Latest news with #MuseumofOldandNewArt
The Age
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
‘Tasmanian royalty' rules the Jordan Gogos runway
Rather than pander to celebrities, or have to pay them, designers at Australian Fashion Week in Sydney are enlisting high-profile friends to promote their shows. Celebrity cookbook writer Nigella Lawson looked on at Lee Mathews, while television personality Melissa Leong walked in Gary Bigeni's show. Radio host Carrie Bickmore sat front row at Aje and former Victoria's Secret model Jessica Hart walked the runway for Bianca Spender. The enfant terrible of fashion week Jordan Gogos aimed higher, summoning the couple often referred to as the closest thing to royalty in Tasmania, excluding Queen Mary of Denmark. David Walsh the founder and owner of the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, dressed in Gogos's label Iordanes Spyridon Gogos to watch his wife Kirsha Kaechele model on the runway from the front row. 'It just made total sense for me because Kirsha is so theatrical, and she's got so many ideas,' says Gogos, a fan of Kaechele's creative defence of the male-free status of the controversial Ladies Lounge at Mona. At the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal last March, Kaechele was inspired by Robert Palmer's 1980s music video Simply Irresistible to perform silent choreography alongside a group of performers in navy suits, red lipstick and pearls. For Gogos, Kaechele shimmied down the Carriageworks runway in a multicoloured coat dress with neon-trimmed knee-high spats, stopping in front of Walsh for more elaborate dance moves. 'I feel that everything she throws herself into from the deep end is authentic,' Gogos says. 'Also they've been collecting a bit of my stuff.' Gogos manipulates fibres into one-off creations for the Sotheby's crowd rather than the Shein set. Even his runway shows are art, with stiff patchwork pieces and rough quilting, giving the impression of a Muppet Show reboot with classical motifs ran by an alternative art collective. 'I was on the treadmill earlier wondering how I got into this vortex and feeling the excitement of being a part of this,' says Gogos, who made his fashion week debut in 2020. 'I remember seeing the fashion week schedule in 2019, the year before my first show, and thinking that there was a space for this. There was a space for what I do.'
Sydney Morning Herald
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘Tasmanian royalty' rules the Jordan Gogos runway
Rather than pander to celebrities, or have to pay them, designers at Australian Fashion Week in Sydney are enlisting high-profile friends to promote their shows. Celebrity cookbook writer Nigella Lawson looked on at Lee Mathews, while television personality Melissa Leong walked in Gary Bigeni's show. Radio host Carrie Bickmore sat front row at Aje and former Victoria's Secret model Jessica Hart walked the runway for Bianca Spender. The enfant terrible of fashion week Jordan Gogos aimed higher, summoning the couple often referred to as the closest thing to royalty in Tasmania, excluding Queen Mary of Denmark. David Walsh the founder and owner of the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, dressed in Gogos's label Iordanes Spyridon Gogos to watch his wife Kirsha Kaechele model on the runway from the front row. 'It just made total sense for me because Kirsha is so theatrical, and she's got so many ideas,' says Gogos, a fan of Kaechele's creative defence of the male-free status of the controversial Ladies Lounge at Mona. At the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal last March, Kaechele was inspired by Robert Palmer's 1980s music video Simply Irresistible to perform silent choreography alongside a group of performers in navy suits, red lipstick and pearls. For Gogos, Kaechele shimmied down the Carriageworks runway in a multicoloured coat dress with neon-trimmed knee-high spats, stopping in front of Walsh for more elaborate dance moves. 'I feel that everything she throws herself into from the deep end is authentic,' Gogos says. 'Also they've been collecting a bit of my stuff.' Gogos manipulates fibres into one-off creations for the Sotheby's crowd rather than the Shein set. Even his runway shows are art, with stiff patchwork pieces and rough quilting, giving the impression of a Muppet Show reboot with classical motifs ran by an alternative art collective. 'I was on the treadmill earlier wondering how I got into this vortex and feeling the excitement of being a part of this,' says Gogos, who made his fashion week debut in 2020. 'I remember seeing the fashion week schedule in 2019, the year before my first show, and thinking that there was a space for this. There was a space for what I do.'
The Guardian
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Tasmania's Dark Mofo is back with a bang – and a car crash: festival announces 2025 programme
A two-hour performance work involving an artist and a stunt driver culminating in a head-on car crash, a man being crushed by sand in a giant hourglass, and an open invitation to scream, are among some of the artworks heading to Tasmania's Dark Mofo festival, which is back this winter after taking a fallow year. The annual art festival, created by David Walsh's Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) and well known for its often controversial, confronting and humorous spirit, was called off last year so organisers could take stock of 'changing conditions and rising costs' to ensure its future. Many festivals around Australia have been cancelled in the last two years, including Dark Mofo's summer equivalent, Mona Foma, which finished in 2024 after 16 years. Estimates put Dark Mofo's economic impact on Tasmania at $54.3m in 2023, which reportedly fell to $7.1m in 2024, the fallow year. Now the festival has signed a new funding deal with the Tasmanian state government that will see Dark Mofo receive $7m a year for three years, allowing Walsh to step back and focus on other investments in the state. Works coming to Dark Mofo include a new work of 'staggering scale' by Trawlwoolway artist and playwright Nathan Maynard: We threw them down the rocks where they had thrown the sheep, named for a quote by a white settler describing a massacre of 30 First Nations people in 1828 over the killing of three sheep. The work, which will involve sheep flesh, will highlight how the remains of First Nations people are held in galleries and museums around the world. Online, some people have reacted poorly to the way the festival has teased the work, which will explore cultural theft and erasure – perhaps because of Dark Mofo's previous controversies, such as in 2021 when a Spanish artist asked Indigenous Australians to donate blood for a work that was swiftly cancelled. Chris Twite, the festival's new artistic director, said: 'I think people have a lot of preconceptions about the work that arts organisations do. Nathan is one of our greatest storytellers and he's written a story in flesh this time. This is an ongoing and horrible state of affairs and something that Nathan has been working in various ways for many years. 'I can't speak to curatorial decisions before my time, but what I can say is that we wanted to work with artists who are asking really big questions and addressing these complex situations in their work. The First Nations artists on our program are making incredible work and pushing the boundaries to hopefully propel us towards new resolutions and new concepts.' Crash Body will see Brazilian artist Paula Garcia and a stunt driver drive specially equipped cars in Hobart's Regatta Grounds for two hours of tension, in a tightly choreographed show of near misses that will culminate in a head-on collision. Twite said: 'It is a very physically demanding work on Paula, she began training several months ago to get into the physical state to ensure the tension, stress and the eventual crash.' Nicholas Galanin, an artist of the Sitka tribe of Alaska, will invite visitors to his participatory work, Neon Anthem, to 'take a knee and scream until you can't breathe'. Twite said the work, which has been popular in galleries around the world, would provide 'a moment of catharsis and protest'. 'When we spoke to Nicholas about the work, he had concerns about what we would think about how many times people scream and how long they scream for,' he said. 'We weren't going to place any limitations upon people or him.' Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Carlos Martiel, an American-Cuban artist known for putting his body through grueling, painful performances to address violence against people of colour, will present a new work titled Custody, which see him imprisoned inside an hourglass as a tonne and a half of sand falls on his naked and restrained body. It will only be performed once as 'it is so demanding on his body', Twite said, describing it as 'a work that investigates the over-representation of people of colour inside the prison systems around the world'. Martiel's previous work, Cuerpo, which saw him hang himself from a gallery ceiling with a noose around his neck while passersby 'held his body aloft on the edge of life', will also be screened. 'It is a very confronting and challenging statement,' Twite said. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion Everything is Recorded, a project by British record producer Richard Russell, will create an improvised sound work about the winter solstice that will be audible within seven kilometres of the city. Twite said the festival had been working closely with the City of Hobart and the environmental protection authority on the work, 'so that we can spread the reach of the art across the whole of the city. It should be beautiful.' And Quasi, the divisive statue by New Zealand artist Ronnie van Hout that haunted Christchurch and Wellington until it was mysteriously lifted out for a new home in October, will be placed atop a waterfront building in Hobart. Portishead's Beth Gibbons will perform, as will rock bands The Horrors and Diiv, US rapper Tierra Whack, US singer Jessica Pratt, Mancunian saxophonist and poet Alabaster DePlume and Australian post-punk group Crime and the City Solution. Metal groups Baroness, Spectral Wound, Imperial Triumphant and Clown Core will also appear. Many Dark Mofo regulars will return, including the Night Mass dance parties, the Winter Feast food market and the nude solstice swim, held on the shortest day of the year in the freezing waters of Sandy Bay. The swim was still held last year and saw its capacity increased from 2,000 to 3,000, but still sold out; Twite said it would remain open to 3,000 this year. Every year, a giant wooden effigy of a different endangered species is burned. This year's 'Ogoh-Ogoh' will be a Maugean skate, a flat-bodied ancient ray found only in Macquarie Harbour. The species has made headlines in the run up to the Australian federal election, as Tasmania's salmon farming industry threatens its extinction. Dark Mofo will be staged 5-15 June, then 21 June. Tickets go on sale to subscribers at 10am on Wednesday 9 April, then to the general public at 12pm.
The Guardian
17-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Eighty tonnes of sand and junk: why Mona's latest exhibition is destined to collapse in front of our eyes
Théo Mercier, the French visual artist, choreographer and stage director, has spent months in Tasmania taking photos of junk. In Mirrorscape, an exhibition that opened on the weekend at Hobart's Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), he and an international team of expert sculptors – Kevin Crawford, Enguerrand David, Sue McGrew and Leonardo Ugolini – used 80 tonnes of compacted sand to recreate the scenes of decay and detritus he found, serving them as a mirror of our own ruin. It's a ghostly scene of domestic, environmental and industrial decay in still life, and it's beautiful. Fine, clay-rich sand collected from a Tasmanian quarry has been compacted and sculpted into hyperrealistic shapes to scale: from the threaded cushioning of a mattress and a crumpled old pillow to the brittle, snapped gum tree trunk and a side-view mirror dangling off a wrecked ute, the intricacies are replicated to perfection. They're also very Australian, right down to the impossibly well-crafted twisted sheets of corrugated iron. 'It was really important to me that everything was really strongly locally grounded, so that you can actually see your own mattress, your own car, your own catastrophe,' Mercier says of his first exhibition in Australia. 'And the title, Mirrorscape: it's a landscape that mirrors you.' He's brought our rubbish back into the house, holding it up for acknowledgement and responsibility while creating the space for all the questions we don't want to ask. Mercier says he spends much of his time playing between the two poles of attraction and repulsion and bringing things from the periphery to the centre. 'For example, bringing this desperate landscape, the one from the dump, the one from this trash place that you don't want to see, that is put outside the city, I put it back in the middle of the city, in the place – in the fetish place – the museum, where you are paying to see something. At those other places you pay to make an object disappear, and now you are paying to see it. Somehow, the ghosts are back and they're in the centre.' The work was created in situ, in the former library space deep in the guts of Mona's concrete industrial labyrinth. The sculpture takes up one whole wall, flanked by muted stainless steel and protected by glass. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning The sterile feel of the steel is juxtaposed with the soft warmth of the natural sand, which contrasts again with the destruction and decay depicted. 'What interests me is the contrast between the violence of the scene and the calmness, the stillness,' Mercier says. 'There is something really soft and really epic at the same time.' Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion Mercier has left his work deliberately ambiguous. While it's clearly about human impact and destruction, the timeline is unclear, as is the force to blame. It looks like the aftermath of a tsunami, perhaps a cyclone or explosion, but it's not quite. The addition of naturally eroded sandstone cliffs, seemingly subsuming the ute and other man-made objects, add to the story. 'It's like a specimen – a specimen for what?' Mercier asks. 'A fossil from the future? Prophetic stone? It's a bit lost in time – you don't know if it's something really archaic or really prophetic.' Also unknown is how long the artwork will last. It's a dynamic piece of work, designed to decay before our eyes over the year that it is on display at Mona. 'Sand is a really interesting material because it represents landscape degradation,' Mercier says. 'We are destroying mountains, emptying rivers, making islands disappear to build our cities, our streets, our houses, so we are destroying to build, but we are building our own destruction. 'In this case, I built the ruin, I built the destruction, and now we will look at this destroyed landscape going back to its original state: the sand. It's a man-made landscape that can go back to its natural state. 'You can see a giant sand clock: weeks after weeks, months after months it will erode … The landscape will disappear and the sand will remain and continue on its own journey. What we are seeing now is just one moment.' Mirrorscape is at Mona in Hobart until 16 February 2026
