object eye
Stories In Form — An Introduction
Friday January 20 2012
As the curator of Stories in Form I am thrilled to be able to introduce this exciting exhibition. So what makes this exhibition special?
I believe that a particularly exciting aspect of this exhibition is that all of the pieces on display are products – they have the potential to be manufactured in large numbers. These are the types of items that owners often seem to cherish the least because they lack personalisation.
What makes us love our belongings? Often the things we cherish the most have little monetary value but have an unseen value – they may remind us of a person, a place or a special moment. The object becomes a receptacle for stories.
Object & Collect Holiday Opening Hours
Monday December 19 2011
Amongst Christmas party shenanigans and end of year celebrations, we at Object are working furiously in the last days before taking a break. Importantly we’re preparing for our exciting new exhibitions opening in late January and squeezing the most out of our current shows here at Object and around the country.
Thank you for all of your support in 2011 and best wishes for a stupendous, silly season.
p.s. If you’re looking for some last minute stocking fillers, Collect continues to offer free shipping to anyone around Australia, so jump online today. For the local in you, drop in and see us here at Surry Hills. Just mention the Summer in Sydney Campaign to get your 10% discount.
HYPERCLAY Catalogue App Available Now
Friday December 16 2011
We’re very excited to announce that the HYPERCLAY: Contemporary Ceramics app developed as part of the touring exhibition is now available for everyone to download from the App Store in iTunes, exclusively for iPad. Divided into nine sections, the app has a profile, process, expert and student video for each of the eight artists, as well as a look at international ceramics, a word from the producer, and a look at material technology.
Designed to take the place of a traditional catalogue, the HYPERCLAY app contains over two hours of video content, some of which were included in the profiles of the HYPERCLAY artists on Object Eye over recent months. The app is free, and a great insight into the works and the artists. If you have seen the show already, you can catch up on any videos you may have missed, and if you plan on catching it over the course of the tour you can get acquainted with the exhibition before it arrives. And if it isn’t touring near you, it means you don’t miss out on all of the great information complementing the works!
Try This At Home — 6 Jars
Tuesday December 13 2011
Welcome to the fourth entry in a series profiling the artists and works in Try This At Home, an exhibition running parallel to HYPERCLAY: Contemporary Ceramics in the Object Gallery Project Space in Surry Hills until 8 January 2012. Find out more about HYPERCLAY here, find out more about Try This At Home here, or catch up on the Try This At Home series here.
This week, we’re looking at the 6 Jars project from Makeshift (find out more about Makeshift at their website.)
Like most projects contained with Try This At Home, 6 Jars is deceptively simple. The basic idea is that most of the pre-packaged foodstuffs and household products you purchase can be made yourself, and often an issue with doing this is that the effort you put into creating it simply for yourself is not at all economical. If you create to scale, however, it is relatively easier — if you create six times as much, for example, you don’t use six times as much of your energy or time. But what do you do with that extra stuff?
Try This At Home — Bike-Power Home Cinema
Friday December 09 2011
Welcome to the third entry in a series profiling the artists and works in Try This At Home, an exhibition running parallel to HYPERCLAY: Contemporary Ceramics in the Object Gallery Project Space in Surry Hills until 8 January 2012. Find out more about HYPERCLAY here, find out more about Try This At Home here, or catch up on the Try This At Home series here.
This week, we’re looking at the Bike-Power Home Cinema, from Magnificent Revolution Australia + Jessica Coughlan.
The Cinema is a simple-looking contraption with a serious purpose. It’s ultimately the combination of an old Slimline exercise bike and a toy motorised helicopter — the two are combined to create a pedal-powered signal switch. This is all rigged up to a screen that, when powered, will play a short documentary about the CO2penhagen festival, a carbon-neutral festival that took place in Denmark in 2009. (Find our more about CO2penhagen at their website.)
Try This At Home — Degavlas
Tuesday December 06 2011
Welcome to the second entry in a series profiling the artists and works in Try This At Home, an exhibition running parallel to HYPERCLAY: Contemporary Ceramics in the Object Gallery Project Space in Surry Hills until 8 January 2012. Find out more about HYPERCLAY here, find out more about Try This At Home here, or catch up on the Try This At Home series here.
Today’s entry looks at Degavlas, an open-ended project from the Slow Art Collective. Comprised of Tony Adams, Chaco Kato and Dylan Martorell (whose solo show Duppy Musique Povera was in the Project Space earlier this year), the Slow Art Collective have been working together since 2009, creating a series of installations that focus ‘on creative practices and ethics relating to environmental sustainability, material ethics, DIY culture and collaboration.’ (From their blog, which you can find here.)
Paul Wood — HYPERCLAY
Wednesday November 30 2011
Welcome to the final instalment of the HYPERCLAY: Contemporary Ceramics artist profile series. Every week for the last eight weeks we have looked at one of the artists involved in the exhibition currently on show at Object Gallery in Sydney. Click here to catch up on the rest of the series.
This week: Paul Wood.
Paul Wood graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in 1998 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, before going on to attain in 2003 a Graduate Diploma from VCA also. As part of his Graduate Diploma, Wood decided that, rather than create functional objects, he would distort them, transforming them into non-functional objects in the process. You can watch a video of Wood discussing the creation of his work for HYPERCLAY in our Video & Audio Gallery here.
Graphic Design Internship
Wednesday November 30 2011
We’re on the lookout for creative folk interested in taking on a graphic design internship at Object in 2012. Roles range from 3-5 days a week and a 3 month min commitment, and are based in Surry Hills. It’s a great opportunity to get into the Sydney design scene, build your portfolio, work with seriously talented curators and on a range of creative projects. Oh and you get to see your work up in lights at the end of your stay – with a creative identity you develop for an exhibition at Object Gallery.
Along with this great experience we provide a travel allowance and there’s the heart warming feeling you get from joining the Object family!
Interested? Let us know. Contact Jessica at j.waal@object.com.au or call us on +61 2 9361 4555.
Try This At Home — Natural Fuse
Monday November 28 2011
Running parallel to HYPERCLAY: Contemporary Ceramics in Object Gallery since October (read more about HYPERCLAY here) has been Try This At Home, the first exhibition in the five year Curating Cities research project, investigating how art and design can effect sustainable urban transformations. Try This At Home is upstairs in the Project Space, and you can read more about it here.
Try This At Home features the work of five artists, all presenting examples of adaptive practice, utilising existing resource in the name of sustainability. The first work we are looking at is Natural Fuse, by Haque: Design + Research, a UK outfit.
Natural Fuse consists of a number of planter boxes, each with an included electrical port, an attached appliance and a bottle of vinegar. The idea is that you take home a plant, connect it via ethernet cable to the internet and let it act as a carbon sink. The plants are all networked together, providing ‘power’ to an online grid - a website collecting the total carbon absorbed by the plant and converting that into an electrical amount.
Nielson Design Lecture
Thursday November 24 2011
After spending the afternoon at the offices of Donovan Hill, talking to architect Timothy Hill about his studio (watch out for more on Hill in the next issue of Object magazine in March next year), I headed to one of their best known buildings, the State Library of Queensland, to see the third annual Nielson Design Lecture, featuring international heavyweight visionary Bruce Mau.
Firstly, the State Library of Queensland (SLQ) is an incredible building in so many ways, from the integration of the outside and the inside to the spaces with no specific purposes allowing you to adapt to suit your needs. It looks amazing, and it works in far more sophisticated ways than I can go into here — that’s for another day. There is no wonder CNN has selected it as the third contemporary architectural wonder in Australia (after Federation Square and the Sydney Opera House.) In fact, Mau said at the beginning of his lecture that ‘What you’re doing here is the future’ about SLQ — I couldn’t really agree more.
Visiting Object
St. Margarets, 417 Bourke St
Surry Hills NSW 2010
Gallery:
11am to 5pm
Wednesday to Saturday
Object Ground Floor:
11am to 5pm
Wednesday to Saturday
+61 2 9361 4511
object@object.com.au
