Cultures @ Brood Box

Wandering around the laneways west of Elizabeth St. has not been a regular feature of my exploration of Melbourne’s art galleries and street art. After all most of the art galleries are east of Elizabeth St. along Flinders Lane as are most of the laneways containing street art, or so I thought.

I was looking for Brood Box, a new gallery on Rankins Lane, “off Lt Bourke Street between Queen and Elizabeth Streets”, which narrowed it down to a couple of laneways. At first I thought that Brood Box, might have been a renamed Mahoneys Gallery, but I found that Mahoneys had become a framing service in the corner of another restaurant that fill these laneways. A strange combination – the meal was so good that I think I’ll have it framed.

There are other galleries and art dealers in the area but most are by appointment only. In Warburton Lane I saw there is a new gallery space but again by appointment only.

On my walk I also saw a lot of street art, paste-ups by Miso and others, aerosol art by the Everfresh crew and others, and lots of street art sculpture. (See my entry on Street Art Sculpture.)

Rankins Lane has enough street art to draw attention to it. Brood Box is a big space with a trailer parked inside selling coffee and cakes, combining an art gallery with a coffee shop. The coffee-trailer has been painted by the ubiquitous Drew Funk. There are tables and chairs but also enough wall space for a contemporary art gallery. I was looking for Brood Box because Joseph Flynn was exhibiting. I had interviewed Joe for my entry on Fine Art Education and I wanted to see how his career was progressing with this exhibition.

Joseph Flynn’s exhibition, “Cultures” is two series of drawings on large sheets of paper. I found my self steeping back across the laneway and looking through the entrance of Brood Box to get far enough back to taken in one of the drawings as a drawing of a face. Up close the intensity of the lines that form the pictures look like circuit diagrams, cultures of bacteria or star-maps. There are many star and psychedelic references in the images and titles of this main series of drawings. The second series of drawings are more colourful with outline drawings of faces overlayed on top of one another. Flynn shows a great deal of confidence and skill in the execution of these large images.

I saw a few other exhibitions on my walk around the city but Cultures at Brood Box was the best that I saw that day.

Party @ Blender

They came together on a hot, humid November evening in Melbourne. There were young emerging artist – “aren’t that one of those twins that was on the ABC doco?”  There restless drunks clutching brown paper bags of take-away alcohol or sharing the silver plastic bag guts of a cask of wine; the beer had run out before I got there and the only thing that the very short barman was serving glasses of wine with every $2 donation to the gallery. They were no longer celebrating an exhibition opening but surviving another year in Melbourne’s art world.

There was an exhibition opening earlier in the night at Michael Koro Gallery: “Surface”, an exhibition about the painted surface. Only a few people were still in the gallery and most of those were queuing at the bar. Stephen Giblett was showing two paintings exploring the transition where the representational becomes abstract, as in his painting of paint on a painter’s overalls. He said that he was trying to be less tightly controlled with his brushwork with these paintings. Dan Sibley’s paintings of burning cars are very controlled; using a technique that appeared like Aboriginal dot painting or pointillism. Melbourne street artist, Frederick Fowler (aka NUROC) was exhibiting paintings of spontaneous aerosol single line drawings that filled the surface in his personal style. And, outside in the street, there were cowboys moving on the “Melbourne Propaganda Window”, two digital projectors on the papered upstairs windows of Michael Koro Gallery.

There were lots of exhibition openings on last Friday night in Melbourne. Outside the Yarra Sculpture Gallery there were lots of guys with mohawks and I could see another opening going on through the window of Per Square Metre as I passed by. I couldn’t go to them as I had other business to attend to; earlier in the evening I was at the Melbourne Stencil Festival AGM. I was elected secretary and the rest of the team that ran this years festival were all formally elected to run next year’s festival. I won’t bore you with any details of the meeting; we were trying not to bore ourselves and got through everything in under an hour.

When I arrive people’s attention had shifted to the studios and the alley that runs alongside Michael Koro Gallery and Blender Studios. Most of the studios had a few works on exhibition for the night. HaHa was sitting around in his studio upstairs with conspiracy theory videos running on the TV but no one was watching. A post-graduate social-anthropology student was trying to get 500 responses to a survey about attitudes to graffiti. A very quite techno music duo was playing with a singer wearing a showgirl style black costume with tassels made of garbage bag plastic. I asked Drew Funk what he was going to do now that he has painted the walls of so many bars, cafes and alleys in Melbourne. He told me is moving to Sydney.

It was yet another time that I had left my camera at home – every time I do I miss photo opportunities. The truth is that I still haven’t adjusted to the demand that a blogger is also a photojournalist. Not that I even had my notebook on this occasion, just a backpack full of stencil festival files. So this cannot be taken as an accurate record, it is just my distorted memory.

Graduate Exhibition @ VCA

The VCA School of Art Graduate Exhibition 2009 is huge. Space after space filled with art: video installations, sculpture, paintings, drawings, printmaking, installations and things that defied classification, but were called “spatial practice” on the invite. If you are going to see this exhibition, and it is worth seeing, then give yourself over an hour to see it all. It is at the Margaret Lawrence Gallery (named after the Margaret Lawrence Bequest who supported the exhibition); which is all of the studio and workshop spaces at the VCA turned into a gallery.

The entrance is at 40 Dodds St., Southbank, it looked like there was a cue to get in when I arrived shortly after 6pm. It must have been the biggest thing happening in Melbourne’s art scene on that a mild Monday night. There were two long bars in the courtyard with a DJ and hundreds of people. Free wine or buy Mountain Goat beer (a strange kind of sponsorship). Young men with haircuts from 80s new wave bands, fashionably dressed young women, the artists, their parents, their friends, etc. There were thousands of people at the opening doing the gallery shuffle and demonstrating their “spatial practice” by not bumping into people after a few glasses of free wine.

Carmen Reid had sent me an invite to the exhibition (I wrote about her June exhibition at Brunswick Arts ) and I was pleased that I could find her exhibits. Her latest works continue to be enjoyable, the accordion doors “(Fidget) Neither Here Nor There” is like Looney Toons architecture made real. Unfortunately I did not get to talk to Carmen – I think that she was cleaning up broken bits of glass from her work “Limbo” that had been damaged by crowds of people.

Seeing the opening was like stumbling into an art fair, overpowering and diluted at the same time. It was hard to take in all the art because:

a)     there were so many people at the opening

b)    there were so many works of art (the invitation said over 1,000 works and I believe it).

c)     there were so much variety of quality art

The list of “School of Art Awards” ran to two sheets of paper – not that there was any information about the various awards beside the award-winning work.

All the current contemporary art moves are on show, the heat from lights, video projectors, art stirring up dust, plants trying to survive an art installation and visual puns from desperate art students. Although there is likely to be one or two very successful artists amongst this year’s graduating class. This doesn’t mean that they are doing great work now or that all the work in this exhibition is great. Much of the art is going down the plughole. Clare Scalan was painting studio plugholes prognosticating a future for so much paint and artist’s careers. I overheard someone in the crowd saying: “90% of video artists are rubbish.” It is probably true of all the arts graduates.

Still there is plenty of art to enjoy at this exhibition; I liked Graham Brindly’s sculptures. They are elegant, they are like physics experiments and drawing in 3 dimensions. In Brindly’s “Gravities” a plumb bob hangs over a circular pile of black sand.

Ricky Swallow @ NGV

I liked Ricky Swallow’s art from the first exhibition that I saw. It was one of Ricky Swallow’s first solo exhibitions: “The Lighter Side of the Darkside” at Grey Area Art Space in 1998 the year after he graduated from the VCA. The exhibition was very funny. It combined record players, themes of space exploration and evolution with plasticine models the put a Darth Vader helmet on a Planet of the Apes face. I was not surprised that he went on to have a stellar career.

I was even more impressed when I saw his actual sized carving of whole table with a still life with seafood: Killing Time (2003-4). This work refers to history of still life painting and the common theme of death that Swallow frequently uses. The art history references along with the beauty of the carved wood make Killing Time a masterpiece.

So I was looking forward to Ricky Swallow’s exhibition “The Bricoleur” at the NGV Fed Square but when I saw it I was under-whelmed. There was so little on exhibition that I felt as if I’d missed something. Two sparsely hung galleries with mostly recent work; there was none of his older works that used record players. The two series of his watercolour paintings in the faux naïve style did nothing for me. They appeared to be a cruder version of Elizabeth Peyton’s paintings of British celebrities applied to Californian rock icons.

There are beautiful and fun works in the exhibition. The “bricoleur: is a tinkerer, a bodger, a modifier of found objects and this is a good description of Swallow’s diverse approaches to finding subjects and making art. The carvings of ephemeral objects like crumpled paper in hardwood, Fig 1 (2008). The combination of barnacles on balloons echoed in casts of archery targets, the arrow holes look like barnacles. It is playful and fun, even when dealing with the theme of death.

Swallow’s art has courted the attention of two both sub-cultures: goth (with all the skeletons and other references to death) and hippy. I think that the hippy side has dominated. The influence of California was evident in the movie themes that Swallow used at the start but after he moved there it is much stronger. This is not just in the paintings of Californian rock icons, but the increasing play superficial aesthetics like kitsch, corny or sentimentalism.

Much of Swallow’s work questions the status of woodcarving as fine art. If kitsch is the inappropriate translation of a work of art to another media, like a Mona Lisa beach-towel, a Clement Greenberg argues in his seminal essay on kitsch. The question that Swallow’s work raises is woodcarving an appropriate media and what is an appropriate subject to carve? Woodcarving is often a kitsch or corny art technique with its folk craft traditions. And carving the Woodstock logo of a bird perched on a guitar neck, as Swallow has done, is definitely corny if not kitsch.

See also Artkitiques blog entry On Ricky Swallow.

Galleries & Museums

Modern and contemporary art is often aesthetically dependent on gallery spaces; the gallery or museum architecturally and aesthetically frames the work art. Despite the emergence of site-specific works, many works of contemporary art depend on the art gallery setting to give them meaning even existence. Modern art was also dependent on gallery spaces; it was the modern world that created the art gallery, the art museum and the contemporary art museum. The mode of exhibiting art in white walled cubes may appear to be natural and necessary whereas it is arbitrary and only sufficient.

Given that the art gallery/museum has been the prime location for art it is surprising that there has been very little written about the aesthetic impact and other effects of art galleries and museums. Paul Mattick, Jr. of Adelphi University notes this in his entry on museums in A Companion to Aesthetics (Blackwell, 1992); adding that “a quick survey of the British Journal of Aesthetics and the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism turns up not a single article devoted to the subject.” (p.297) Mattick did say “a quick survey”; my research was better, because I found two articles in the first volume of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism in 1941 (Ananda K. Coomaraswamy “Why Exhibit Works of Art” and John D. Forbes “The Art Museum and the American Scene”). Neither of these articles is particularly insightful and both conclude that there is an educational function to exhibition. Mattick’s entry in A Companion to Aesthetics is possibly the best article written on the subject; I wish that A Companion to Aesthetics had been published when I was writing my thesis it would have made my life a lot easier.

Mattick traces the history of the art museum from the proto-art galleries of European royalty designed to be impressive displays of power and wealth. To the first post-French revolution art museums that removed the religious, political and moral function of art organizing them and, in that process, expanding the categories of art to include, industrial and non-European arts.

Although the neo-classical architecture has mostly disappeared art museums haven’t changed their function from that of the proto-art gallery, a display of the state’s wealth and power. As displays of power political allegiances are on display in major art museums where the international collection will reflect the countries geo-political position. Those countries firmly in the American camp following the American version of art history in their collections, the Europeans having a slightly different version of art history and post-colonial countries another version.

And if articles about the aesthetic impact of art museums are rare, articles about art galleries are non-existent. This is why I pay particular attention to current gallery practices and to describing art galleries, counting the number of people working in the gallery, the type of lighting in the gallery, the type of space, etc. in this blog. Gallery practice will change but if nobody pays attention it people will assumed that current practice is natural. I wonder how much longer the white walled gallery will continue to be the norm?

(This blog entry is an edited version of two entries published in my old blog, Culture Critic @ Melbourne. My old blog has since been taken down for reasons beyond my control but I thought that this entry was worth republishing.)

Wanda Gillespie @ Seventh

“The Museum of Lost Worlds presents: Swi Gunting (reconstructing artefacts from the lost island of Tana Swiwi)” must be the longest title for an exhibition that I’ve seen this year – it is on at Seventh Gallery and it is worth seeing.

Swi Gunting are carved and decorated wooden scissor-lifts constructed by the Jatiwangi Arts Factory from Jatiwangi West Java. The craftsmen at the Jatiwangi Arts Factory have produced beautiful carved and painted work. And the wooden scissor-lifts do actually work; they are capable of being cranked up and down with an adapted bicycle chain and sprocket wheel. Since these scissor-lifts are too small and decorative to have a practical use archaeologists would classify them as ceremonial objects and we know that they must be contemporary art.

Wanda Gillespie is the artist behind this spectacle of the Museum of Lost Worlds; her website has images and details of the sculpture on exhibit. For more information about her residency see Creative Journeys.

I like imaginary museums like the Museum of Lost Worlds; I have also seen the Museum of Modern Oddities and the Museum of Soy Sauce Art. The idea of a museum, the older relative of the art gallery, has an aesthetic impact on the art displayed. The artist becomes the curator and gallery director of their imaginary gallery. Unfortunately “The Museum” part doesn’t really work, it didn’t make me believe in a museum, and feels like an excess of words. Some didactic cards, a website, other exhibits or souvenirs from the imaginary museum would have helped make it more complete.

Wanda Gillespie is a Melbourne based-artist who mixes the conceptual and sculptural. I first saw her exhibition “Flying For Dummies and failed attempts” at Blindside in 2006. I thought that it was a good exhibition when I saw it but Swi Gunting is much better. For two years Gillespie was the secretary for Seventh Gallery, an artist run initiative, in part explaining why Seventh Gallery consistently has good exhibitions of quality contemporary art. She was also founding director of Twentybythirty, a miniature gallery, in Melbourne’s CBD.

Triforce Advances @ Gorker

“The triforce advance team promise to deliver a set of new work to help you hyper-teleport to other dimensions. 
As well as a new set of individual new work form each artist there will be a set of unseen collaborative pieces set amongst large treehouse installations.” – Quoted from Ghostpatrol’s email.

They were still washing the glasses from the wine tasting the night before when I visited Gorker on Thursday afternoon. On the black walls of Gorker’s main gallery there were over 60 small images along with three wooden “treehouses”. There was a crash of glass coming from the kitchen. In the white kitchen there were more works.

Triforce Advance are playing their exhibition, “The Neverending Masterquest” like a video game with a “Bonus Level” along with a wine tasting on Wednesday night. The “Bonus Level” is another new set of watercolor collaborations by Acorn, Nior and Ghostpatrol, works by the newly formed “Forest Force collective” (Acorn, Alpha-ray and Ghostpatrol) and a triptych by Sean Wheelan and Ghostpatrol. Collaboration is a very important feature of their creative process, a street art process that Ghostpatrol has successfully brought into the gallery.

Ghostpatrol, Acorn and others spent the last two weeks out in the country collaborating and creating these new works. There is real depth to all of the collaborations in the exhibition. The artists play with each other’s images; the hand-shadow puppets and other images unite the exhibition. I am not familiar with his collaborators but I have been seeing Ghostpatrol’s work on the street for many years. And Ghostpatrol is the uniting force behind both “Triforce Advance” and the “Forest Force collective”.

Like Ghostpatrol, Acorn and Noir are both skilled illustrators. Acorn creates landscapes with techno-savage child inhabitants. And Noir specializes in depicting animals along with geometric forms.  Their individual styles are clear in their collaborations but a shared childhood aesthetic unites their efforts. This not a cute childhood vision but something closer to savagery of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

The “treehouses”, cubby houses, the childhood forts are symbols of the temporary autonomous zones of children. It is this wild-child freedom is the inspiration for Acorn and Ghostpatrol’s aesthetic – Ghostpatrol has named his studio “Mitten Fortress”. The “treehouses” have pitched roofs and are beautifully constructed from old wood and other found material. They contain all the equipment, the collections, the weapons, and the trophies, the drawings needed for life of freedom and art. One of the tree houses contained an animated digital picture of Ghostpatrol’s drawings.

Street Art & Galleries

Every time street art enters the gallery the question is raised about the definition of street art. The Melbourne galleries most associated with street art doesn’t want to use the term “Street Art” because it is a contradictory term for art in a gallery, But it is the term that we are stuck with. Maybe some future art historian will find a better name for the art movement.

When I want to use a word like ‘movement’ I refer to the “Afterword” in Stewart Home The Assault on Culture (Aporia Press & Unpopular Books, London, 1988) “’Movement’ has military connotations and implies a mass of adherent. For something to merit the title ‘movement’ it would seem to require several thousand participants at the very least.” (p.106) Art movements are very rare; Home lists the Sixties Underground (taken as a whole), Punk and Mail Art as the only post war art movements. The rest, Situationalists, CoBrA  Fluxus, etc. are just groups.

Like other movements, street art is, in part, a reaction to previous art movements with a radical change in artistic paradigms. Instead of art dependent on gallery space to make it art, street art is independent of the gallery setting. Walking through W.E. Kennick’s imaginary warehouse of all the objects in the world and trying to pick out the art you may be confused by Duchamp’s readymades but not by the street art. (Kennick, Journal of Philosophy, v.81) Street art is designed to appear as art without the museum, you would know that it is art anywhere.

If you know that street art is art anywhere why is there any doubt about it still being street art in an art gallery. How can one identical image, for example a stencil, be street art when sprayed in the street and not when shown in a gallery? Unless “street art” is merely a geographic description that would also include any art found on the street, (e.g. public sculpture etc.) Although street art is a rejection of the influence of the anesthetizing environment of the contemporary art gallery that dominated so much of late modernism and contemporary art it does not follow that street art ceases to be street art in an art gallery.

Perhaps the question would be better put is it appropriate to show street art in art galleries? But this does not make sense as it would make art galleries only appropriate for a very limited amount of art. For most of human history art was not made for art galleries – Leonardo da Vinci never thought that his paintings would hang in an art gallery because the idea of art galleries had not been invented. Very little art is therefore appropriate for an art gallery, however, currently a lot of art does end up being exhibited in art galleries from sacred art intended for churches and temples to street art intended for the street. However, the contemporary art gallery is the site for displaying and selling art and design as diverse as Amish quilts to street art.

Street art has become a term for a new graphic arts movement that started in the early 1980s and continuing into the 21^st century. It is a calligraphic and figurative art movement that developed on the street. Instead of art that requires no talent, no technique, no skill (aside from theory, publicity and management skills), street art emphasizes illustrative drawing skills and other talents. Instead of art that is dependent on art theory, that was becoming, in Arthur Danto’s terms, philosophy; street art is independent of current art theory (this is not to say that street art is theory free). Street art may be independent of art galleries but that doesn’t mean that they are antithetical.

Juan Ford

I meet Juan Ford in 1999 over several LookSmart staff lunches when he was doing his masters; his then girlfriend was a colleague of mine. Juan Ford is gregarious and we enjoyed talking about art when everyone else was talking about the internet. I saw many of Juan Ford’s exhibitions in Melbourne, the openings were always packed with people. At first these were at artist run or rental spaces and then major art galleries like Dianne Tanzer Gallery in Melbourne and Jan Manton Art in Brisbane.

The first painting of Juan Ford’s that I saw was his 1999 exhibition at TCB art Inc. “The Way It Is”. The exhibition consisted of a single canvas on an easel that faced away from the small gallery’s shopfront window; on the canvas was a view looking out of the gallery from that spot, it was like a Magritte image brought to life.

After that Juan Ford started to exhibit anamorphic images engraved through the paint onto the aluminium support. Anamorphic images are images that are not their own shape because they have been stretched or otherwise distorted. Anamorphic images are an old painting trick for creating a hidden image; most famously know with the distorted skull in Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533) and Salvador Dali continued this optical tradition with a few lithographs in 1972 that have to be viewed in a reflecting cylinder, a bottle of Ponche Caballero, to be precise. Ford’s anamorphic paintings are like The Chemical Bros in paint, distorted images are scratched with a groove cutter across portraits of Juan’s friends in a daring display. And the anamorphic images produced a special kind of audience interaction with the paintings as people stood on the extreme sides of the paintings trying to find the viewing point for the anamorphic image.

Ford’s early paintings were full of darkness and chiaroscuro lighting. He put excitement and drama in figurative painting with excellent painting technique and playing with optical distortions. However, this changed with his 2002 exhibition ‘Clone’ where his images were full of a lot more light and informed by a lot more science, like clones, hybridisation and the environment.

In 2006 I saw an exhibition of Juan Ford at Dudespace in Brunswick. Juan Ford was back from a residency in Rome courtesy of the Australia Council to study severed heads. He thought that these would be the severed heads in the paintings of Caravaggio but instead he found himself painting the broken disfigured marble heads of antiquity, heads that have been broken off statues of Neptune, Venus and Hestia, with their missing noses and other chips.

 

Juan Ford - The Shaman (Image courtesy the artist and Jan Manton Art, Brisbane)

After that Juan Ford started to paint eucalyptus leaves, or their shadows on people’s skin. Images that are obviously Australian landscapes and baked in sunlight. I asked Juan why he wanted to paint obviously Australian images? Juan Ford replied: “I’m not sure there’s an entirely obvious response to that. I did want to tap into the rich history of Australian painting, but in an oblique way that said something about our times. Also I am conscious that a lot of art strives to emulate the ‘international’ aesthetic of the biennale circuit, or that shown in Frieze or e-flux. I really didn’t want that, I don’t find that kind of approach very interesting at all. I often that work with a local flavor has a greater dimension or depth.”

 

In his latest exhibition Juan Ford continues to paint images of Australian flora and to develop the ideas behind them. Bundles of gum leaves or Banksia flowers bound up in electrical cable, cellophane packing wrap or gaffa tape. The encroaching banality of modern hardware materials on the poetic flora is shown in complex but elegant images.

 

Juan Ford - Busted Bouquet (Image courtesy the artist and Jan Manton Art, Brisbane)

Juan Ford wrote about his 2007 exhibition in Queensland that: “The vanitas tradition used the skull to warn the viewer of the work that their soul was forever in danger from their thoughts and acts while alive. Well these are secular versions of that kind of thing, environmentally focused. I want to say that our arrogance can undo us, but life will keep going despite us. We do not own life, and never have – it flows though us, and then moves on. Wanting a 4wd and a huge plasma screen tv is just bullshit; each time this happens we a collective step closer to environmental catastrophe and subsequent annihilation.”

 

Juan Ford - Misunderstanding Everything (Image courtesy the artist and Jan Manton Art, Brisbane)

 

Sydney Rd. Window/Art

“This nugget is a symbol of the dream common to all those who travelled along Sydney Road on their way to the Victorian gold fields.” The bronze plaque reads; unfortunately the bronze plaque look more golden than the pathetic green bronze lump bolted near the entrance to a carpark near Albion Street. The idea of casting a giant ‘nugget of gold’ in bronze is stupid and pointless as this public memorial that is almost hidden from view.

No one travels along Sydney Rd. to the Victorian gold fields now; the highway is a more direct route and the gold rush is history. Sydney Rd. is now a very long shopping strip from Brunswick to Coburg with cafes and restaurants serving food from around the world.

Each year the Moreland City Council and the local traders association has as community art exhibitions in the shop windows. This year it is called Window/Art. I have been in a few of the past exhibitions and seen others because I live in the area. They never really work either as community art exhibitions or as attractions for Sydney Rd shops. The problem is that Sydney Rd. is too long and the shops exhibiting work are spaced too far apart. The general amateur standard of art on exhibition does not attract much of an audience. There is nothing wrong with community art exhibitions but the amateur art on exhibition would be better in a local gallery rather than in a shop window amongst their window display. The gold ribbon frames taped to the shop windows did make the art more clearly identifiable but did look tacky and didn’t always frame the work.

I did not meticulously survey the first part of Window/Art between Victoria St. and Moreland Rd. but have seen it in parts as I went past in the tram or walking along a particular block while shopping. I had my lunch at Tabet’s Bakery for Lebanese pizzas: oregano, sesame seeds and fresh tomatoes and capsicum – a very tasty.

Robert Waghorn - It Ain't Heavy

There are a few stand out pieces on exhibition, including: Ben Howe (who was highly commended in the Emerging Artist Award at Melbourne Stencil Festival), Rachael Miller (another artist who exhibited at the stencil festival), and Robert Waghorn, (whose sculpture I wrote about in Victoria St Mall Coburg) who is exhibiting two painted wooden sculptures in the window of the Edinburgh Castle Hotel. And at Gowns Evening Wear Ri Van Veen raku clay works are certainly in good taste; her “That’s a Wrap” is simple, elegant and effective. Gowns Evening Wear was involved in past window exhibitions and generally makes a good selection. (You would hope that the manager of a shop selling evening wear would have good taste in art, as well as, fashion).

Ri Van Veen - That's a Wrap

However, the quality and quantity of street art along the Upfield railway line and bike path, that runs parallel to Sydney Rd., makes that my preferred local community visual art experience. But that is another story.