look, matter

The last time I went to an art gallery was Tuesday evening. The gallery in question is known as First Site and it has shows every two weeks featuring work from RMIT students. They have openings every Tuesday night with free wine and nibbles, which is a lovely way to end a hard Tuesday at university, as you can imagine. Anyway this fortnight in the gallery there are three different shows. One is 'Wondernamel', which is enamel jewellery. Another is a the deterioration of ceramic sculptures and the third consists of postcard-sized canvases that just looked really nice to me and I didn't really ingest their meaning.

For a student gallery I have to say First Site usually has good work. I like going there because my sister and all her friends from painting go to the openings and it's the only time I get to see them. First Site is a bit of a weird gallery space, being in a basement, but it's usually used to great effect. A lot of the shows reflect the nature of the space, oh there have been some good ones there! You can do a lot with lighting and there are different nooks going round. People always walk in craning their neck around in peculiar awe. The curator is also a really cool dude.

I chose this topic initially after I went to NGV with my dear pal Jordan. I was walking through the giant rooms looking at 100 year old portraits, big old scenes in gaudy gold frames pretending that I was a lady in a difficult dress with a parasol viewing them for the first time. The rooms are so big in that place! Then Jordan took me to the contemporary part and told me all about gestural work. I liked the colours. We then went to the park.

Anyway it just struck me that people can get weirded out by galleries because they have a bit of stigma about them - I know some of my friends at RMIT get a bit annoyed by the 'art scene'. And some worry about 'not knowing about art'. But it's not necessary to know about art! Any opinion is fine, including no opinion. At NGV I was trying to make up stories about the people in portraits and the artists but there were too many things there and we were going around too fast. That's a really enjoyable part of going to galleries for me. Actually that was the first time I've been inside NGV for about ten years or something so it was kinda nice. Even though really it's just a collection, just showing off all the expensive acquisitions that the Gallery has.. it's still nice to be in a giant building and be surrounded by so much interesting stuff.