Art in Public Spaces

Art in Public Spaces - Albury Regional Art Gallery
Tea Ceremony, Julie Shiels (2007)
Art in Public Spaces - Albury Regional Art Gallery
light boxes rev 72
dean pebble copy 72
dean st - pub copy 72
olive christ1 copy 72

Albury Regional Gallery
February 9 – March 11 2007

Keen to increase the identity of its Cultural Precinct as the heart of the city, Albury undertook a residential project engaging three artists’ imagination to explore possibilities for artwork within the defined site. Artists Ludwika Ogorzelec, Julie Shiels and Nicole Voevodin-Cash have developed ideas which embrace the concepts of artworks on the site. The three exhibitions present their individual approaches to art in public space.

Tea Ceremony pays homage to the women with strong and capable arms, who have collectively raised unknown sums of money for countless causes  The extra-large teapot is an emblematic object of an urban/rural life.

The artwork reprises the ritual nature of the Australian ‘tea ceremony’. – a phenomenon that has been steadily replaced by the electric urn, the tea bag and the disposable polystyrene mug.

Bordertown captures the competing surfaces that have become part the architectural fabric surrounding Albury’s cultural precinct. Each lightbox  shows a detail of the point where two buildings intersect, capturing layers of decorative history that have been applied to the streetscape.

Most of the buildings are heritage buildings, but at street level their historic features have been erased, replaced by the modernist, utilitarian architecture of commerce.