The central question that populates the work of indigenous artist Michael Cook in his beautiful and enchanting series of “Broken Dreams” is quite simple: what if the British, instead of completely and summarily dismissing Aboriginal people and their culture, took a more open approach to their people, culture and knowledge systems?

This art work became our guiding motivation for the Lodge on the Lake Ideas Competition in Canberra, some of which can be seen on the Stephen Collier Architects website. Taking the image of the semi naked Aboriginal woman wearing a French sailors hat, and a parrot hovering above (referencing the artist’s own history), we created a mix of forms, both formal and informal, that are intertwined with colourful gardens of native and exotic plants.

Using Cook’s compelling series of propositions, the “what if ” of art, history, culture and identity become the ‘what if” of a distinctly Australian form of design. Conciliation in 1788 would have created a complimentary mix of architectural variations and distortions. This country would be one where the chances of an indigenous or non-indigenous Prime Minister would have been the same at every election since Federation. And Australia would now have an equal meeting of cultures and (cultural) influence.

It’s never too late to dream.

Victor Kossakovsky’s beautiful and elegiac film ¡Vivan Las Antipodas!, shown recently at the Sydney Film Festival, presents these imponderable questions by poetically observing the antipodes of Entre Rios in Argentina (Shanghai), rural Russia (Patagonia), northern Spain (a beach in New Zealand) and Hawaii (Botswana).

It ends with this wonderful image: The outline of a man standing on his hands slowly becomes apparent in the distance; his limbs are outstretched into the shape of a star figure. The camera pans around 180º and our perception of both him and the earth changes.  He is no longer standing on his hands, but appears to be hanging. Curiously, this upside down view is physically more accurate than the head to toe way of seeing things that we are used to.

In collaboration with Sydney via New York artist Kim Connerton, we have been shortlisted to go into the next round of Sydney’s Laneway Art Project 2012.

Titled PAIRED GOLD, inspiration is drawn from Roni Horn’s work which subsequently became a source of inspiration (and direct acknowledgement) by Felix Gonzalez Torres. Both artists were exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 2009 in an exhibition similarly titled Paired, Gold. The pairing of Gonzalez Torres and Horn speaks of joy and loss, as well as a shared aesthetic. Ours wishes to evoke the same sense of joy, in the grittier surrounds of a southern Sydney CBD laneway, for people to reflect on the fleeting nature of beauty in their own private lives as well as the public space of the street.

Please keep your fingers crossed that we make it through to implementation.

Image courtesy of DailyServing

Rem Koolhaas’ (OMA) ‘City of the Captive Globe Project’ provided thematic inspiration as each would-be architect took on the task of modelling their ideal home.

There were some curious responses to the brief, but the blue foam and hot wire cutters turned out to be a great medium for self-expression.

Thanks again to Kaldor Public Arts Projects and their Parlour program, and Jurassic Lounge
Read more about it in our previous post

As the sun sets on March 27th, Stephen Collier Architects  has been commissioned by Kaldor Public Art Projects to help transform the Australian Museum into a hive of activity. Armed with blocks of blue foam and  hot wire-cutters, we will be hosting an after-hours model-making workshop where we invite people to craft an image of their perfect home. Collectively we hope to grow a small city under the skeletal remains of ancient dinosaurs & reptiles.

The workshop will be run as a part of Jurassic Lounge, a series of 10 after-hours art & music sessions held every Tuesday in Summer, and is presented by Kaldor Public Art projects as a sample of what is to come in their amazing new series of Parlour  evenings, a new engagement program they will launch alongside the 25th Kaldor Public Art Project, Thomas Demand’s The Dailies.

The free, after-hours Parlour bar and program will include art, music, model-making, talks, performance, games and film. For this edition, Kaldor Public Art Projects has partnered with UTS Design, N, Fbi radio and KINO to create an exciting and diverse series of events on 5th, 12th and 19th April at the CTA club in the MLC Centre, Martin Place, where Thomas Demand’s project will be held.

To create his artworks, Demand constructs full-scale models of architectural spaces using paper and card, then photographs them, blurring the distinction between his copy and its original. His works often represent well-known spaces that are familiar to us second-hand from media images, like the Oval Office. This creates an uneasy ambiguity between what we perceive to be the “real” space and the artistic representation of it.

For Demand, the model is a means to an end (rather than a finished art project in its own right) and requires precision and perfection. For Stephen Collier Architects, the model is forever unfinished and rarely precious. It is a tool in the design process; a way of learning in 3D. With these competing ideologies, Kaldor Public Art Projects and Stephen Collier Architects ask visitors of Jurassic lounge to join us and transform a block of styrofoam into their small piece of an imaginary new city

Join us on the night for a lot of fun, and the opportunity to model your ideal house.

Brought to you by Kaldor Public Art Projects’ new PARLOUR program, Stephen Collier Architects and Jurrasic Lounge.