INVURT

The show runs til the 25th of September so if you didn’t make the opening night there is still plenty of time to get down and get immersed!

Check out James Dodds website and the Lindberg Gallery website for more info.

“It is all happening between the 4th of August and the 3rd of November at Name This Bar on Oxford Street”. 

Whenever we hear of something artistic that Tiger is involved in our curiosity gets piqued, the last Tiger event Invurt attended we had a freaking blast – and the fact that this is an ongoing alliance of sorts with ‘Name this bar’ makes us all the more excited/ Invurt welcomes ‘Art battles showcase – Choose your own weapon’ to the live art scene!

“This year’s Art Battles will comprise of seven different bi-weekly themes, surprise guest judges and a public critique on each battle.
The series will run 4 heats with 2 semi-finals with the final showdown to culminate in a huge grand finale”.

If your interested in getting involved with other uber cool creatives, check out the full details of this competition/event via the Art Battles website and if you just want to get amongst it all, head down to Name this bar on Oxford Street. 

Its all judged by the public, so if you want to push yourself that little bit further, then step outside your comfort zone and get to it – bring it on!

Who: Australian artist community, Name this bar in conjunction with Tiger Beer
What: Art battles – Choose your own weapons
Where: ‘Name this Bar’ 107 Oxford Street, Darlinghurst, NSW
When: The whole shebang started on the 4th of August, but it’ll run until the 3rd November – so plenty of time to check it all out, and, if you’re game, be involved!

Check out the Art Battles website and Name this bar, also check out the facebook events – thats a search, but it’ll get you the list of everything coming!

The other night we were able to briefly get down to the opening of the Midsummas Festival arts program – a part of which included Toy To The World. Such a cool show in general, and the TTTW portion was especially great. What was surprising, was just how many people had done Popobe bears for the charity event – over 75 of the beasties – and there were some amazing customisations.

Basically, a whole bunch of artists got a whole bunch of bears, and customised them so that they could be sold for charity. There were also some prizes involved – with Mark Lyons in 1st place, Dean Swanton in 2nd, and Kaitlin Beckett in 3rd – congrats to all, it must have been a hard job selecting them, we would have been stumped to pick only three!  The pics below dont do them great justice, but if you like any of these get down to 45 Downstairs and check it out – there is a silent auction for all of them, so just put down which one you’re interested, how much you’d pay for it, and it goes in to the draw – and some of these really deserve a good amount for the amount of time spent on their creation alone! All of those funds will then be donated to the AIDS Council, so yeah – go and do it!

Yeah, my photography skills still suck! There was also a lot of other great art down in the other exhibitions that formed a part of the show, oh – especially the foetus shaped hand bags …

(Please … bear … (okay, that was bad) with us, whilst we iron out all the bit and pieces for our new image system – there may be some fine tuning to be done!)

Things are fairly light on this week as I’m having a pretty heavy week at work – but theres always time for a few articles here and there – like this one! The other week we had news of a show, Nice Piece Of Art, from Jessicat and PT up in Sydney – we weren’t able to attend ourselves, so Jessicat kindly sent through a few pics from the opening.

Lots of crazy cool girls up on the walls – heres a couple of highlights ..

Check out the rest of the pics from PT and Jessi cat’s exhibition, Nice Piece Of Art, on our facebook page.

In my totally hung over state and after a busy afternoon (I may have possibly had one too many the night before whilst watching my friends band the Freak Technique), I headed down on the tram on Sunday evening to check out the inaugural Melbourne Tiger Translate event.

So I decided to put a few of my thoughts down into a small review – again, excuse my point and shoot pics – I’m not exactly what you’d call the worlds best photographer haha … enjoy …

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I’m totally art-ed out from the past week, with way too much happening! I did manage to get to a few openings and events though, namely the A3 Small Art show, Toy To The World and the Cardbordia show that I was part of with a bunch of other cool crew …  but I’m also looking forward to seeing the other shows whose openings I missed on Friday over the next few days – namely Kami & Sasu, about:blank and Scottie “Bonsai” Neoh’s one at Fed Square …

Anyways, I got a few shots along the way (I’m a crappy photographer so don’t hold it against me if they aren’t that shit-hot =P, so I figured I’d do a couple mini-reviews and post up a few of them up …

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I made my way down to help out with the opening of Urban Intervention last Friday night at the Yarra Sculpture Gallery, and was pretty impressed by the whole affair (sure, I’m helping volunteer for the festival so maybe I’m a biased, but fuck it, I like what I like). The curating, by Anna Briers and Kelly Madigan, was excellent, the attendance was fantastic and the whole interactive nature of the show itself was, as Junky Projects mentioned in passing on the night, something different that hasn’t really been seen much of here in Australia, or even elsewhere around the world.

The sculptures in the show were varied, from the political to the ephemeral, there were some great light paintings, a cool walk-through installation off to the side, and it was just generally great seeing this part of street art on display to such a wide cross section of the community – and those at the launch were as varied a group as any I have seen at these events so far.

As I mentioned before, one of the parts of the show was the launch of their interactive Urban Intervention Art Trail map, a very cool trail that leads you through the streets of Collingwoodcool and Fitzroy and covers a bunch of its artistic treasures, some existing and some that were created for the show itself. As its an interactive map, people are encouraged to go through and tag and add their own work to it – so if you have something up on a wall around Melbs, get to it.

Here are a couple of not-so-professional-shots from the opening night …

Melbourne Art @ Culture Critic also has a mention of the show here.

On a side note here – one thing that has impressed me over the last week or so of Sweet Streets has been presence of the Yarra City Council at this, and various other events of the festival (I’m pretty sure it was Cr Geoff Barbour that been representing last Friday night). I am often pretty skeptical on the views of both government and local councils in regards to their approaches to street art – on the one hand there are tough penalties for even carrying a damn spraycan around in a bag, on the other they use street art as an attraction (yada yada yada you’ve heard it all before), and I guess I’m the kind of person that always thinks “Instead of constantly buffing that wall all the time, why not get some artists to come and paint it for a tenth of the cost of constantly painting over it, and a hundred times the coolness factor of a boring blank wall?” – but, that said,  its genuinely great to see a councilor get up and do an opening speech, and actively be a part of the discussion, and looking towards implementing fair and reasonable guidelines and practices in conjunction with the street art community.

Its nice to see them taking a progressive approach that I still dont see in too many other places, apparently its part of that State Wide review thats been going on to assess the cultural value of street art in Victoria, or whatever that all means, so we’ll wait to see what the report comes of all that before commenting on it more.

Anyways, this is a gentle tip of the hat to Yarra City Council for their willingness to actually engage the street art community, and not just write it off as “those fkn vandals,” and to start looking at the work adorning the streets as a significant part of Australias artistic, cultural and creative heritage.

Last night I did the dual mission between Fitzroy and the city to go and check out both the opening of Sweet Streets @ BSG as well as to see my first Secret Wars heat.

Neither disappointed, and I got a couple not so crappy shots from both …

Sweet Streets @ BSG

So much going on with Sweet Streets at the moment! BSG opened their show last night, the Festival Film Night is on tonight with a bunch of new short films on street art, and tomorrow night is the Urban Intervention street art sculpture exhibition and art trail opening at Yarra Sculpture Gallery .. that and all the things happening at the Artists Hub in Collingwood, as well as all the workshops and the many events coming up on the program makes for a busy time.

Anyways, I got to BSG fairly early and moseyed around and checked everything out …

More on our facebook page …

Secret Wars

Wow, damn that was cool. Scale and Itch battled it out last night in the first heat of the Melbourne round of Secret Wars, and it was a great show – Scale just made it past the mark and beat out Itch to go into the next round of qualifiers. I personally wouldn’t have liked to have been the judges, and as it was their votes were equally split between the two and it was left to the crowd cheer-vote to decide.

Great job by both, amazing work – congrats dudes.

All the rest of out photos are up on our facebook page, as per the usual …

Hi all – just a few photos from my own crappy camera and some more awesome ones that the guys at At Large took of my opening last Friday night of my first solo show, Inhabited Times – a pretty full on evening that floored me, so many amazing people and so many wonderful words about my work. I put a lot of effort into it, and I’m still overwhelmed by all the positive feedback I received.

Massive thankyou to everyone that helped me get it all organised, the guys at At Large gallery, and those all who were able to make it down to support me (on the night and over the weekend), with what turned into an epic evening that left me speechless and humbled.

Lots more photos on the At Large website, and I’ll also be putting a whole bunch of photos of all the pieces up on my blog after the show – I think the count was around 44 pieces at the end of it, not including some hand made toys and some amazing custom dresses.

To those that weren’t able to make the opening (it was a busy night all round, I even missed the EF book launch, and Worldcon!), the show will run until September 16th at the At Large Gallery (208 High Street, Northcote) and I’d love it if could make it down for a look and let me know what you think – they are open 11-6pm Wednesday to Saturday, and 12-6pm on Sundays (I’ll also be in the gallery Sunday afternoon if you wanna stop by and say hi).

Again, sorry for the lack of updates and the slightly more personal addition of this post! Blog will now go back to post-opening, post-creative crazytown, regular programming .. some great interviews coming up, so stay tuned!

Its a little slow on the news front the past week, I’m looking down the barrel of an impending deadline for my first solo show, and winter appears to force habitual hibernation here and there – but there are still some pretty cool things happening around the city, even so, and these cold rainy days aren’t stopping the artists of the ‘burn from getting shit done.

ADi and Craig Poore have their exhibition Beautiful Strange on at At Large gallery at the moment, and though I was (fuxn) ill and missed the opening, ADi posted up some photos of the opening in his blog. Cant wait to get out to the gallery during the week and check out both of their works, as should all of you.

I made it down to the opening of Go Font Yourself 5 at No Vacancy as well, and once again I was impressed by the quality of this rounds offerings – some amazing prints to be had at really reasonable prices, and its always a pleasure to check out these shows and see the cool ways people are interpreting the various various fonts in their works. Twoone had some live print making going on, and it was fun to see him at work. Go check this out whilst its still running!

The weekend, however, saw a different kind of event – I happened to come across an invitation to something called Wrong Town, I had pretty much no other information about it, apart from the names of a few of the artists and a time and place (I’ve since found this article with a lot more info) -  and with the meeting place only a few  blocks from my house, I headed down on a sunny Saturday afternoon to Rockerly Gardens in South Yarra to check it out.

Getting there, a substantial crowd had already formed – and to my surprise (not really knowing what was actually going on) I estimated there were a hundred or so people gathered, at the least. After a little while, the crowd started moving on some unseen cue, and we walked up the road, then down into a typical suburban street. A short walk into inner city suburbia, and  a gate painted with a dripping, red “Enter at your own risk” was the only giveaway as to what lay beyond.

Sidling up to the house, I was both baffled and excited – we had to duck down under some windows to enter the house, the front door being closed – and the crowd of people made it a little difficult to really get in at first, but walking in I suddenly figured out what was going on – yep – Wrong Town.

It seems that the house we’d come to, was marked for demolition – the owners had kindly let a group of artists come in and do their thing to it before they knocked it down – and, that they did. The transformation was pretty damn cool, as evidenced by my once again remarkable (not) photo skills -  but you get a good idea as to what was going on … heres a short rundown, apologies for not being more detailed, there was a lot to see, and I also get the feeling that I missed some stuff here and there … apologies in advance for any mistakes or omissions I make in the following ..

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