New Year and APT7 Art Brisbane Jan 2013

We rang in the New Year by taking our dinghy upriver to where they were setting off dual barges of fireworks.  They had an early show at 8:30 pm for kids and old farts like us who couldn't stay awake until midnight.  Then they moved the midnight show to the river between YOLO and the downtown riverside skyscrapers so there was no way I could sleep through the booms and reverberations off the tall buildings!

You can see the Brisbane Wheel ferris wheel all lit up near the center.

Jason laying on the side of the dinghy watching fireworks.

Fireworks at the South Bank

A public pool on the South Bank, along the river walkway.

 

South Bank pool by day

 Jason and Jeff on YOLO.  Jeff was kind enough to allow us to use his mooring when he took his boat, Albatross, up north.We left YOLO on the mooring and headed off on a campervan tour in late January.  Then the flood came.... another whole story.

We spent a day touring the art from the 7th Asia Pacific Triennial (APT7) expo.  It was in the building next to the library we practically lived in, so we walked the extra 100 feet and wandered through the exhibits and joined a guided tour there.  The theme this year was Papua New Guinea so the following pictures show art that is representative of the native works from that country,which is just off the northeast corner of Australia.

A fish head drum

 Totem poles that were the pillars holding up a roof of a building.  The roof is on the wall.  You can see ceremonial costumes in the foreground.  These are big enough for a person to wear.

Woven art and woven wall

giant ditty bags made of recycled metal

Full-sized masks and ceremonial costumes

Tall carvings

The base of a very tall sculpture

another ceremonial mask.  These were made for one special occasion and then usually destroyed.

Totems for support of the roof on the wall

The carved pole supports

Big Yellow, an artwork made of cardboard boxes taped together and painted yellow.  It was over 30' long and covered the whole end of a hallway.  Art???..... You can see it in the background of several other shots.

Building gone amok.

more plastic bag art.

 

A bridge outside the art museum.

 A carving in the art museum

Dinghies at the dinghy dock.  Our aluminum dinghy is in the center there.

Dot art of Grace Jones in tribal costume.

 Dot art of a cannibal scene.  You can see a person from the waist down on the left, some wood in the foreground, being used to fuel the fire under the pot where a person is being cooked.  You need some perspective from a distance and some imagination to 'see' these pictures.

A closeup of a massive collection of blown glass animals that are strung along a huge tabletop representing a huge migration of all the animals of  the world.  There are thousands of these little blown glass animals.  Can you imagine the job of packing them up to move them one day?

A partial view of the glass menagerie

Moving day boxes that spells LOVE.

I can't even tell you what these represent...

Indonesian money nailed to a giant tree trunk.

Plastic bag art; this is made entirely of plastic bags.

American flag art in the museum exhibit.

Another American flag art piece

Sushi trucks.  These are toy trucks with pieces of sushi as their loads.  Cute.

Another view of the sushi trucks.

Another view of the Brisbane Wheel.

One of the 6' ditty bags on the wall.  It's made of recycled barbed wire.  Another was bed springs and others were different metals salvaged from junk yards.

 A giant wooden carriage with a small compartment in it.  I climbed up to look into the inside and got scolded by a museum employee.

A suspended shrine made of balsa wood that took up an entire room.  It is made to represent a reflection/mirror image of itself in the water and is identical from top to bottom, just inverted.

"The Written Room", with nonsensical Farsi scribbling meant to invoke calm.  It looks like musical notes or tree branches to me.  I really liked this room

Another view of the written room

The next 6 shots are some of the permanent mosaic artwork built into the sidewalk/riverwalk along the river on the South Bank, not part of APT7.  So colorful, and folks walked and rode their bikes over them often without even noticing them!  They are about 4-feet  by 4-feet square each.