In the Vineyards '08

7 October 2008 - 18 January 2009

A massage from Tara:

"I am happy to invite artists to submit a proposals for 2008 exhibition of Sculpture in the Vineyards.

Continuing on from last years success, we hope to put together just as interesting and diverse an exhibition.
Please visit the website for more information and follow the link to the blog for some of last years highlights."

ENTRIES CLOSE ON JULY 31

Tara Morelos - curator
2008sinv@gmail.com


"Artists are invited to submit proposals by Thursday 31 July 2008 for selection be included in 2008 Sculpture in the Vineyards
Set in the picturesque Wollombi Valley, Sculpture in the Vineyards features an innovative array of large-scale outdoor and site-specific works by local, regional and city based artists. Wollombi, already home to many artists, writers and performers, provides fertile ground for a festival-like atmosphere as a new community of artists come together for the opening weekend.
Sculpture in the Vineyards provides the artist with ample opportunity to showcase their work, engaging visitors over the three month exhibition period by inviting them to enjoy contemporary sculpture amidst the springtime beauty of the Millbook Estate, Undercliff, and Stonehurst Cedar Creek vineyards. Over this time, visitors will also be able to sample unique boutique wines, participate in a creative workshop and join in one of three guided bus tours of the exhibition for an informal and fun day out in lower Hunter Valley."

Art Centre

It is good to see they are moving ahead with waterfront arts infrastructure in Norway.

New performing arts centre in Kristiansand in Norway

Of course Gosford had a state of the art centre for the arts at one time. The building is still there!

Renewable Energy

The immanent demise of eO inc. was given greater poignancy with the announcement of an exhibition at Malmo Konsthall, The Hamsterwheel.

“The Hamsterwheel is an exhibition initiated by the Austrian artist Franz West, and was originally presented at La Biennale di Venezia, 2007. The exhibition has since then travelled to the Festival de Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse, and Centre d’Art Santa Monica, Barcelona. At each exhibition venue the presentation of the works and relation to each other changes dramatically.

The Hamsterwheel can be seen as a playful comment to the wheel of life – the life as an artist. A wheel where we struggle to go forward, to get ahead. That always takes us forward, and still – at the end – nowhere. The exhibition attempts to show art as turbulence.

Having for many years watched, and been part of, many artists initiatives driven by committed, energetic, optimistic artists, that finally collapse under the pressures of a huge voluntary workload with little financial support or return, the “hamsterwheel” seems an apt metaphor.
But is the impassioned energetic activity simply wasted? One suspects that there is a drive mechanism attached to wheel, which, as artists instinctively struggle to go forward, generates power to keep the top heavy apparatus of the art industry lurching onwards.

Replica of a human hamster wheel, used in the 1700s to 'put the sick person back on the right track'. From the Glore Psychiatric Museum.

It is amazing that an activity carried out by a group of people, the majority of whom cannot make enough money from it to earn a living, can give rise to the huge infrastructure of well paid administrators, managers, cultural planners, curators, critics and writers, academics, gallery operators, government officers etc. We are of course grateful for the contribution they make to the industry.

Designed by Swedish physician Gustav Zander in the late nineteenth century