A tri-party visit to the NGA

We decided to take Arabella (aka Small Person #1 or SP1) to the National Gallery of Australia today, having heard good things about the kiddies play area that had been created where the shop used to be. Before getting in there I thought this image of the ceiling of the underground car park was quite artistic.
For whatever reason SP1 didn't seen at all keen on it and we moved slightly to the adjacent Ramingining Memorial where she had great fun identifying the various wildlife represented on the log coffins.

We then ducked back into the main foyer where this '73 Rolls Royce Corniche (aka to Arfur Daley at least as a Roller) was looking suitably shiny.  It was used by Reko Rennie to make a road movie!
In the triennial exhibition itself they had a movie, on three screens of the Roller's outback trip.
It was a total hoot!  Excellent music and great imagery.  The Roller wasn't so shiny by this stage.

I find this image very tricky as it seems to have movement, at least when viewed at a large size!
Getting into the main rooms and this work by Ken Thaiday Sr (from the Torres Strait, but as far as I can work out not a close relative of Sam Thaiday of the Brisbane Broncos) was quite impressive.
This one - a joint effort by Thaiday with Jason Christopher - is magnificent
The next was this work by Yvonne Koolmatrie was, quite reasonably, titled Echidna, It looked a bit like a hot-water bottle cover, but the spines would contraindicate a good night's snooze.
This next work titles "Assimilated Warriors" by Karla Dickens was interesting to look at.  It was described as being "mixed media": one of the favourite unhelpful descriptions of which the NGA is so fond.
It would surely be interesting to everyone, and culturally interesting, to know these are emu feathers!
This pooch is titled Black Dog (presumably a reference to depression) by Archie Moore who was born in Toowoomba.  As he is from the Kamilaroi people I'd expect his roots to be a bit further west. The most interest is the media he used: taxidermy dog (tick); shoe polish, leather metal (all tick).  Raven oil  - what the heck??  It seems to be a type of black, oil-based, dye rather than rendered down corvids!
Looking down from the First floor this set of glass raindrops were very interesting.  SP1 suggested they were magic raindrops.  Possibly she was about on the money as the work represents the black rain that fell after the Maralinga nuke tests.

The artist Yohnnie Scarce was born at Woomera so definitely has a right to comment about those tests.  Her statement talks about the bomb turning the ground into glass "so it seemed right I made the work out of glass yams."  Apparently there are 2000 yams and it took NGA staff 3 weeks to install it!

Heading out into the sculpture garden the mist sculpture was going great guns: presumably the high ambient humidity assisted with this.
No Gorillas were harmed in taking these photos.
We then moved into James Turrell's Skyspace "Within Without".   This is a view of the sky from within!
I finish with a couple of shots of the middle of the work, with a bonus SP1, to give a sense of scale.

Another very good outing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are our routes: That map comes from Google Maps (G
Read more

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I recall years ago driving al
Read more

Satin Bowerbird gets ready for Lanigans Ball.

Image
Having some time to spare today I went to check the bower near "Tom Green's Seat" in the Australian National Botanic Gardens.  The bower was well occupied by what I take to be - based on the green plumage and yellow bill - a 5th or 6th year male Satin Bowerbird.  (With all these images, click on them for a bigger - unfortunately not better focused picture.  The shots were taken hand held on full zoom from about 10m distance into a fairly well shaded location.) He was very much engaged in adding to the construction. Then it seemed that another bird called from the bush above.  This led to a whole lot of activity: the most spectacular (and worst imaged) was a flash of the wings: The bird also did a fair bit of hopping around.  Given that it was still immature I called to mind the greatest traditional Irish song of all time: Diarmuid O'Leary and the Bards performing Lanigan's Ball .  This ditty refers to spending "6 long months at Brooks Academy learning
Read more