participate in an Internet organized art exhibition in Western Australia. We asked them to airmail letter-size original artworks to us, and they did!

A4 ART is an exhibition unique in concept and content. The exhibits presented here reflect a variety of cultures and philosophies, art styles and subject matter, techniques and media, artists' age and career status, all unified by a singularity of size. However the most important common denominator is how in a post September 11th world, where envelopes, airplanes and different cultural practices are suspect, artists around the world have sufficient confidence, generosity of spirit and trust in the unknown to participate in the project. It's comforting to know there is at least one community who happily celebrates cultural differences; the global art community.

The international exhibits in A4 ART offer representation from every continent as they include works by Clara Pechansky from Brazil; Kiki van der Heiden representing Canada & The Netherlands; Friedhelm Brandt, Guido (Jitteman) Rombach, and Gudrun Weerasinghe from Germany; Adam Sofineti from Romania; John Clarke and Rupert de Beer from South Africa; Dennis Cox, Milton Lauenstein, Claude Smith, Shan Wells from U.S.A. and Peter Mitchev representing U.S.A. & Bulgaria; Keith Stanfield from U.K. and Paul Kidd representing U.K. & Antarctica; and Nguyen Thi Kieu Giang from Viet Nam. Thank you all for your positive response and enthusiasm.

These exhibitors are joined by local Australian artists who represent this country's international flavour. Florence Allain (France), Sieglinde Battley (East Prussia), Cedric Baxter (Burma), Inta Goddard (Latvia), Norma MacDonald (Yamatji), Lesley Murray (Koori), Concetta Petrillo (Italy), Deon Schafer (England), Dimity Gregson and Alex Hayes (Australia). Thank you too for eagerly coming on board.

Last but far from least, I'd like to offer a larger then A4 size thank you to Inta for her digital camera expertise and for carrying the larger half of the load, and Bevan Honey for inviting A4 Art into the very real space at Fremantle Arts Centre.

Judith McGrath  (U.S.A.)