SHADOW TREES PUBLIC ART INSTALLATION VICTORIA HARBOUR, MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

Sally Smart's Shadow Trees are now installed  at the new Buluk Park and library the junction of
Bourke and Collins street, Victoria Harbour in Docklands, in the City of Melbourne, Australia.

The Shadow Trees sculpture installation is an assemblage construction of painted and fabricated mild steel. The sculptural tree forms have horizontal as well as vertical impact, with elements linking each other to form an assemblage of parts.
The Shadow Trees silhouette elements are plasma cut and fabricated, with bolts and structural elements casting shadows within its structure and environment, creating a complexity of imagery -overlapping and connecting shapes and shadows.

The Shadow Trees branches and canopy elements radiate from the trunk structures to over 12 metres in height, visual impact to its location at the junction of Collins and Bourke Street, with this visibility amplified at night through illumination via integrated lighting on the structure of the Shadow Trees, and a lighting design from Ramus Illumination.

In speaking of the “choreography” of the trees, we mean the Shadow Trees inhabit the site by creating new, different shapes and spaces within it. These new shapes and spaces will in turn combine with other elements in the site, culminating in an architecture of interrelatedness. We speak of choreography because, as with choreographic work, the sculptural trees draw on metaphors and allusions, on focused improvisation and the transposition of actions and meanings. 

The text etched into the bluestone paving under the tree is a poem commissioned  to reflect ideas in the tree imagery and the site, its history and relationship to place, by writer and cultural historian Maria Tumarkin. 

ALL PHOTOS:FRED KROH

Sally Smart The Choreography of Cutting (Spring) installation views,

2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Dark Heart, Art Gallery of South Australia

March 1st- May 11, 2014

Views of the Performance: The Choreography of Cutting

Choreographer and dancer Brooke Stamp  performing a dance work - responding to Sally Smart's installation
The Choreography of Cutting (Spring) and performed in her installation space at the 2014 Adelaide Biennial,
Art Gallery of South Australia, on May 11, 2014

Installation view Sally Smart Choreographing Collage, Breenspace Sydney, Australia

The Pedagogical Puppet: Projects by Sally Smart

September 24 - October 27, 2012

"As our 2012 Raymond and Beverly Sackler Artist-in-Residence, Smart plans to produce a new body of work that will include her first exploration with time-based media and performance. While on campus, Smart will be taking advantage of the expertise of UConn's world-renowned Puppetry Arts Program and Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry. Smart will also have use of the School of Fine Arts' newly outfitted Media Lab to do editing and high-speed film rendering.

Australian artist Sally Smart is recognized internationally for producing stunning, large-scale wall tableau installations made from felt, canvas, silk-screened and everyday fabrics that she fashions together with pushpins. Smart is a process-oriented storyteller, presenting work that characteristically subvert gender hierarchies through deconstruction and reconstruction of historical events and political associations with the traditional activities of women. Her work identifies with the art practices of Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism, and reflects a long engagement with avant-garde modernist women artists such as Sonia Delaunay, Hannah Höch, Lyubov Popova, and Sophie Taeuber, all great exponents of work with performance and puppets.

In collaboration with CAG and as an added attraction, the William Benton Museum of Art plans to present from October 6 through December 16 a grouping of framed mixed-media collages that were initially presented in Smart's New York exhibition Flaubert's Puppets.

Sally Smart has long been interested in the unstable, the illusory and the uncanny. As opposed to certainty or perfectibility, her interest is in the realms of shadows, symptoms, dreams, mutations and subconscious memories.... Along with the strong visual impact of the imagery in Sally Smart's work, it is the richness of implication, triggering an array of conscious and subconscious associations, that gives her work its poetic resonance, depth and potency. The element of risk-taking is ever-present."

Professor Barry A. Rosenberg,
Art and Art History Department,
University of Connecticut, USA, 2012

PARA - REAL

 601 Artspace

601 West 26th St., #1755
New York, NY 10001
http://www.601artspace.org/Current

Sally Smart's installation work Artists Dolls was commissioned by GOMA for their current  exhibition-

'Contemporary Australia: Women- 21 April – 22 July 2012
The exhibition ' includes more than 70 works in painting, sculpture, photography, installation, textiles, video, and performance. The exhibition will explore key themes such as ‘performing’ femininity; the place of personal and intimate spheres such as sexuality, the body, motherhood and ageing; the return to everyday materials; and the ways some artists are ‘redressing the canon’ of painting.'

http://qagoma.qld.gov.au/exhibitions/current/contemporary_australia_women/artists

No-Name Station 16 Oct – 14 Nov 2010, Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China

The project has been initiated by Gertrude Contemporary in Melbourne, in collaboration with Warmun Arts Centre in Western Australia and Iberia Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. It has been developed with the support of the Australian Embassy in Beijing and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and will be promoted as a part of DFAT’s 2010 Year of Australian Culture in China campaign. The exhibition and book launch in Beijing in October 2010. 

Brook Andrew, Gao Shiqiang, Newell Harry, Mabel Juli, Gabriel Nodea, Marika and Marissa Patrick, Rusty Peters, 
Rammey Ramsey, Liang Shuo, Sally Smart, Wang Wei, Zhao Zhao

The exhibition launched in Beijing will be shown in Melbourne in 2012 at Gertrude Contemporary.

Sally Smart Shadow Puppet Dreaming
No-Name Station Project, Warmun, Australia 2010 

Sally Smart Boab studio
installation view 2010 

Sally Smart Boab installation
view Iberia Center for Contemporary Art
Beijing, China, 2010

No-Name Station Project exhibition
opening at Iberia Center for Contemporary Art,
Beijing, China, 2010

Sally Smart Eye Desire, 2010-11

Australian Tapestry Workshop
Commission for the
Royal Women’s Hospital
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Weavers
Sue Batten and Chris Cochius 

Photos courtesy ATW

Sally Smart Conversation Piece:Art Family,
2010, Synthetic polymer paint on Fabric with
collage elements and pins, 198cm x198 cm 

Bendigo Art Gallery  commissioned
thirteen Australian artists to respond
to the notion of the game of chess. 

Your Move: Australian artists play chess
is the touring exhibition of these works 

Bendigo Art Gallery 

30 October 2010 – 30 January 2011
and Australian tour 2011

Sally Smart Femmage Shadows and Symptoms 
exhibition McClelland Gallery + Sculpture Park,
and publication, 11 July - 19 September 2010

This installation has been exhibited in various versions
for exhibitions in Singapore, Korea, Japan and 
Spain (1998-2003). A new version was exhibited
for the  McClelland Art Gallery + Sculpture Park,
Langwarrin, Victoria, Australia

Visible Art at Republic Tower is the first major project of the Visible Art Foundation. The Republic Tower is an adventurous and challenging work of architecture, located in the city of Melbourne Australia. The Republic Tower’s designers are Nation Fender Katsalidis Architects.

The Visible Art Foundation commissioned artists to work on a project to create images for the Artboards, representing the art site. They were essentially two curved billboards comprising the first 4 storeys of the buildings prominent corner position, and made with the image printed on to vinyl and stretched over the board.

Sally Smart was a commissioned
artist in 2001, working with the Visible Art Foundation’s project manager Bruce Filley.
......................................................................................
Photography: John Gollings