It's unique living in a city where you can paddle your sea kayak over to a big art show. That happened today when Melanie and I crossed the Sydney Harbour to check out the work by over 150 street artist, including Banksy, being exhibited on Cockatoo Island. These are photos of the art.
Much of the street art was exhibited an authentic manner and could be found in and on warehouse buildings. but some works, like these by Banksy, were framed and hanging gallery-style.
Once every two years Sydney becomes the stage for the art extravaganza known as the Sydney Biennale. This years art event will be showing 440 works by 146 artists from around the world. The Biennale will be held at several locations around the city from 12 May until 1 August 2010. The Biennale has been credited with exposing the city as well as Australia to contemporary art from around the world. Wikipedia had a really cool thing to say about the Sydney Biennale on this page.
This year the theme of the Biennale is THE BEAUTY OF DISTANCE: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age. The artistic director of the Biennale is David Elliott who has lots of experienced around the world in the installation and exhibiting of contemporary art. David Elliot also happens to be a writer, curator, broadcaster as well as a museum director and lecturer. The Biennale will host works by hundreds of artist from around the world. Last year the event drew crowds of nearly half a million.
Typically the art for the Biennale is not revealed until the opening day. This year however the center piece for this event, located on the front lawn of The Museum of Contemporary Art near Circular Quay in Sydney, was installed this week. It is a very large sculpture of welded tubular stainless steel titled "Nueron" and created by artist Roxy Paine from New York City. I spent a couple of days shooting photos and watching this sculpture take shape. It is a large sculpture (1100x1070 cm in diameter) and required several days to install. The installation crew included two welders and the studio manager from the Roxy Paine Studio flown in from NYC, an installation expert from the James Cohan Gallery in NYC, and the installation staff from the MCA. This team with the help of a couple of cranes, man lifters, welders and grinders moved "Nueron" into position from two 40 foot shipping containers. The team completed the assembly during one jet lagged all nighter plus two more days. Unfortunately the artist was not able to make it over for the installation. Watching the sculpture go up was a very cool experience. I have followed Roxy's work, especially admiring his Dendroids work, for several years so it was a great experience to see one of his newest works installed in Sydney.
Here are some words about this work that I took from an artist statement posted at the site. The "Nueron" is part of a series of works by Roxy Paine called Dendroids (an example is his exhibit "Maelstrom" on the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art NYC last year). This new work continues his focus on the idea of dendrites and synapses, the means by which information, knowledge and experience are electrically transmitted through the body.
Since this is a photo site I am obliged to give some technical data on this photo. The photo was made before sunrise on the final morning of the installation.
nikon D3s handheld with a 16-35 f4 vr lens the light is from a Elinchrom Quadra with two A heads at full power.
