Sydney’s laneways, which had become dirty, forgotten and victims of modernist architecture over the years, are now slowly re-emerging. The Laneway Art program, in its fourth year, is helping bring these neglected spaces to life with diverse and eye-catching installations. The program provides a platform for artists, designers and other creative people to challenge and redefine the city with imagination, verve and wit.
The City sought ideas from curators in an open call for proposals for the 2010/11 Laneway Art program, and a shortlist of curators developed their ideas further before the City commissioned curator Barbara Flynn. She engaged artists of the highest calibre for Are You Looking at Me? and has set a new benchmark for the Laneway Art program.
Although this is the first time several of the artist have worked in the public domain, their projects have infused the city with a new sense of potential. The City of Sydney is excited to present this year’s Laneway Art program and we hope you enjoy exploring it.
– City of Sydney, excerpt from the Laneway Art 2010/11 Exhibition Guide
Are You Looking at Me? brings together the talent of nine of Australia’s moist original artists with the ambition of taking the public space of Sydney to an entirely new level of meaning, attractiveness and excitement.
Art interventions in public spaces, especially when they are temporary, can be random, undisciplined, uninteresting and often overtly personal to the point of being irrelevant and bewildering.
That was then and this is now: the laneways project entitled Are You Looking at Me? brings together the talent of nine of Australia’s most original artists with the ambition of taking the public space of Sydney to an entirely new level of meaning, attractiveness, and excitement.
One of the most memorable lines ever spoken in the history of cinema, ‘Are You Looking at Me?’ becomes the pretext to redirect the public’s attention to the fascinating history and silent beauty of Sydney’s oft neglected laneways. Each project will, quite literally, get you to look at it, and to look at the laneway in which it is situated in an entirely new way.
This is the whole point: to work across several art interventions to transform laneways we had only known as dirty and disused dead ends into the commanding handiwork of nine of Australia’s most imaginative and adept image makers.
For the workers and residents of Sydney, the experience will be one of tremendous thrill, as if they are seeing the laneways for the very first time.
Artists were chosen who work in a variety of ways to present the full range of what art can do in cities. Two of them – Nike Savvas and Jan van der Ploeg – are fine colourists who will bring an entirely new chromatic life to spaces formerly downcast and grey. One artist, Rocket Mattler, will juxtapose city and suburbia by introducing billboard-sized photographic images of the latter that will read as incongruously out of place in Tank Stream Laneway. Five of the artists – Jon Campbell, Newell Harry, Simryn Gill, Mikala Dwyer and Simon Yates – will commune with the history, lore and local language and archaeology of the laneways, but the project will read as fresh and current and avoid all historicising.
Artworks need to be convincing in purely visual terms to hold up when they are implanted in a city. Didactic or historicizing works tend to bore, and the emphasis will remain squarely on the artists who will be encouraged to come up with their best possible works to express their unique visions. That was then and this is now.
The projects will be temporary but our vision and hopes for and ideas about the sort of permanent works that might eventually replace them will never be far from our minds.
– Barbara Flynn, excerpt from the Laneway Art 2010/11 Exhibition Guide