A Spatial Biography: Seven Extra(Ordinary) Office Buildings Exhibition

An exemplar selection of work by students from the Curtin Fourth Year Master of Architecture program. 

The studio was dedicated to two facets of architectural practice - the development of a complex building on an urban site and the development of the designers own spatial intelligence as someone who is engaged in spatial research for the benefit of society.

Exhibition open from 13th December - 22nd December at Moana Chambers, 7am - 4pm Mon-Fri, 10am - 5pm sat.

Link: A Spatial Biography: Seven Extra(Ordinary) Office Buildings Exhibition

Photo: Jonathon 'Mcfly' Yeo

Go Away and Come Back Exhibition

Go Away and Come Back: an exhibition of architecture, travel, research, experience is currently open upstairs at the Moores Building Contemporary Gallery on Henry Street in Fremantle.

The closing party is this coming Sunday 4-7pm. There will be snacks, drinks, and thought provoking, engaging works to interact with.

Sneak previews and more info: www.facebook.com/GoAwayandComeBack  

Parallel Nippon - what we liked + what we want to visit

CALL OUT FOR PROPOSALS Go Away and Come Back: an exhibition of architecture, travel, research, experience.

 

Image: Detail Opportunistic,

2012. R. Creagh.

Go Away and Come Back:

an exhibition of architecture, travel, research, experience.

What does it mean to return home after focused travels? What meaningful contribution can be made when returning with understandings found elsewhere or between places? Go Away and Come Back: an exhibition of architecture, travel, research, experience spirals around these questions proposing an investigation through the work and travels of established and emerging architects.

Architectural pilgrimages, study trips and grand tours have a significant place in the historical understanding of architectural education. Now, the internet grants access to the other side of the world from a home interior. Is the value of study trips questioned by the proliferation of online architectural media? With the increasing convenience of travel has the status of the grand tour shifted within the education of architects? Has inexpensive digital photography diminished the way experiences are recorded? Given the change in global economics, and a shifting emphasis away from old colonial centres, is there still relevance to the overseas internship?

Go Away and Come Back is a proposed peer reviewed exhibition of research works. The visual enquiries  are invited that draw on exhibitors’ travel documentation and reflection to further understandings of the nexus of architecture, experience, research and travel. In a contemporary world of globalisation and mobility, submissions are invited that challenge assumptions about both travel experiences and architectural research through grounded enquiry and engaging mediums.

 Call for proposals now open.

A maximum single A4 page written expression of interest, including a brief biographic statement, should be received before Monday 24 June, 2013. An additional reference image may be included at the applicants’ discretion. Please email to Robyn Creagh r.creagh@curtin.edu.au or Shannon Lyons  s.lyons@curtin.edu.au

Successful applicants will be invited to attend a series of optional workshops in Perth. As part of the curatorial review and development of the research works, at key points in the lead up to exhibition an interdisciplinary selection of creative practitioners and scholars will provide mentoring and critique. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue of works and scholarly essays.

Exhibition: Reading Public Spaces

Opening Thursday 21 February, Exhibition open until Saturday 2 March

Works by David Attwood, Courtney Babb and Jake Schapper. Robyn Creagh, Shaphan Cox, Thor Kerr, Mace Francis, Kirsten Hudson, Sarah McGann and Robyn Creagh, Joanne Richardson, Annette Seeman, and Lance Ward

Suburban Odyssey

Yesterday KvV and I visited the Shaun Tan exhibition, ‘Suburban Odyssey’ at the Fremantle Arts Centre (runs until July 15).  Having marveled at the illustrations of the picture books, ‘The Rabbits’ and ‘The Arrival’ in a coffee table sort of attention span, I really appreciated seeing the evolution of his works.  The major works are of suburban landscapes, from early pieces of realism and portraiture to suburbia as magic-realism and then the working sketches of his later work illustrations.

So our fascination with suburbia, have we seen it all before?  Not as Tan manages to capture suburbia.  I found this quote from a love-in, online review by The West Australian, "These are serious paintings of Australian suburbia, bringing to life that which is usually pictured as dull and monotonous.  Many Australian artists celebrate the boredom of the suburban landscape, but Tan is able to breathe magic into the streetscapes of Perth".

I would agree with the sentiment but I feel that the best descriptive word would be his ability to capture a ‘benign’ suburbia.  Is this suburbia in its best version? There are no seething, bleak undertones, think Tim Burton’s ‘Edward Scissor Hands’ or David Lynch’s ‘Blue Velvet’, just a perspective that some of it’s implied rules are strange (homogeneity, 9-5, crows).  Whilst BENIGN doesn’t have the charisma of AMAZING, the intellect of DELIGHTFUL or the nous of CLEVER, it is used in its ability to convey a kind, generous, gentle disposition.  The magic realism of his stick figure series of paintings (definitely worth the short trip) promote the idea that alien landscapes (or objects & creatures as seen in his later works) can be both strange and benign, which is surely if you took this idea further a message of tolerance?  Maybe I have run away with that thought, but to see these layered paintings and different techniques; pencil, gauche, acrylics, pastels and layered cardboard, wood, cloth & plaster, was a nice interlude for a Thursday.  

Teaser pictures below.

exhibition intro

working perspective

layered painting

U-Ram Choe: extraordinary, empty

U-Ram Choe, a Korean sculptor who focuses on kinetic works, has a solo exhibition in the John Curtin Gallery, as part of the Perth International Arts Festival.

Urbanus Female on show in the John Curtin Gallery
image: choe u ram website

The show seems, at first, enthralling. The rooms are dark, and sparsely populated with strange mechanical creatures: flowers, fish, 'Aliens' (a la Geiger), dragonflies. These robots move - some constantly, some intermittently, some in groups, pulsing in arrhythmic patterns. Beautifully mechanical, complex and dramatically lit in the dark chambered space, they are astonishing creations. 

There is also a theatrette, showing a making of video, and videos from the original (and more complete, it would seem) show in Tokyo.

Read more >>

City of Perth Library

what: an exhibition of the shortlisted entries for the new city library
when: 8:30 am to 5 pm, all business days till 2 January 2012
where: lobby, Council House, 27 St Georges Terrace

Four schemes are displayed, one from Cox Howlett and Bailey Woodland, one from Donaldson+Warn with Denton Corker Marshall and two from Kerry Hill Architects, including the successful "Round Scheme".

Now and When: Australian Urbanism

Architecture & Culture 302 presentations

there is something different about building 201 today...

coffees and hot chocolates are primed and ready

Read more >>

Portraits of Success

To be a successful, well published Architect one needs to first master the art of being photogenic.

Brook Andrew, The Cell

If anyone is interested but there is a fun exhibition on at PICA I think that people might be interested in visiting. It's just a little fun. I am attaching some photos from when my sister and I took my cousin there and you can find the bio from the PICA website copied below.

Brook Andrew
The Cell
9 July - 21 August 2011
Central Galleries

Commissioned by the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Brook Andrew's The Cell is an immersive installation, featuring a 12.5m x 6m inflatable rectangle that requires the viewer to wear a specially designed costume, before crawling via a tunnel into a striped cell. This is the first time The Cell has been shown in Western Australia.

Working with striking neon installations, powerful photographic studies, prints, sculpture and optical illusions, Andrew challenges cultural and historical perception using text and image to comment on local and global issues regarding race, consumerism and history. Language and traditional designs from Andrew's Wiradjuri heritage are combined with contemporary elements such as optical art patterns, pop art aesthetics, and the declarative strategies of advertising to create compelling and insightful pieces. The inflatable cell draws on such themes concerning cultural identity, colonial experience and consumerism.

In the artist's words "The original idea for The Cell is an extension of my wall pattern installations, where one is immersed in the pattern and experience. You are immediately transformed once you don a costume and enter The Cell. It's like you become an inmate, a cellular astronaut or asylum seeker. Experiences of loss, asylum and genocide, an 'outsider', is turned on its head. The Cell is a conundrum, a monument to such stories, a space for quiet contemplation, disorientation and spectacle."

Please note: during the Little Big Shots Children's Short Film Festival (20-23 July, 1pm), The Cell will operate from 11am to 6pm with a break from 1pm-2pm.

For the rest of the exhibition period the break will be from 2pm -3pm each day.

[co]design studio exhibition

(Click on image for larger view)

Can anyone help gallery sit?
free range is a cosy little gallery perfect for people watching & daydreaming :)
Would love to hear from you! mimi.cho@codesignstudio.com.au