art extravaganza

Ever since Ma and I made that visit to the Museum and the Art Gallery back in January, we seem to be going out of our way to find various little art galleries and exhibitions and things. And today, since there was so much stuff that just happened to be on, we did a bunch of it all at once.

After Random Food Shopping, we headed into town and managed to find a park in the 20 cent section that I found once when I was off to have my hair cut, so bonus there... however, since today is also Saint Patrick's Day, we had to contend with a large number of people of Irish extraction in various shades of green going the opposite way from the way we were going. Alas there was only one cute redheaded guy that I saw... I don't know if he had an Irish accent or not though, but if he had, I might have been in trouble... you know, from the drooling.

Anyway, we started off with the National Treasures from Australia’s Great Libraries exhibition at the State Library, which was quite interesting... well, some of it... specifically Ned Kelly's famous helmet... I don't know why, but there was something really... moving, I guess... about it. Just seeing the dents in it, you assume from bullet hits... very powerful.

The other piece that really struck me as powerful was the letter written to the organisers of the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne...

John Ian Wing, a 17-year-old apprentice carpenter from Melbourne, suggested that athletes 'must not march, but walk freely and wave to the public' during the closing ceremony. His idea has become an Olympic tradition and the Melbourne Olympics became known as the 'Friendly Games'.

The spirit behind his letter actually got me a little choked up.

After that, we headed down to the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra headquarters to look at an exhibition of photographs, but when we got down there it turns out that they're only open during the week... which was kind of annoying... then we trailed up the Mall, stopping off at Borders to make use of my 40% off coupon, and ended up getting a bunch of stuff because of their damn ongoing 3 for 2 offer... stuff we wanted, but still...

We were supposed to have another stop off, but the place we were headed to turned out not to be the place I thought it was (same kind of shop, totally different company), so that didn't work out too well either.

Then it was down to the Torrens Parade Ground to see the Helpman Academy Graduate Exhibition which was actually pretty good... it's just a shame that anything that could have been interesting (and a slightly reasonable price) to buy had long been marked with a red dot as sold.

Because Adelaide is playing host to the 2007 World Police & Fire Games, everywhere we went today we were either seeing people with official looking teeshirts or backpacks or passes or whatever... and we actually walked through a group of Russian Police (alas, not as hot as I hear the Russian Firefighters are) at one point... and saw lots of other people who must have been involved in some shape or form, even if we couldn't work out where they were from.

We actually headed down to the Torrens (aka where I walk) to check out the Dragon Boat Racing that was supposed to be taking place today... but alas, no dragons, no boats, no nothing. There were, however, a large number of pretty damn hot guys down by the river, I assume that most of them were either Police or Firefighters of some description, although some of them could have been random tourists or spouses or whatever. We hung out for a while, but the closest we got to seeing Dragon Boats was a woman who went past who had "Dragon Boat Team" printed on the back of her teeshirt... but she was headed AWAY from the river, so after that we pretty much gave up.

After that we tootled up to the National Wine Centre to check out an exhibition called Me Fein (Me, Myself and I in Irish... but it would actually be a cool blog name I think, although you might have to be Irish to pull it off), which was all female artists, and largely female subjects. To be honest, actually going into the Wine Centre was actually more interesting than the art, since I've never been in there before, plus I got a few good shots on the fringes of the Botanical Gardens on our way to and from the car.

Next stop was the Tin Cat Cafe, which we'd visited a couple of weeks ago to see the bodypainting photos by Emma Hack, but this time to see the Botanica exhibition, specifically the butterfly jewellery. Pricey stuff... really beautiful, but pricey.

The last stop on our Art Extravaganza was the Art Images Gallery in Norwood, specifically to see the stuff by Eliza Piro... now her stuff I really liked... and I actually took a really close look at a couple of them (since she works in acrylic paint), since I thought I might get some inspiration for something myself. I'm sure I couldn't so it half as well as she did, but it was still a thought.

And after that we were all art-ed out...

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