Seen any good blooms lately?

Happy New Year from Letting Space and the Suburban Floral Association!

Monique and Tanya from the Association are working on their project for Letting Space (Auckland Festival, March 8-20) throughout the summer and need your assistance - have you seen any hydrangeas in full bloom of late? Or any other blooms (like hibiscus) that take your eye? If so, they want to know where they are! Or even better take a pic yourselves and send it to us. Anything floral would be good. Pics and info can be sent to sophiejerramandmarkamery@gmail.com or questions and suggestions made on this page.

Happy bloom hunting.

Auckland ahoy!

Public art programme Letting Space are rather pleased to unveil a Letting Space project  for Auckland Arts Festival 2011, our first foray into Auckland, with a work by the artist group Suburban Floral Association in March 2010.

The growth in empty retail space means strong demand for the services of Letting Space. A high vacancy rate in the retail sector has created many opportunities for artists, with the Suburban Floral Association’s work perfectly positioned to bring new life into a monocultural retail environment.

During the Festival the Suburban Floral Association will work in Auckland’s inner city shopping area to bring floral blooms into a recession hit inner city shopping area.

This work aims to open up conversation between different people through something we all identify with: the blooms of plants. Shopfront asks whether the established planting of the suburbs can help pollinate the fallow ground in the inner city. 

The festival project will be staged in a retail space yet to be announced, Shopfront is an alternative gardening project that will change regularly– as cinema, gallery, seminar space, front yard and living room - a space where relationships between flowers and people will also change.

The Suburban Floral Association’s project also recalls the floral events of festivals of the 1960s and 70s when the influence of Agricultural and Pastoral Shows and Country Women Institute events were strong.

The Suburban Floral Association is a collaboration between Auckland artists Monique Redmond and Tanya Eccleston. For more information on Suburban Floral Association's activities and events, please subscribe to  the online forum, www.lettingspace.org.nz/contact-us

Shopfront is part of the Visual Arts programme for Auckland Arts Festival, the region’s biggest celebration of arts and culture.  In 2011 more than 75 separate events will be staged over two and a half weeks in March. More details on the programme, including some very exciting visual art projects we're pleased to sit alongside in their conversation with the city, can be found at www.aucklandfestival.co.nz

More about the artists

Monique Redmond is an artist and teacher living in Mt Albert, New Zealand. She is interested in front gardens, flowering trees and blooms that occupy suburban spaces. The suburban context, its sites, architecture, planting and gardens are a source for installation and photographic works that both draw upon and document the lived spaces of her everyday. She is currently Programme Leader Visual Arts at the School of Art and Design, AUT University. She has initiated or exhibited as part of a range of major art projects both in New Zealand and Australia.

Tanya Eccleston is an artist, writer and teacher now living in Avondale, New Zealand. Her own interests as an artist are in working with social contexts and communities. She has recently immigrated to Auckland from Glasgow, Scotland where rhododendrons grow wild as weeds in the hills and no-one would dream of planting one in their front garden. Tanya was formerly Head of the Sculpture and Environmental Department at the Glasgow School of Art.

Shopfront: Suburban Floral Association

Tuesday 8 March – Saturday 19 March

Site to be confirmed - Watch this space!

Roadshow

This rather fine work by Ann Shelton has recently been installed on Ghuznee Street outside Bartley and Company Gallery, as the first in a series of seasonally changing public art billboard works. Congratulations to the gallery and the artist on such a great start to this public project. 

Letting Space has a vested interest. We're rather pleased that the next artist to feature in Autumn will be Bronwyn Holloway Smith, with a work that will support the real estate mandate of her Letting Space project The Pioneer. 

Who would have known back in May when Bronwyn showed the following slide as part of her pitch at the Urban Dream Brokerage (a real estate billboard for apartments yet to be built on the side of the building that housed Kim Paton's Free Store) that this would come so neatly to pass?

This giant billboard remains in place driving south a mere 50 metres down the road from Ann Shelton's. 

For a window into Bronwyn's upcoming project for Letting Space you'll find that pitch with slide show here as part of our publication of a series of the pitches made to the Urban Dream Brokerage in 2010.

Nativity Scene on Featherston Street

We joked with Eve Armstrong about having a plastic Christmas tree in the window of her plastics shop - it being the season - and the very, very observant might have noticed she obliged with an abstract branch dangling some empty packaging. Yet we never predicted this....

A visit from the central character in the nativity story. Sharon Young and her sellotape baby visited the temporary inn for all things packaging at 143 Featherston Street, snapped here by exhibition sitter, Letting Space publicist and photographer Gabrielle McKone.

Another shot of this visit can be seen at McKone's excellent photo blog www.gabriellemckone.com, which daily captures the public street life of Wellington city.

Which is all by way of wishing you some seasons greetings and also announcing there's a whole swag of new images of Eve's project up in the image gallery (go here), including some rather fetching ones at night from across the road in Brandon Street.  

News Release: Eve Armstrong's work meets Buy Nothing Day

LETTING SPACE
“MAKING DREAMS REALTY”

NEWS RELEASE
For Immediate release:  22 November 2010

Eve Armstrong makes the perfect Buy Nothing product

Buy Nothing Day, a 20-year old day of international protest against consumerism, is this Saturday 27 November.
In time for this date and surrounding week of action, artist Eve Armstrong has installed Taking Stock: a sculpture comprised of plastic product packaging. Taking Stock can be found in an empty Wellington retail space at 143 Featherston Street until December 2.
Armstrong’s work is the latest from the Letting Space public art programme which causes us to pause and consider our buying habits, say Letting Space curators Mark Amery and Sophie Jerram.
“Enjoy thrift, celebrate Buy Nothing Day by visiting the shop where there’s nothing for sale” says curator Mark Amery.
Engaging with all the seductive qualities of retail and advertising display, Taking Stock uses the materials that surround our goods – the sort that you usually have to rip apart to get to the goodies.
“Taking Stock and Buy Nothing Day both provide a little breathing space as we head into the crackle and whirl of Christmas shopping and all its attendant packaging”, says Amery.

Taking Stock  is open shop hours, 10-6pm Monday-Friday, and 11-3pm on Saturdays at 143 Featherston Street Wellington, until December 2.

The programme Letting Space, supported by Creative New Zealand, seeks to transform the relationship between artists, property developers and their city. It commissions temporary art works from leading New Zealand contemporary artists for commercial CBD spaces. This project is also being supported by property managers CB Richard Ellis.

For more information about the project and Letting Space please contact Gabrielle McKone tel 021 373 873 or see
www.lettingspace.org.nz

For information on Buy Nothing Day and links to other events:
www.meetup.com/Buy-Nothing-Day/

Auckland Festival

Auckland Festival has an excellent looking Visual Arts programme thanks to Ariane Craig-Smith, just announced last night. And a little something from Letting Space will be up and running in Newmarket... here's a clue

Details soon 

http://www.aucklandfestival.co.nz/events/letting-space.aspx

From a collector

Some nice words below from Pataka's Education Coordinator Margaret Tolland on the joys of collecting plastic as one of a handful of galleries providing collection points for Eve Armstrong's work - opening this Saturday at 143 Featherston Street. We didn't keep count but we believe Enjoy Gallery to have led the plastic count, including also getting the award for dirtiest plastic... But Pataka were also strong leaders, something Margaret puts down to the collection point's placement outside the Porirua Library. 

"Pataka was keen to support Eve Armstrong’s new ‘Taking Stock’ work by providing a collection point for the clear packaging.  The wonderful upturned perspex plinths were a winner as the collection of clear plastic grew and gained momentum during the time it was here at Pataka. I saw people carefully placing their plastics into the case with precision and consideration.  It made me think of the black recycled bins we have here in Porirua and the untidy and unloved plastics that are discarded weekly.   The plastics looked superb in the case and I congratulate Eve on the idea, very cool.  I look forward to seeing the installation work and I hope that everyone thinks about Christmas packaging after this too."