Canberra's Public Art on a Tablet

The city of Canberra has long embraced public art and I'm talking about the good stuff, not what looks like leftovers from a building site that have been cobbled together because no-one wanted to pay for a dump truck (not that the latter doesn't exist in Australia's capital city ... the sculpture at the intersection of Barton Highway and Gungahlin Drive, anyone?) 

Anyway, I do enjoy photographing sculpture — I love being able to move 360 degrees around an artwork, to explore it from all different angles. The context of public art is also richer and very different from the blank walls of a gallery. The surrounding scape can add so much, or even completely change, its meaning. 

James Turrell's "Within Without" in the gardens of the National Gallery of Australia starts as a grass-covered mound, similar to an English barrow, those round burial mounds Bronze Age   chieftains are buried in. Inside, however, the "architecture" is somewhere between Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece — and the symmetry is just mesmerising.

I took the above image on my Motorola Xoom tablet, processing it in the Pixlr-o-matic application. At 6" x 8", this is one of the few photography applications that allows a decent print size.

The form of Andrew Rogers' "Perception and Reality 1" at the revamped Canberra Airport is equally ancient with a capital "A", like a shot put competitor at the Olympics when all competitors were naked (not that women were allowed to compete or even watch!). The lighting and background, of course, are pure neon ... a vibrant mix of primary colours.

To make up for the tiny size of Urbian's Retro Camera application (about the size of a Polaroid 600), I took a cue from Sam Haskins — who first made me realise multiple images, similar or juxtaposed, can be montaged together — and doubled-up on shots.

I was actually picking Justin up from a work trip and, while other partners hugged and kissed, he disembarked to find me crouched in front of the pubic hair of this striking, yet slightly shock bronze sculpture!

Pill-Popping in the Name of Art

Sometimes I try to be a little too clever for my own good and these images are probably an example!

As you know from my last couple of posts, I experimented with my Motorola Xoom tablet as an art tool for made. Creative Space's upcoming group show of artists' journals. Well, the name "tablet" had me intrigued ... it has strong health and medical connotations, so I created a few images based around the idea of pills.

As you can see below, I toyed with the idea of "pill-popping", first, with a stream of pills going into a mouth and, second, a rather left-field interpretation ... Pac-Man chomping his way through a maze of pac-dots.

I only thought to Google how the tablet, as in the technology, got it's name afterwards. Well, it turns out to having nothing to do with my assumption at all! These revolutionary little devices were named after writing tablets, also known as slates, a writing tradition that is as old as the 10 Commandments on Moses’ stone tablets and, more commonly, remind many of their early school days!

Butterfly Babies with Urbian's Retro Camera Application

As promised, here are some images from my journal in made. Creative Space's 2012 art journal show.

Urbian's Retro Camera android application oozes all the hipness of Hong Kong’s plastic Diana camera and all her clones, but its images are tiny at a decent print quality ... we're talking 7.6cm square. Okay, that's still about the same size of a 600 type Polaroid, which might be okay if we didn't live in a time where billboard-sized prints are de rigueur for exhibitions.

What's more, the application seriously blows highlights to the point of turning olive skin like mine into an opaque white mask. Not surprisingly, I largely banished this baby to application hell ... until one afternoon when I decided to test if I could use its flaws to my advantage.

So, armed with a broken doll, vintage yarn holder and a piece of red velvet brocade, I was actually thrilled when Retro Camera turned my composition into an ethereal white “butterfly baby” shape. Conveniently, the butterfly is an ancient symbol in many cultures for the human soul, so blends well with the human form.

I overlaid a close-up of a butterfly wing, photographed through a microscope, over the form to give it texture and detail, and to suggest flight, before adding a scatter of golden cat’s eyes, courtesy of one of my Russian Blue/British Shorthair boys. Cat’s eyes also have a spiritual connotation — according to Chinese folklore, good eyesight allows cats to see spirits in the dark. And to dream one has cat’s eyes apparently indicates a person can find their way through a dark and troubling problem.

Finally, I tried to think "outside the square" about that small print size, re-photographing my butterfly baby, still with the tablet, in sections on the computer monitor and piecing these back together in Photoshop. The result has a photocopy effect that I love that it lends itself to image transfers. I also quite like the mismatched alignment of the four sections because I'm a fan of anything that draws attention to process.