Education Space: Creating Art in Public is a hybrid studio, classroom and gallery designed to promote active participation with, and careful consideration of, public art practices and the diverse and inventive approaches artists adopt when creating artwork for public space. At the centre of the Education Space is a concise survey of maquettes, renders, moving images, costume, diagrams and artefacts drawn from both realised and propositional public works by leading contemporary artists.
The pieces included in this collection function as learning objects to guide exploration into the creative and practical development of distinctive and ambitious public artworks – from idea, to proposal, realisation and reflection. This presentation also points to a number of existing publicly accessible works that can be viewed in Melbourne and nearby to ACCA.
ACCA Education have developed a program of teaching activities that focuses on the form of the propositional artwork as an accessible, future-oriented studio activity that catalyses intangible ideas into comprehensible forms. Students will be supported to create and view their own propositional public artworks as powerful means to shaping the so-far unimagined future(s) of our shared public spaces. Through this focus students and the broader audience alike are encouraged to see potential for artistic activities far beyond the gallery walls.
A final key section of the space is designated for the exhibition of artworks created by students and young people during visits to Who’s Afraid of Public Space? This rotating display will, over the course of the exhibition, present the many and surprising speculative future(s) of public art practice as imagined by tomorrow’s public artists.
Artists:
Atong Atem, Ross Coulter, Sonia Leber and David Chesworth, Eugenia Lim, John Meade, Clement Meadmore, Kent Morris, James Nguyen and Victoria Pham, Tom Nicholson, Rose Nolan, Open Spatial Workshop (Terri Bird, Bianca Hester, Natasha Johns-Messenger, Scott Mitchell) Reko Rennie, and Steven Rhall
Curated by Andrew Atchison, Artist Educator, ACCA
Curator’s statement:
Education Space: Creating Art in Public is inspired by the unique opportunities and challenges that artists encounter when working in public spaces, as contexts richly characterised by complex combinations of function, form, community, access, history, architecture and place. There is no possibility of ‘getting comfortable’ in public art practice because it is, at its rigorous best, a commitment to lifelong learning. For this reason it is also an ideal context for students and young people to explore and test ideas of how citizenship, individuality, empathy, and self-expression might combine.
Arguably, artists who work in public space expose their practices to the highest degree of scrutiny – public artworks capture the attentions and passions of the people that live with them. They bring into sharp focus opinions of worthiness, discrepancies of taste, and notions of public ownership. In doing so, they test the self-image of communities in an inimitable way, often resulting in the revelation of divergent views and unexpected sympathies that might otherwise go unspoken. Who is art for? Who gets a say over public space? What is the role of the individual artist in the public sphere? Whose creativity matters? And, who are the public? These core questions are trumped by the perennial, delightfully confounding question of What would a public artwork that made everyone happy look, feel, sound or be like? It is this ever tested and expanding horizon of possibility that ultimately makes both the creation and experience of art in public space so rewarding.
Education Space: Creating Art in Public furniture has been developed by student designer team ASAP (Evan Clezy, Shengjie He, Kathleen Hoo and Sophia Koundouris) and supported by RMIT Interior Design and These Are The Projects We Do Together.
Dulux colours in this space: Vivid White
