Monash architecture an inspiration for art
Narelle Jubelin, The Gray Cloth (glass transcriptions) 2011-12; Caulfield Technical School E Block, architect Percy Everett, c.1950 (now Faculty of Art Design & Architecture, Monash University)
Art comes face to face with architecture in Vision in Motion, a major project and survey exhibition by artist Narelle Jubelin, now open at the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA).
Vision in Motion features Jubelin’s intricately sewn petit-point embroideries of the past three decades, alongside works inspired by architecture and the built environment.
During 2012-13 the exhibition will be presented across three Australian university art museums, where the artist will create new works in key modernist buildings located at each site.
At Monash, Jubelin will work with Percy Everett’s modernist building located on the Caulfield campus at the intersection of Sir John Monash Drive, Dandenong Road and Bourke Road.
Originally designed for the Caulfield Technical School, this iconic local example of modernist architecture now houses Monash University’s Faculty of Art Design & Architecture.
In the round stairwell of the building the artist has laboriously transcribed text from a 1914 utopian satire (The Gray Cloth and Ten Percent White: A Ladies Novel by Paul Scheerbart) onto the glass windows.
Jubelin’s exhibition offers a critical -- and at times humorous --engagement with modernism in art and architecture.
According to the artist, the exhibition is, “both a swansong to an earlier modernist moment when universities became progressive sites for the new, and a lamentation for their imminent change, restructuring and loss.”
Curator Ann Stephen suggests that the artist’s occupation of the academy is both a form of celebration but also a eulogy reflecting upon the divided fate of modernism.
Vision in Motion has been developed by the University Art Gallery, the University of Sydney, in association with MUMA and the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia.
Vision in Motion will be on display at MUMA, Caulfield campus, from 24 April to 7 July 2012.
For more information visit the MUMA website.