Written with Lee Salomone exploring the utilisation of prominent billboards on the tram track in Adelaide for the term of one year at no cost for them to be used as public art spaces.
As an organisation, Arts + Industry is fundamentally concerned with economics and income generation. Assisting artists and designers to either find employment with industry or create opportunities as self-employed designer/makers is integral to their goals.
Artists were left out in the cold at the 1994 Festival of Arts. Examines issues facing organisers of events such as Artist's week in the context of the Adelaide Festival of Arts.
"As a practising artist/craftrsperson with an interest in education, teaching and learning, the potential of studio based training greatly appealed to me."
Artists are particularly vulnerable to economic downturn for two main reasons...the business cycle and the role of other jobs in a tight employment market.
The time is post-recession, the economic climate is uncertain, Australian designers and consumers inhabit the suburbs but are cut off from each other, and someone decided to do something about it in the City of Caulfield, Victoria.
"If you are real lucky you got CDEP or your are making it selling your art and then you got a good art centre too, maybe. If you are real lucky just when you turn up with a couple of week's art production, maybe yours, maybe the families, the centre's got cash, no one's a bastard, everyone's happy, the store has even got some decent food, even new bikes, toy guns, tape decks and a few tins of Log Cabin. Shit, life's good - sometimes anyway." A personal view of art making in indigenous communities.
The Premier of Victoria may claim that his government has opened Victoria for business, but it is the important role of local government and the Federal Government in developing arts training and facilities that is really making the running. Artists are no longer in their garrets but in front of pcs in their offices.
Operating both as an industry training ground and as a space for creative experimentation, low budget film and video production must be thought of as an economic and a cultural investment.
Bark painters of Arnhem Land are experimenting with a new medium - canvas- and in so doing both increasing their output and responding to market forces.