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Rubbish Theory

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Wii – Namchuk 225 x 120 x 3 cms – acrylic and flock

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Robbie the Robot and friends 225 x 120 x 3 cms – acrylic and flock

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The 12 windows in Campbell Arcade will be packed with a collection of objects that have been cast from the empty spaces in plastic packaging. Each display window will have a different pattern: patterns of use that reference products that could have been sold in the now defunct department store: computer gear, toys, confection, etc. Other arrangements, mostly crowded, suggest movement and echo the way people pass through the arcade.

Apart from being a mad critique of mass production and the era of the $2 dollar shop. Rubbish Theory asks questions about what objects will survive and become meaningful beyond their looming use by date. How do changing tastes affect the meaning and value of an object? (1) How will this stuff be viewed in twenty years time? Will we laugh about the old technologies and the crap that filled our lives or will some of these objects have a new meanings and significance?

Photos:John Brash

(1) Rubbish Theory – the creation and destruction of meaning by Michael Thompson

RUBBISH THEORY: Julie Shiels
Platform – Degraves Street Subway (Campbell Arcade) Melbourne
EXHIBITION: 1 – 25 September 2009
OPENING: Friday 4 September 6-8pm

Flock

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They flock together in patterns across the wall: a collection of objects cast from the empty spaces left behind in plastic packaging. Sourced from the tool box, the toy box and the domestic environment, the original moulds are the wallpaper of our daily lives – ever present but barely noticed.

Flock is on show at fortyfivedownstairs (45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne) from July 23nd to August 2nd.

Circling the ruin

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Excavating for the basement car park – Collins Street
(near Southern Cross Station), Melbourne
The old foundations will be preserved but what will the good people of Melbourne make of the graffiti the next time it’s dug up?

Looking up #1

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Corner of Bourke and Swanston St, Melbourne

“The cityscape involves a circling, a continual return to the same loci, the same figures the same objects, but each time from a different direction, from a different vantage point.” Walter Benjamin

The botanist of the pavement

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Looking up, looking down and looking into the distance at Docklands.

In the 1850’s the French poet Baudelaire believed that traditional art was inadequate for the new dynamic complications of modern life. Social and economic changes brought by industrialization demanded that the artist immerse himself in the metropolis and become, ‘a botanist of the sidewalk’, an analytical connoisseur of the urban fabric.