“The High Life”
Hotham Street Ladies, Natasha Frisch, Dell Stewart, Adam Cruickshank, Andy Hutson, Kirsten Bradley, Tai Snaith and Carl Scrase
12 Mar → 23 Mar 2010

Presented by West Space and the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival.

The High Life is a series of rooftop art projects curated by West Space that will be a feature of this year’s Melbourne Food + Wine Festival. The Festival invited West Space to work with contemporary artists to present artworks that reflect upon themes initiated in this year’s festival keynote project ‘The Metlink Edible Garden’.

West Space has commissioned eight artists to make new work that responds to ideas around plants and gardens, food sustainability, urban landscapes and environmental concerns more broadly.

Working across some of Melbourne’s best-loved rooftops for the duration of the festival, the artists have also responded to the unique flavour of each establishment. How will artists interpret the hunter/gatherer ethos at Sarti Bar and Restaurant, or the flamboyant cheekiness of Madam Brussels? How will they respond to the understated but oh-so-Melbourne elegance of the Order of Melbourne, or the cool as a cucumber and high as a kite atmosphere of Rooftop Bar?

Artists: Sarti Restaurant & Bar: Hotham Street Ladies + Natasha Frisch
Rooftop Bar and Cinema: Dell Stewart + Adam Cruickshank
The Order of Melbourne: Andy Hutson + Kirsten Bradley
Madame Brussels: Tai Snaith + Carl Scrase

Closing Night Event: Tuesday 23rd March
On the closing night, come join us on a walking tour across all four sites:

5.30–6.00pm: Sarti Restaurant & Bar. Enjoy champagne on arrival to toast the artists and the festival’s closing night.
6.15–6.45pm: Rooftop Bar and Cinema
7.00–7.30pm: The Order of Melbourne?
7.45–8.15pm: Madame Brussels. As the grand finale, artist Carl Scrase will perform his flower shooting artwork.

Sarti Restaurant & Bar

Hotham Street Ladies + Natasha Frisch Address: 6 Russell Place, Melbourne. ? Open: Mon–Fri noon–3pm, 6pm–11pm | Sat 6pm–11pm.

Hotham Street Ladies: The Garden of Armageddon The Hotham Street Ladies will create a scene that represents our future if we do not finally do something about climate change. In Sarti’s pizza oven, which resembles a ruined stadium, the Hotham Street Ladies will create a miniature rock opera that is a vision of Armageddon. It probably won’t scare you to death as it will be made of icing and other foodstuff. As one would expect in the last days of the world, sweet and savoury collide in a river of vegemite and strawberry jam, while people made of icing fight over the last morsels of civilisation. Biography: The Hotham Street Ladies are a group of five women who do food-related projects including cake creations, recipe books, street art and installations. Each of the HSLs has lived at one time in a crooked share house in Hotham Street, Collingwood. Recent activities for the Hotham Street Ladies include making a wedding cake that looked like a leopard skin rug; entering the Royal Melbourne Show with a cake decorated to look like a pile of pizza boxes, and ‘frosting’ Newcastle’s This Is Not Art festival. The members of the Hotham Street Ladies are Cassandra Chilton, Molly O’Shaughnessy, Sarah Parkes, Caroline Price and Lyndal Walker. http://hothamstreetladies.blogspot.com/

Natasha Frisch Natasha Frisch is a Melbourne-based artist who employs modest materials to construct models and installations that closely approximate everyday objects and sites. Inspired by crime mythologies, suburban folklore, and forgotten architecture, Natasha’s meticulous constructions aim to challenge our reading of the built environment, and interrogate the slippage between the real and the unreal.
Natasha completed her Bachelor of Arts (Media Arts – Honours) at RMIT in 1997, and since then has exhibited consistently both nationally and internationally. Her work has been presented in several solo exhibitions including, Somewhere in the Middle of Nowhere (Mailbox 141, 2007), Nasty Little Piece of Work (Next Wave Festival, 2004), and Living (Artbox at Sherman Galleries, 2001). Natasha’s work has also been featured in numerous group shows, a selection of which includes, Grow Wild (Utopian Slumps, 2008), Elsewhere (Nellie Castan Gallery, 2007), Pleasures & Terrors (Blindside, 2006), and Papercuts (Monash Museum of Art, 2003). Recently, Natasha has been a finalist in The Ola Cohn Memorial Sculpture Award, and her work was featured in the ‘New Work’ section of Art World magazine. She was also the joint recipient of the Arts Victoria – Cultural Exchange Award for her participation in the international exchange project Parallel. Natasha is represented by Dianne Tanzer Gallery.

Rooftop Bar and Cinema

Dell Stewart + Adam Cruickshank
Address: Level 7, Curtin House, 252 Swanston Street, Melbourne. ? Open: Daily noon–1am

Dell Stewart: Flying Charlie?
Flying Charlie is a mix-up of ideas Dell has about idealism, lifestyle, hunger and despair. Umbrellas on a rooftop speak of lazing and luxury. They seem like an idyllic place from which to escape and ponder the world. They transport us to resort parties in the sunshine featuring colourful umbrellas and thatched tropical scenes in some unique island location with extravagant looking cocktails. In an age where economic opposites are so extreme, self-indulgent decadence can be read in two distinctly different ways depending on where you are standing. Perhaps in selfishness there is freedom? With true liberalism you can be unconventional, enlightened and even optimistic. Especially if you have the cash. ‘The Lobster’ and ‘The Pineapple’, slang for the $20 and $50 dollar notes respectively, are both loaded with flavour and a pinch of exoticism too. Yes, it all comes down to Cash Money. The Rooftop Bar will be resplendent with screen-printed editions of flags in red and yellow featuring lobsters and pineapples. Let’s have a holiday. Live the high life. Dell’s printing pineapples. Dell Stewart has organised and participated in numerous solo and collaborative exhibitions, working with sculpture, drawing, animation and installation. Most recently she has exhibited at Bus and Utopian Slumps in Melbourne and Project(OR) in Rotterdam, and undertaken studio residencies in The Netherlands and in Berlin.

Adam Cruickshank: Audience Acquisition?Supermarkets are on the leading edge of psychological and point-of-sale techniques engineered to make you buy more and more often. They do this to further their business and to make a larger profit. Supermarkets are big business. Gourmet food is big business. Crappy snack food is big business. And the design and implementation of ‘supermarketing’ is big business for the marketing and advertising companies involved. For the vast majority, most of our purchasing of food is done in a supermarket. None of this comes as a great surprise, but it’s easy to become dissociated from this mundane reality while being lulled into a state of culinary bliss by a barely-focused photograph of a chocolate and raspberry layered mousse in the sumptuous shiny pages of Gourmet Traveller or while quietly contemplating the latest organic locally produced rosemary-fragranced olive oil at a farmer’s market. Rather than focus its attention on food itself, Audience Acquisition references and utilises the point of sale mechanisms employed to sell us food. Primarily the work replicates the devices of point-of-sale marketing and exaggerates them to a ridiculous degree. Using the rail along the side of the Rooftop Bar as a kind of supermarket shelf, with a constant stream of Rooftop Bar customers as its makeshift supermarket audience, the various works shout loudly and obtrusively. These are sales tools stripped of their content, void of their associated products. Ground back to their basic graphic forms, they scream impotently at a largely uninterested audience already accustomed to such techniques. Adam Cruickshank is an artist working across a broad range of media and installation techniques. Having worked as an art director and designer in advertising and magazines, the corporate generation and manipulation of culture is central to much of his artistic practice. The dialogic nature of his approach also attempts to examine hierarchical definitions of so-called ‘fine’ and ‘applied’ art practices and the ways in which ‘meaning’ undergoes contextual flux. Cruickshank attended the Queensland College of Art in the early 90s and exhibited at various Brisbane artist run spaces of that time. He is the recipient of a 2010 City of Melbourne Arts Project grant and a 2009 Linden Postcard prize winner. He has lived in London, Berlin, Malaysia, The Netherlands, Papua New Guinea, Sydney and currently lives and works in Melbourne.

The Order of Melbourne

Andy Hutson + Kirsten Bradley
Address: Level 2/401 Swanston Street, Melbourne. ?
Open: Tues/Wed 3pm–11pm | Thur/Fri 3pm–1am | Sat 3pm–3am.

Kirsten Bradley: The latent power of germination
The latent power of germination is a simple exploration of shape, colour and the implicit promise of the seed. A small field of seedballs, a constellated plane of small, clay spheres, lies in wait for a rain event sufficient to break apart each sphere and germinate the heirloom herb varieties within. Depending on the weather, this work may or may not transform into an ocean of seedlings during the course of the festival. Small samples of the latent power of germination will be available free of charge from West Space during the course of this installation. Feel free to pick up a packet and establish a bit of hardy, nutritious herbage wherever you think it’s needed. About Seed balls: Seed balls are a technique used to propagate plants in inhospitable environments. A simple yet powerful concept, they involve a seed or seeds being encased in a coating of clay to protect the seed from insects, birds and other factors until a suitable rain event enables the seeds’ germination. With the addition of compost to aid growth after germination, the seed ball becomes a small yet robust environment that both protects and then nurtures the seed until it is well on its way to independent growth. Kirsten has used seed balls extensively to establish plantings and build biomass and diversity on her farm. Through this process she has become aware of both the potential power and also the poetry of this elegant technique. Adding to this the microcosmic ethos of what a seed ball can contain, they perhaps represent the quintessential metaphor for urban renewal. Kirsten is a farmer, artist and writer working from a farm in the NSW high country. She is primarily concerned with our shifting relationships with nature and with land stewardship in both rural and urban contexts. Her background as an artist is in New Media, installation and Public Art, and she has created installations for a range of galleries and organisations including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and the Govett-Brewster in New Plymouth, New Zealand as part of artist trio Cicada. Kirsten also runs Milkwood Permaculture Farm with her sometime artist-collaborator from Cicada, Nick Ritar. Milkwood is a small organic farm exploring the possibilities of regenerative agriculture in the context of a marginal Australian landscape.

Andy Hutson
Andy will construct a greenhouse, built out of timber and clear builder’s plastic, that will be suspended from the ceiling at The Order of Melbourne. Inside, and sprawling out from the structure, will be cardboard and paper plants based on psychotropic plants (the high life?) and vegetables that Andy has grown – or attempted to grow – in his own back garden (the good life?). These will be illuminated and silhouetted by a combination of fluoro and UV lights. The effect will be of a kind of psychedelic, baroque overflow of floral good times. Biography: Andy Hutson is a Melbourne-based visual artist, who has exhibited extensively both locally and interstate. Andy’s artistic practice stems from a preoccupation with catastrophe, and takes the form of impermanent sculptural installations that oscillate between the miniature and the monolithic. He occasionally creates sets for film and theatre. He is also an active member of the committee at Seventh Gallery, an artist-run space in Fitzroy. In 2008, Andy completed his Master of Fine Arts at the VCA. He is now patiently anticipating the end of the world.

Madame Brussels

Tai Snaith + Carl Scrase
Address: Level 3, 59-63 Bourke Street, Melbourne. Open: Daily noon–1am.

Carl and Tai will create three site-specific and interconnected projects for Madame Brussels. They are collaborating on two large banners for the Madame Brussels' rooftop that will refer to concerns about environmental sustainability, consumption and indulgence, as well as to the temporality of the artists' other works. They will both also contribute individual works: Tai is creating tailor made mini-gardens in the form of white teapots and ceramic vessels with green succulents planted in them, which will fit in perfectly with Madame Brussel’s overall art direction. Carl’s solo work will be an event at the Closing Party to be held on Tuesday 23 March. As a fitting finale to The High Life, Carl will set off a flower bomb/canon that will shower a cloud of flowers over the crowd as a final celebration and event.

Tai Snaith has a multifaceted practice working as an independent artist, curator, producer and writer. Honesty, absurdity and animism heavily influence her artwork and ideas, alongside a recurring focus on collaboration and experimentation. Using collage and drawing Snaith often explores the inner thoughts, spiritual beliefs and apocalyptic visions of the greater animal kingdom. Graduating with Honours from the VCA in 2002, Tai has recently exhibited her site-specific illustration and collage at a range of various commercial and artist-run spaces including West Space, TCB, Bus, Brunswick Bound Gallery, Kristian Pithie Gallery, Greenwood Gallery, No Vacancy Gallery, Hosier Lane and VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery. Tai has worked as a Visual Arts Producer for the Next Wave Festival (06-08), Melbourne Fringe (05), Emerging Writers’ Festival (07 Rich Text exhibition at RMIT Storey Hall). After receiving an Australia Council grant to travel to Berlin and Glasgow (05), Tai initiated the New Ruins project which was presented in the City Watch House for the Commonwealth Cultural Program as part of the 2006 Next Wave Festival. She also recently curated the collaborative site-specific program House Proud for the 2008 Next Wave Festival, which was restaged as a project space for the 2008 Melbourne Art Fair. Tai regularly conducts a critical arts review program on 3RRR FM, and has recently completed the Australian Council Tokyo Residency.

Carl Scrase is a Melbourne-based philosopher and artist. He has shown extensively in many of Australia’s best artist-run galleries, arts institutions, commercial galleries and festivals since graduating with a BFA from Monash University in 2008. Some of the exciting things Carl will be doing in 2010 include: exhibiting as part of Next Wave’s Sports Club project; presenting a show at Platform Gallery supported by the Australia Council for the Arts and a Melbourne City presentation grant; and creating a 14-metre high sculpture for the Splendour in the Grass music festival. Carl is represented by John Buckley Gallery in Melbourne.