Art and Sport Down Under - Uri Tzaig - Tracey Moffatt - Sylvie Blocher - Alan Fleischer - Patricia Piccinini - Rosemary Laing - Lin Onus - Lorrie Graham - art exhibit focussing on art and sports for the Olympic games

Art in America, May, 2001 by Roni Feinstein

Looking Locally

Also at the Customs House were several presentations devoted to architecture and design. Object Galleries of the Australian Center for Craft and Design featured work by an Adelaide-based jewelry workshop and a selection of lamps and furniture by Australian designers. "Sydney 2000 Olympic Design of the New Millennium," at City Exhibition Space, was more substantive, displaying large-scale working models, architectural drawings, photographs and plans for the stadiums and public spaces of the Olympic Park. It detailed the history of Homebush Bay, the main Olympic site; furnished a glimpse of the buildings and public-art projects; and considered the site's "ecological sustainability" with regard to uses of solar power and water conservation. Of Olympic Park's many stadiums, arenas and transit buildings--almost all characterized by soaring, arching, elaborately articulated roofs--the Archery Pavilion, designed by Stutchbury and Pape, a Sydney-area architecture and landscape firm, stood alone in its simplicity and wit. It consisted of a long, sloping slab roof extended over a series of rectangular sheds, the roof supported by long, skinny columns configured to look like arrows.

At the Museum of Sydney, two exhibitions focused on the city: "Sydney Harbor" and "Sydney-siders." The latter consisted of resident photojournalist Lorrie Graham's black-and-white photos of people of the metropolis taken during the 12 months preceding the games. These portraits offered a broad-spectrum look at the lives and rituals of ordinary people, from children training to be lifesavers to drag queens, and also provided a sense of the city's ethnic diversity. Intriguingly, the photos' tonal quality and subject matter seemed to defy contemporaneity, conveying instead a sense of nostalgia for an older Sydney.

"Sydney Harbor" explored the harbor's place at the center of Sydney life through works in a wide range of both conventional and untraditional mediums. An intelligent and eccentric show (which seems to be this institution's speciality), it intermingled paintings, prints, photographs and sculptures dating from the 19th century to the present with buoys, model skiffs, maps and botanical illustrations of marine life. Among the most engaging objects in the exhibition was Steven Greenwood's ship in a bottle: within this confined space, a video monitor less than 1 inch square played the film "Mutiny on the Bounty." (A replica of the Bounty sails Sydney Harbor today for tourist cruises.)

Among the modest shows geared mainly to local audiences, I particularly liked "State of the Waratah," a charming and entertaining exhibition that explored the image of the New South Wales state flower in paintings, prints, photographs, architecture, furniture, ceramics, fashion, jewelry and the like. The show was fascinating from a sociological point of view, as it ably demonstrated the impact of a nationalist symbol upon art, design and popular culture. While "Waratah mania" was at its height during the first two decades of the 20th century, the flower was prominent in the bouquet presented to Olympic medalists at the Sydney Games.