Five Art Projects Remixing Urban Spaces in Sydney

In this feature, Concrete Playground goes off the beaten track to visit five inspiring projects re-imagining our city and eroding the barrier between art and everyday life. By taking dead patches of urban space and transforming them into creative destinations, these artists are reinvigorating the barren, the forgotten and the just plain boring.

Elizabeth Street Gallery

One night last month, a collective of photographers installed forty large-scale photographs on a car park wall in the centre of Sydney. Most people saw this stretch of bricks as a blight on the cityscape, but Andrew Quilty and his colleagues saw the potential for a street block gallery that reversed urban decay. They went ahead and installed large-scale photographs on the wall without seeking permission from the City of Sydney. They just thought it needed to be done.

Quilty says the secret to the crew's guerrilla tactics was donning official looking high-visibility vests while installing - passing police barely glanced at them, let alone questioned them. Only once the photographs were up did the team notify the council. Quilty says "the message went up through the ranks and eventually got to [Lord Mayor] Clover [Moore], and that day, they gave us the thumbs up. They notified the graffiti busters not to touch the gallery."

Quilty says Moore "wants to turn it into a permanent fixture in the city, and we'd be keen to play some part in part. For the time being we have no intention of taking what's up there down.

"We're not precious about the work, we're quite aware of the fact that its on the street and its open to graffiti and the elements. We're happy to see it in its transient nature. We're happy to see it replaced with something else eventually."

Conductor's Project

This new micro-gallery is split between Museum and St James Stations. Supported by the NSW Transport Rail Corp, Conductor’s Project utilises a series of previously blank glass display cabinets to offer almost 6000 commuters a tiny injection of contemporary art on their journey from home to work and back.

Beyond it’s innovative use of empty space, the curatorial line-up is assured, engaging and thoughtful. The space has been occupied by local artists Phil James and Remnim Alexander Tayco, and currently houses the work of Justin Balmain.

Alaska Projects

Until October 2011, the former mechanic’s office in a King’s Cross car park was abandoned and barren. The tiny room and the patch of concrete around it is now home to Alaska Projects, an artist-run initiative that offers free, accessible exhibition space to Australian artists. Alaska requires a sense of adventure from its audiences: an off-street, car-dodging trek down a parking lot ramp, into an elevator, and across the fluoro-lit car park floor eventually leads you to the visual arts space. A yellow strip of paint still runs through the middle of the gallery floor, an ode to the space’s humble beginnings.

Alaska has recently expanded beyond its regular contemporary art cycle into a range of film and music programs, including an monthly classical music series, “Musical Alaska”. An evening of Andy Warhol films, electro outfit Collarbones, the Sydney Symphony Vanguard and classical music chameleons Ooi and Quartet2100 have all lent warmth to the cold, grey concrete space.

Renew Australia

When Marcus Westbury’s Renew Newcastle project started, there were a hundred and fifty boarded up shopfronts in the city’s CBD. The project, which temporarily installs artists and small businesses in vacant commercial spaces, had an immediate impact: business and property owners say it increased foot traffic and brought life and buzz to Newcastle's centre. It also gave artists the opportunity to exhibit, experiment and work for as long as the properties were vacant.

Renew Australia is the expansion of this initial project, taking over dead sites across the country. It’s a real test of the broadmindedness of real estate agents and property owners, but all indicators show that they’re up to the challenge: three new large-scale spaces have just been announced across NSW and Victoria.

Drew Pettifer's Still Revolting

This art project was part of SafARI 2012, a grassroots festival of emerging and unrepresented artists that flits between galleries and spaces alongside the Sydney Biennale. This time, SafARI went off the grid almost entirely with Drew Pettifer’s “Still Revolting” series.

The Melbourne-based artist posted his large-scale works on brick walls across inner Sydney in a cross-cultural collision of high and low art. It requires a lot of confidence to paste up your art, poster-style, with the knowledge that it could be torn down and rolled over by the next week’s batch of gig advertisements. But it worked. The egalitarian exhibition method melded perfectly with the work’s thematic concerns of sexual equality and the gay rights movement’s history.