Bendigo Gallery has a terrific street presence - huge close up photos of alabaster white classical bust sculptures, appropriately setting the mood for a mix of the modern and old.

Inside the gallery are two (typically) large white rooms set next to a more traditional room:

"These rooms were designed in the grand European tradition (notably the Tate Gallery, London) with polished wood floors, ornate plaster arches and cornices, and diffused natural sky-lighting through rooftop lantern towers."

If you visited the NGA annexe when (during it's St Kilda Road renovation) it invaded the Museum's old digs on Russell or have been to the Art Gallery of New South Wales then you'll immediately recognise this kind of room.

During our visit we checked out the Experimenta House of Tomorrow - an exhibition I had been consciously avoiding for most of last year.

Best of the bunch was Patricia Piccinini's detailed "Young Family 2002-03" from her "We are family" series- and Marcus Lyall's hilarious "Slow Service" which uses a high speed video camera to capture the moment his subjects were pelted with pizza, custard, pea soup, etc.

Also on show was Bookplates from the Corrigan Collection, Bendigo Art Gallery - and we didn't dwell long on this. To my mind an exercise in padding - it could have made a fascinating poster of ephemera rather than being strung out across four walls.

Tracey Moffatt: Fourth. Weak pseudo-paintings consisting of hand-coloured style images from the Sydney Olympics broadcasts. Have a look for yourself.

I just realised I know one of the exhibition curators - Liz Hughes - I was once an overacting extra in her short, Cat's Cradle:

"At a factory with blazing furnaces, workers leisurely talking or looking in newspapers, don't even notice the family as it walks toward a furnace, carrying the corpse."

"workers leisurely talking or looking in newspapers" is code for my bad acting. Small world.

42 View Street, Bendigo Victoria 3550 Australia
Entry by Donation. Ph: 03 5443 4991

This entry was posted on Monday, January 24, 2005 at 24.1.05. You can skip to the end and leave a response.