Image courtesy City of Sydney.
Famed collective The Glue Society returns to Art & About Sydney 2014 with public art project Us, a pop-up style photo-booth designed to interrogate the formation of social and cultural groups in contemporary Australian society.
Creator James Dive of The Glue Society has been a member of the award-winning international collective for the past nine years and said Us was a departure from earlier works. ‘It’s slightly different in its execution. It’s almost performance based, and a very different setup from what I’m used to working with.
‘Whether we’re in an elevator, a car accident and everyone’s helping out, or when someone has a fall, people gather around and you form an unofficial group for a moment in time, and then that group disperses. And so I thought, well, if these groups are forming because of these events, why couldn’t art form one of these spontaneous groups?’
Held in the heart of Sydney on the Queen Victoria forecourt, Us invites random groups of people to be snapped in a temporary photography studio, before images are distributed as a personal take-home copy and published to a live Tumblr blog.
The project is just one of the many fantastic public art events to be staged across Sydney during the three week Art & About festival, which launches on Friday 19 September and runs to Sunday 12 October.
‘One of the things I really like with all my artworks is being interrupted. I quite like when art isn’t the destination. You don’t go out to see art, you just sort of run into art and I think that’s what Art & About does really well. You can just be planning to do something else and you just run into art. I really enjoy that,’ said Dive.
‘I like that people will be going around, doing their business and their day will be interrupted by a piece of art that asks them to have a group photo.‘
‘It really is a celebration of all the groups I suppose we do have in Sydney and around the world. What it sort of captures is a real moment that disappears, and a fleeting moment in time could relate to the “endangered” theme. But it definitely records a moment that will be lost forever when these people disperse from the photo.
Dive said that Us follows from the successful Art & About 2012 installation I Wish You Hadn’t Asked, where guests donned yellow raincoats and stepped into a house that had been literally rained on.
‘What was really interesting about it is, I’ve done a lot of public art in Europe, and I wasn’t sure how involved Sydneysiders would get, especially with a raining house, because the work requires you to put on a raincoat and get wet basically.
‘I wasn’t sure what the involvement levels would be like in Sydney. To my surprise it was fantastic, Sydneysiders were more engaged than their European counterparts.’
What and where:
Us by James Dive and The Glue Society will be presented at Queen Victoria Forecourt, George & Druitt Streets 19 September to 5 October, 11am to 6pm.
Art & About Sydney 2014 runs from 19 September to 12 October.
For complete program details visit the Art & About website.
This is a free event.
