I have visited lots of galleries in many cities across the world but there is one that never fails to astound me when I visit it. The National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia. The gallery has two sites in the city; The NVG International on St Kilda Road and The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia on Federation Square. The NGV International was the first gallery I visited when I first arrived in Australia in November 2014. The building in itself is an experience and an aesthetic wonder, situated on the busy St Kilda road leading into Melbourne’s central business district opposite Queen Victoria Gardens. Outside the gallery are two large pools with fountains and the entrance to the gallery is behind a huge wall of glass with water perpetually pouring down it. I always enjoyed looking out to see how the stream of water distorted the view of the street outside and watching the shadows it created moving on the floor of the atrium.
The first show that I visited was Express Yourself: Romance Was Born in 2014, predominantly featuring works by Romance Was Born, the fashion house of Sydney-based designers Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales.
The show was created for children with an interactive exhibition style. I remember that one of the activities that kids could get involved in was decorating cardboard cut-outs of beards with sequins, glitter and pom-poms.
The whole space was curated in an incredibly immersive way, everywhere you looked the was colour and the walls were papered with a variety of designs by Romance Was Born and Del Kathryn Barton.
The show also featured lots of everyday objects such as a tin of milo, Aussie footballs, a plastic toy truck, a pink Care Bear and some purple flip flops. These were interspersed with more historical objects such as ceramics, paper fans, and landscape paintings. Everything was sorted into colour order in a gallery painted floor-to-ceiling in a corresponding rainbow of hues. This arrangement of the 'everyday' mixed in with the 'museum-worthy' reminded me of my own childhood; when a marble or a shell I found on the beach seemed just as precious as a piece of jewellery or an antique vase. I find it very interesting to consider how our perception of value changes in relation to our life experience and understanding of the world as we grow older.
As I was exploring the exhibition I had one of those intensely magical and extremely nostalgic moments when I spotted an animation playing on a television that was part of a display, and immediately recognised it as something I had watched in my childhood. It was a scene from the film Dot and the Kangaroo (1977). For those who happened to miss this children's classic, Dot and the Kangaroo is about a little girl that gets lost in the bush and makes friends with a kangaroo who has lost her joey. Dot spends the rest of the movie riding around in the kangaroo's pouch meeting a variety of wildlife along the way and eventually the kangaroo helps her find her way back home. When I saw this movie my 5-year-old self fell in love instantly. Watching it again I was able to better take in the artistry of the animation. It is created in a similar way to several scenes in Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks where the animation is laid on top of a live-action background to great effect.
I was amazed when I saw it, it was like finding a long lost treasure. At the time I was in my first week in a new country, I had a visa for one year and was thousands of miles away from everyone I knew and loved and was not entirely certain that I had made the right choice. Finding this forgotten relic of my childhood felt like finding a tiny piece of home. It gave a feeling of serendipitous reassurance that perhaps moving to the other side of the world was not a huge mistake - not long after I realised it was one of the best decisions I had ever made.
Romance Was Born also introduced me to Del Kathryn Barton, who has been one of my favourite artists ever since. Barton’s work is vibrant, hectic, intricately detailed and overwhelming – a whirlwind riot of colour, often exploring themes of nature, femininity, family and sexuality. One of the things that I most admire about Barton is her enthusiasm to explore and experiment with a huge variety of mediums; from painting and collage to textiles, sculpture and film. I get the feeling that she is excited to turn her hand to everything, and all that she makes feels undoubtedly hers, her style apparent in every medium.
The National Gallery of Victoria’s immersive style of curation has often been something that sets it apart in my memory. Exhibitions are executed with a thoughtfulness that greatly enhances the viewer's experience of the work. Another show that stood out to me for the execution of the curation was The House of Dior: Seventy Years of Haute Couture in 2017. This exhibition was a celebration of the iconic fashion house's seventieth anniversary and showed over 140 pieces. Beginning with Christian Dior's earliest ensembles from 1947 that first established the designers signature silhouette "The New Look"; and progressing through the decades of six successive designers pieces, to the couture house's first female creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri's work in 2017.
The first few rooms of the exhibition were laid out in the style of a department store with cocktail dresses and gowns on plinths in the manner of window displays, a beautiful homage to how shoppers would have first seen Dior's pieces in the 1940s and '50s. Later in the show, I came to a mezzanine level with an elegant staircase leading down to the lower gallery. Lit by a dazzling chandelier, these features in the gallery space beautifully echoed the glamour, decadence and elegance of the pieces featured in the show.
Unfortunately, I don't have any photographs from this show but you can view a short walkthrough in the NGV's video below:
"The violent accent of black makes it the most elegant colour" - Christian Dior
Some sketches I did at the exhibition of some of Christian Dior's dresses Promesse reception dress 1957, Cachottiére afternoon dress 1953 and Aladin cocktail dress 1947
The Highway is a Disco, an exhibition of Del Kathryn Barton’s work at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Austalia was the last show that I visited before leaving Melbourne in January 2018. I actually visited this show three or four times, I couldn’t get enough of it. The intensely detailed nature of Barton’s work often makes me feel the need to view it multiple times as I always see something new - particularly in her paintings – each time I view them.
One of my favourite elements of this show was the film RED Barton made with Cate Blancett (teaser trailer below). The film is intense, vivid, exciting, sexy and dark, it has the feel of a twisted fairy tale with dramatic choreography and a stark and selective colour palette.
RED by Del Kathryn Barton teaser trailer
The gallery space where the film was showing was filled with huge floor pillows for the audience to lie on whilst viewing the film. It was a relaxing space that allowed you to completely lose yourself in the work. It felt very different from the usual set up that galleries often adopt for the showing of art films. On many occasions I have pulled back the curtained opening to a dark room with one solitary bench, self-consciously and blindly edging my way in and trying to avoid stepping on people's toes. I often find this quite an awkward experience and tend to feel quite distracted from the work I came in to see.
So, for me, this setting was fantastic, it enabled me to totally focus on the film and get the full experience of the piece.
A brief walkthrough of The Highway is a Disco at the NGV with some thoughts from Barton about the show and some of the works exhibited
The curation at the NGV galleries often walks the line between an immersive experience and a more common ‘white cube’ setting and the shows benefit from the best aspects of both styles of installation. When I attend shows at the NGV I can feel the consideration and thoughtfulness that has a created a layout that is working its hardest to enhance the viewer's experience in a very accessible way.
I have often heard from friends who have only a little experience attending galleries that they don’t feel that the spaces are welcoming, or there is something about the experience that they just don’t ‘get’. I think that many of these feelings are derived from the curation of a space and believe that art should be for everyone, not just those who are knowledgable about art and the art world. I hope that more galleries will embrace a more immersive and curiosity-inciting form of curation in the future.
Links The National Gallery of Victoria
Romance Was Born
Dior
Del Kathryn Barton
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