RONE In Geelong

Ebony and I drove down to Geelong today for the final weekend of the RONE in Geelong exhibition at the Geelong Gallery. This is the first comprehensive showing of RONE's career, fittingly held in his hometown. The exhibition spans from his early stencil work to street art and major installations in abandoned spaces, which feature those haunting portraits of female faces. There are physical samples and photos of his works, along with a few short films showing the creation of different projects and installations.

 

RONE did a few installations within the gallery space itself, two of which were specifically for this exhibition and carried on from the work he did for Empire at Burnham Beeches. Ebony and I were amused to watch people walking around and through the two installations, closely inspecting the aged furniture instead of standing back to see and appreciate the full scale of the work.

The Green Room (Omega Project)

Without Darkness There Is No Light (Dark) (RONE In Geelong)

Without Darkness There Is No Light (Light) (RONE In Geelong)

RONE In Geelong runs until 16 May 2021

NGV Triennial 2020

The NGV Triennial 2020 is currently on across all levels of the NGV International in Melbourne. The exhibition features over 100 artists and designers from all over the world showcasing works in contemporary art, design and architecture based around the four themes of illumination, reflection, conservation and speculation. 

 

I have been to the NGV twice over the past couple months in order to see the entire exhibition - once on the evening of 11 February for Triennial Extra with Mary and Belinda (the day before we went into a short five-day lockdown) and then again today to see the remaining pieces on Levels 2 and 3. There are so many amazing works, but these were my favorites in the exhibition:

Refik Anadol's Quantum Memories is a giant LED screen with real-time digital animation that is impossible to miss as you walk in on the ground floor. It was mesmerising to stand there and watch the changes to the 3D animations.

 

 

Porky Hefer's Plastocene - Marine Mutants from a Disposable World is a very playful room with these giant handmade creatures on the ground and hanging from the ceiling.

 

 

Outside in the garden are these fantastic large-scale stained glass window portraits by the French paste-up street artist JR for his project Homily to Country about the ecological decline of the Darling River system.

In its own room on the ground floor are the tiny hand-carved wood sculptures of different people by Tomoaki Suzuki. Each figure is scaled down to one third of the model's size.

Up on Level 1 is the architectural installation Botanical Pavilion by Kengo Kuma and Geoff Nees. The wooden pieces interlock and are held together by tension and gravity. It was cool to walk around and through the pavilion to admire this intricate work.

On Level 2 is Carnovsky's immersive wallpaper installation Extinctions, which has different insect and animal species printed on it in red, green or blue ink based on their extinction threat level. When different colored lights are projected on the wallpaper you see different parts of the print. It was quite a clever piece.

The NGV Triennial runs until 18 April 2021.

Keith Haring | Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines

Sean and I went to the NGV today for their latest world premiere exhibition Keith Haring | Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines. Haring and Basquiat were both part of the New York City art scene in the 1980s and their works involved social and political commentary using a variety of media including street art, paintings, sculptures and other objects.

This exhibition explored each artist's career and how they intersected with each other through more than 200 artworks and materials from their archives. They both developed their own visual language of signs and symbols in their works. Many of Basquiat's pieces featured a crown, while Haring's common motif was the crawling baby. Both artists were friends, and occasionally collaborated and referenced each other in their work.

Keith Haring | Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines is on at the NGV until 13 April 2020.

Rone- Empire

I was fortunate enough to spend my Easter afternoon in the Dandenong Ranges to check out the latest exhibition by Rone titled Empire. For this installation he and his collaborators spent a year transforming the deserted Art Deco mansion Burnham Beeches into an immersive multi-sensory experience across the ground floor and upper level rooms.

The rooms were themed around different seasons, with the dusty Art Deco furniture and dried plants making it feel like you were walking through a bygone era. Rone painted his trademark female portraits in each room, this time using actor Lily Sullivan as his muse. The whole exhibition was so inspiring as you wandered through and experienced the beautiful rooms. I hope that when the building is turned into a luxury hotel that it retains the majority of its Art Deco charm.

Here's the trailer for the exhibition:

RONE EMPIRE - 4K full edit from Common State on Vimeo.

Mclean Stephenson and Alexander Gow Photography Exhibition

Tonight Mary, Belinda and I attended the opening of a photography exhibition by Sydney-based photographer Mclean Stephenson and Melbourne Oh Mercy frontman Alexander Gow at Memphis Projects in Abbotsford.

Contained in one large room, it was interesting to observe the contrasting styles of their photographs in the exhibition. While Alex's photos were mainly black and white portraits of friends and fellow musicians, Mclean's photos were a more abstract mix of people and landscapes. There was a nice turn out for the opening which included many of the subjects in Alex's photos, as well as Henry Wagons, who played a part in the black eye Alex was sporting from a recent a game of squash.

The exhibition runs from 22-23 February 2019, or you can check out their works online on their sites.

MoMA At NGV: 130 Years Of Modern And Contemporary Art

This year's Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition is MoMA at NGV: 130 Years of Modern and Contemporary Art. It features over 200 works from The Museum of Modern Art, New York grouped into eight chronologically themed rooms.

Works from many of the world's best known artists are featured in the exhibition. My favorites included the works from the Bauhaus and Pop Art movements, and the paintings by abstract expressionists. If you have visited modern art museums overseas you will have probably seen examples of many of these artists' works. For those who haven't been able to travel though, this exhibition is a great opportunity to see key works by many of the great artists in one place.

MoMA at NGV: 130 Years of Modern and Contemporary Art runs until 7 October 2018.

Biennale Of Sydney- Cockatoo Island

The 21st Biennale of Sydney is currently occurring across multiple sites in Sydney. The theme SUPERPOSTION: Equilibrium & Engagement gives attendees a way to view these pieces and how they reflect current issues in the world. Mary and I took a ferry out to Cockatoo Island today, which is one of the locations for the Biennale. Cockatoo Island is a UNESCO World Heritage listed site that was a former convict prison in the 1800s and then a naval shipyard until its closure in 1991.

Artworks were spread across different precincts on the island. Our first stop was the Industrial Precinct, which contained a few of my favorite works. Austrian artist Martin Walde's piece Timeline explores the passing of time, with a sheet of paper being shot out from a printer up in the rafters every six minutes containing a calendar date that started with the opening of the exhibition and ending in 2071. Each paper floats onto the floor, and some of them have drawings or writing from the artist in addition to the printed date.

The focus of the pieces by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei at Cockatoo Island is refugees. Law of the Journey is a 60-metre long raft filled with people that is made out of black rubber. There is also wallpaper made of photos taken while he was filming the documentary Human Flow, as well as four different video works that were made in the past couple years to focus on the refugee crisis.

Scottish artist Anya Gallaccio's piece Beautiful Minds uses a programmed 3D printer loaded with clay to recreate the sedimentary rock formations of Devil's Tower, also known as Bear Lodge Butte in Wyoming.

Thai artist Mit Jai Inn has a few large scale installations with Planes (Hover, Erupt, Erode) which involves the use of paint in different forms.

In the Ship Design Precinct were two interesting video installations. Lebanese-Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi's audio-visual piece Bring The Silence depicts video on five different screens of people offering their respects to the Sufi saint Muhammad Nizamuddin Auliya at a sacred burial site. The floor of the room was covered in rugs and the scent of rosewater filled the air.

American artist Suzanne Lacy's multi-part audio-visual installation The Circle and the Square is the culmination of the two-year project Shapes of Water - Sounds of Hope in the town of Pendle, Lancashire. Residents came together in a closed down textile mill to sing choral music and do Sufi chanting. The sound of the choir singing rounds filled the room, and there were also individual interviews with local residents that you could listen to.

The Biennale of Sydney is on for a couple more weeks, closing on Monday, 11 June 2018.

NGV Triennial

The NGV Triennial is an international exhibition of over 100 contemporary artists and designers from 32 countries that opened in mid-December 2017. It showcases works in different media across cultures, scales, geographies and perspectives throughout all four levels of the NGV International.

Ebony and I went this morning to check out the exhibition before it got too crowded. These were my main highlights out of the many different pieces we saw. On the ground floor was the large sculpture installation Eternity-Buddha in Nirvana.... by Chinese artist Xu Zhen, which combined replicas of Buddhist and Greco-Roman, Renaissance and Neoclassical sculptures.

American artist Pae White's (Untitled) installation used paint and acrylic cord in different colors to create three-dimensional shapes that ran across the room and from the floor to the ceiling. As you moved around the space you got a different perspective on each piece. The room was slightly disorienting and I worried that I might accidentally bump into one of the pieces.

Another cool and interactive room was the immersive digital installation Moving creates vortices and vortices create movement by the Japanese art collective teamLab. As people moved around the room sensors created a continuum of digital particles on the floor. Therefore, the faster you moved, the stronger the vortex or flow became.

One of the most popular pieces in the exhibition is Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama's Flower obsession. Created as a little apartment, each attendee is given a red flower sticker to place anywhere in the various rooms as you walk through. Over time, all the surfaces will become covered in red flowers.

Upstairs on Level 1 is one of the most creative fashion collections I've had the pleasure of seeing in person. Chinese fashion designer Guo Pei's spring-summer 2017 couture collection Legend was inspired by the Cathedral of Saint Gall in Switzerland. The pieces are ornate and beautiful, and you can also watch footage of the fashion show to see how the garments move.

One of the most confronting works in the Triennial is Australian artist Ron Mueck's Mass, which is located on Level 2 within the historical collection galleries. The piece is comprised of 100 large-scale sculptures of human skulls that are mainly piled up in one half of the room. It reminds you of the Paris catacombs as well as genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda and other places.

The NGV Triennial is free and runs until 15 April 2018. Definitely make an effort to check it out if you are in Melbourne.

SFMOMA

I took the Golden Gate Ferry into San Francisco today to explore some of the latest exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). My first stop was the retrospective of photographer Walker Evans work. It contained 300 prints and around 100 other objects spanning the Great Depression and postwar period which documented everyday American life in the twentieth century. The exhibition runs until 4 February 2018.

Robert Rauschenberg: Erasing the Rules contains more that 150 of his artworks from throughout his career. He often collaborated with other artists and combined multiple disciplines and media within his work while commentating on various cultural and social issues of the time. The exhibition runs on Floor 4 through 25 March 2018.

Next I checked out Louis Bourgeois Spiders. I have seen some of her spider sculptures in the past, and this exhibition featured spiders in a range of different sizes and materials. It's located in the sculpture gallery on Floor 5 and runs until 4 September 2018.

The final exhibition I saw (and heard) was Soundtracks, which featured works from different artists across the entire museum, but mainly spanned Floor 7. This large-scale exhibition focused on the role of sound in contemporary art and how it relates to space. There were so many different types of works, from sculptures to immersive installations to recorded performances. It was really interesting to walk around and experience the different soundscapes of each piece. If you would like to check it out get in quick as Soundtracks finishes on 1 January 2018.