Design Examples from the Beauty in Exile Collection by Elliot Ward-Fear

Above five images of examples from the Beauty in Exile Collection were kindly provided by its designer Elliot Ward-Fear.

Designer Elliot Ward-Fear with his sister.

Some of the designs from the Beauty in Exile collection were projected on the walls inside the after party space

More Photos from Elliot-Ward Fear After Party

Yanni, TVS Cooking Show host pictured with one of the models

Photos from Elliot-Ward Fear Fashion Week After Party,6 May,2010

As you walked up to the Elliot-Ward Fear After Party , such figures were on the steps and hanging off the railings

One corner of the after party space resembled a human garden

These figures were at the entrance to the after party space

Art Moment Gallery 14 April -13 June 2010

The remainder of my internship hours I spent at Art Moment Gallery, 99 Curlewis Street, Bondi Beach in arts administration. My responsibilities here include liaising with the gallery’s visitors who may be artists interested in exhibiting or prospective buyers.
www.artmoment.com.au & www.artwhatson.com.au/artmomentgallery

It is also my responsibility to oversee the update and redesigning process of the gallery’s current website –www.artmoment.com.au. It’s tough because I want to include many different aspects into the website’s content and make sure I do not leave anything out, but that means going over the same details, making sure nothing is missed, thinking of details to include that may be relevant for the future. This is a time consuming and costly task, which will be rewarding once it is completed. The aim is to make this web site look as sleek as the website- www.artwhatson.com.au/artmomentgallery but to have more sections and images and to have this information set out in a clear and organised manner.

6 May 2010- Fashion Week
Every year Sydney’s Fashion Week is on in the first week of May. On 6 May, 2010 as a representative of Art Moment Gallery staff I attended the Fashion Week after party for Beauty in Exile the debut collection from Australian emerging designer Elliot Ward-Fear. This self-titled collection was created as a graduation project from East Sydney Technical College in 2009. The avant-garde collection was selected to showcase in the Innovators show at the 2010 Rosemount Australian Fashion Week on 6 May 2010.

The after party space was a cross between an art opening and a live installation performance in Sydney’s CBD. As you walked in figures jumped at you, these creations looked like clay or playdo models. They suddenly came alive and moved as if about to grab you by the shoulder.

The mystical silent figures were painted black with colourful flowers on them. Just as suddenly as they blocked your way, they would back away and let you pass. In one corner of the gallery space, these dark figures were making contortions which resembled a large floral bouquet in mud.

The crowd gathered was Sydney’s trendy fashion conscious set, having seen many a fashion show and a fashion after party, the crowd looked pleasantly amused and intrigued by what was happening around them.

Apart from the live art installation there were images projected on to walls. On one wall there was a bright floral pattern projected, the mysterious black figures posed against it to striking effect. Another wall had a video projection of a model wearing Elliott Ward-Fear designs.

This collection approached women’s high fashion in a way which let the designer’s vivid imagination flow, resulting in luxurious wearable couture pieces.

" The Beauty in Exile range is a fusion of East meets West, where a blend of silhouettes of old world European glamour meets the simplicity of Asian design aesthetics. The range is inspired by the book Beauty in Exile by Alexander Vassiliev, which profiles artists, models and aristocracy who fled the Russian Revolution and inspired the world of fashion in Europe." (Elliott Ward-Fear Media Release 6 May 2010)

More Interesting Meetings at the Art Gallery of New South Wales

Jane Wynter, Benefaction Manager

Anne Flanagan, Deputy Director

The cheerful Packing Room staff

During my internship Jane Wynter,Benefaction Manager,organised an excursion through the Conservation at the Art Gallery of New South Wales for another student on work experience and me. Jane was very helpful in detailing what Philanthropy work involves at the Gallery.

I am also thankful to Anne Flanagan, Deputy Director at the Art Gallery of New South Wales for taking time to explain what her job involves.

During the internship I bumped into Bambi Blumberg, she is the Art Gallery’s Aboriginal and Contemporary Collection Benefactors Co-ordinator. I was in the same class with her for one of my subjects at COFA, it’s a small world.

The celebration of the Archibald Exhibition’s opening at the end of a hectic day for the Media Relations staff also served as my goodbye drinks, organised by Susanne Briggs and Claire Martin. It was most touching.

At the office drinks I met Fiona Barbouttis, who works in Philanthropy as the Development Co-ordinator. It turns out she completed the Master in Arts Administration at COFA not too long ago.
Fiona kindly lent me her Research Paper, which began my process of thinking what topic to choose for the Research Paper subject I will be doing next semester.

That afternoon, I also briefly met Terence Maloon, the curator of the upcoming exhibition Paths to Abstraction, which will open on 26 June this year and be on till 19 September. He is embarking on an exciting project.

“ One of the most ambitious exhibitions the Art Gallery of New South Wales has ever undertaken, Paths to Abstraction will include more than 150 pivotal works by some of the most influential pioneers of modernism, spanning 50 years when paintings, drawings and prints edged their way by degrees towards purely non-representational images.”
“Terence Maloon has secured representative works of more than 40 of the leading artists of the late 19th and 20th centuries including Monet, Cézanne, Matisse, Munch, Gauguin, Picasso, Kandinsky, Duchamp, Braque, Bonnard and Mondrian among others.”
“These works are from 59 institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; Museu Picasso Barcelona; Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou; Tate Modern; Tate Britain; J Paul Getty Museum and Victoria & Albert Museum as well as private collections.” www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/media/coming/paths_to_abstraction

It was a pleasure to get to know the informative and helpful Media Relations staff. It was great to meet some of the Gallery’s curators, the Gallery’s Director and the Deputy Director along with the staff members in Marketing, Philanthropy, Public Programs, Conservation and the Packing Room throughout my internship, who were each generous with their time and information about their work at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Curator

Currently Natasha Bullock, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales is curating a photo media exhibition where this medium is used in surprising ways for the viewer.

Using different media by artists in surprising unusual ways inspires Bullock as a curator. Examples of this are the Erased touring exhibition of Contemporary Australian Drawing,which Natasha Bullock solely curated and the exhibition of Bill Viola's Tristan project in Sydney in 2008,which she co-curated with Anthony Bond, Assistant Director, Curatorial Services at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Christian Capurro’s works encapsulated the exhibition’s title. “The Melbourne artist uses layering and rubbing, ink and correction fluid to erase and correct images from the pages of different magazines. The remains are a physical trace which, contrast to the hyper-visibility of imagery in contemporary culture…which could be described as a fusion between representation and gestural abstraction…there’s absence and presence in these works…these are ghosts of human activity…they resist total comprehension."(Erased Exhibition Catalogue p8)

Bill Viola’s Tristan Project explored an operatic body of work which celebrated the great love of Tristan and Isolde. Bill Viola used the medium of video to show where water became the meeting place for different worlds, the real and imaginary. (Exhibition Catalogue p5)

In 2008 Bullock also curated the exhibition of works by legendary photographer Harold Cazneaux. www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/archived/2008/cazneaux

Public Programs

Josephine Touma, Coordinator of Public Programs department at the Art Gallery of New South Wales commented that during the Archibald the Art Gallery’s public programs were designed to help people learn about portraiture and its history. Edmund Capon interviewed the Archibald winner and a public forum was also held.
Archibald, Image and Identity: a Portraiture Forum was held on Saturday 10 April 2010.Edmund Capon, director of the Art Gallery of NSW, and Andrew Sayers, director of the National Portrait Gallery, headlined a panel including artists Cherry Hood and Paul Newton (both finalists in this year’s Archibald Prize) and others. The forum was moderated by Virginia Trioli. The panel presented different points of view: the artist, the curator, the critic and the portrait sitter. www.thearchibaldprize.com.au/events/forum

Portraits in the Collection is as series of exhibition talks where gallery staff discuss their favourite portraits in the Gallery’s collection. On 7 April Josephine Touma, spoke about Nicolas de Largilliere's Portrait of an Officer.
www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/events/cal/portraits

A regular tertiary newsletter also gets sent out by this department to its subscribers. The Public Programs department aims to create more appreciation and understanding for the Gallery’s exhibitions by its different audiences, through providing visitors with a number of different opportunities, where they can learn more about each exhibition held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.