David Flanagan created for this exhibition a gorgeous set of black and white photographs that integrate the striking topography that surrounds every part of Canberra with the stark barrenness of developing suburban landscapes. Cleared ground, chain fencing, unoccupied streetscapes give the viewer the picture that has been ever .present in Canberra for over 60 years
Some sample pics below
Big architect practices contribute richly to societies. They create wonderful spaces in which we live and work and they contribute richly to the visual amenity of our towns and cities. This exhibition was created by John Wardle Architects to show what their contribution consists of. They have invited 12 photographers to visit their projects and take a photograph that shows their take on the building.
The exhibition has very large photos and a set of smaller ones that reveal the projects from which the photos were taken.The images are beautiful and the take of those buildings through the images are fascinating.
Below is a web page from when the exhibition was on in Melbourne
http://www.johnwardlearchitects.com/projects/project/104-coincidences-exhibition
There are some snaps below of our visit,
The blurb for this show on the MCA website.reads:
Telling Tales: Excursions in Narrative Form explores the varied, inventive approaches taken by leading Australian and international artists to narrative form. Using diverse materials including light, fog and hand-typed text, their works pick apart conventional story-telling approaches to reconsider ideas around structure, duration, repetition and fragmentation.
Breaking away from a traditional linear format, their works instead offer cyclical and open-ended stories, narration through non-verbal communication or silence, and mysterious, incomplete narratives constructed through fragments and clues. Questions around authorship, truth and fiction emerge through some artists’ works whilst others embrace oral histories and live durational events, including shadow puppetry and opera, to convey their stories.
The items on display are remarkable in the range of ways in which they engage narrative and text. There is a remarkable of set of Indonesian shadow puppets. There are villages with landscapes made from piled up letters. There are poems from cut and pasted text. There are maps on which journeys are drawn out to show where the traveler went. There are delightful paintings made using coffee instead of paint.
Some sample pics are below.
Often I walk towards a gallery thinking “What on earth is this going to be about?” If I have done no pre-reading and am not familiar with the topic or artist that is the best I can do. Approaching the Drill Hall Gallery in the rain today that was exactly what was going on in my head.
What a powerful surprise awaited me.A colour and sound explosion in vital and energetic forms is in that building right now.These artists were intrigued with the possibility of representing sound visually. Some screen savers on early computers tried that and must have been influenced by these artists.
At heart this exhibition straddles two sets of artists past and contemporary that use painting, film, light and music To me the star of the show is Ludwig Hirschfield Mack. There is lots of his work and it is exciting, colourful and playfully musical. Of the modern group Cathy Blanchflower’s marvelous musical looking large flowing works are a delight. John Aslanidis has other great interwoven images that cry out a musical background.
Gallery Three has a wonderful video musical creation on multiple screens that are immersive and invigorating to sit amongst. It has been created by an audio-visual performance group called Botborg. The performance is called Neural Luminance Amplifier.
Below are a few pictures and the hand out. I was surprised by how exciting I found the art on the wall and all the other forms of representing music visually.
When you approach an exhibition titled like this it is done with trepidation however it turned out to be lots of fun. One was a set of white helmets with sound, sitting ethereally on a photo light table, another was a set of blue teapots on upended blue flowerpots accompanied by a flatscreen video and the other one was a video of a woman performing yoga practices. The fun one to me was the collection of half a dozen people standing in a line using blue teapots to perform the old yoga practice of nasal irrigation. They looked like they were keeping a straight face but it was fun to watch.
The fourth element of this was an amazing cloak created from Possum skins by Carol McGregor. It tells some amazing stories on the non fur side and give the vibe of being a remarkable device to keep one warm and comfortable.
There some pics below and the gallery sheet:
stephenrrandall 