Interview with Pony Express

Introducing Pony Express

Antidisciplinary art duo Pony Express (Loren Kronemyer and Ian Sinclair) lampoon soft and hard power structures to create large-scale, world-building projects. At Liveworks, they will present The Queer Woodchop.

Sharpen your conceptual art axeheads, snag a showbag, and barrack on local art stars as they attempt to hold their own Woodchop. Queering C’mon Aussie C’mon values, this immersive contest places Agricultural shows, performance art, pink capitalism, and the ‘original extreme sport’ on the chopping block. Pony Express’ artistic athletes hack away at lumbered binaries in this sly yet sincere subversion of an Aussie sporting spectacle.

"As Pony Express, we are constantly trying to escape the idea of performance. Performance is one tool or strategy, our way of stress-testing ideas live and embodying them fully."
- Ian Sinclair

What can audiences expect from your performance?

A fever-dream Ekka. A big attempt. The Queer Woodchop is our DIY experiment in holding our own comp. We take the rules, heats, tasks, language, and actions of a woodchop, but
reinterpret them through each artist’s conceptual practice, methods, and taste. Traditional
competitive woodchop events are shape-shifted through our artists’ aesthetics and processes to create playful, subversive axe-group routines and art form-shattering solos.

Like many of our works, it’s shaped by the collaborators, subcultures, and communities we’re making for and with. So we don’t really know what to expect until we step into the arena and start training in the next week.

In many ways, woodchopping is not unlike performance art, with its meticulous technique,
abstract rules, exaggerated yet stripped-down showmanship, and reliance on active
spectatorship. There’s an inherent campness and a perceived conservativeness to the contest. We aim to hack away at these lumbered binaries, radicalising the sport towards queered artform status while celebrating its past and present champions.

The Queer Woodchop explores the multiple meanings of “strength”: the cultural, flamboyant, celebratory, and conceptual muscles needed in both art and athletic achievement. But, what we definitely know for sure is we’ll have showbags. Everyone loves a showbag. We’ll bring the subverted Bertie Beetle showbags of your sawdust dreams - littered with intimate delights, miniature testers, and the tools you’ll need to find pleasure in your own woodchop practice.

What is the role of performance in your life?

As Pony Express, we are constantly trying to escape the idea of performance. Performance is one tool or strategy, our way of stress-testing ideas live and embodying them fully.

We’re driven by an ethos of world-building, and performance is useful for crafting intricate
mirror-universes that reflect and refract our own. But we try to ban words like performance or show in our process. Too tacky. Because for us, it’s real.

The Queer Woodchop is our very real and brand-new, artistically rigorous sport. All our works are attempts at modelling scenarios that might have real-world impact, offering some sort of new strategy for surviving the present.

What are you most looking forward to at Liveworks?

Beyond our own arena, we’re excited to be part of a wider ecology of bold artists and Pony Express favourites. Intimate works about living now like Rhiannon Newton’s Long Sentences and Tommy Misa’s Working Class Clown, alongside works that expand liveness like Breathing Archive with Jamie James and Victoria Spence, and I remember what the machine remembers what I remember : 我記得住機器記住我記住的 by Matt Cornell, Critical Path and C-LAB.

Liveworks is always a temporary world of speculative futures, reinterpreted pasts and
questioned presents, and that’s exactly the space we love to inhabit.

Words by Ian Sinclair.