Northern Exposure
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Northern Exposure

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Northern Exposure celebrates diversity within the arts and is breaking beyond the confines of your typical gallery, taking it to the streets. The festival celebrates local artists and will run for two weeks from Friday June 17, along Northcote’s busy High Street. The event is run by local traders and sponsored by the Northcote Business Association. “The street is the gallery” is the event’s motto and artists will utilise shop windows and hidden nooks and crannies within the urban streetscape to display their works.

Kicking off proceedings is the festival’s High Events, a series of arts-based events set amongst the local galleries, retailers and the town hall. The High Views window installations are site-specific pieces created within the artist’s chosen shop front. New to the program this year is the Small Works, Small Spaces street art installations. The introduction of street art is hoped to reinvigorate the event and entice people to come and discover hidden artworks. Event coordinator and local bookshop owner Benita Bunting is looking forward to what this year’s event will bring, “ Small Works, Small Spaces artists have been innovative with using different unused spaces along the streets which is pretty exciting.”

She says the combination of the classical Victorian architecture and the quirky installations should prove to add interest to the local community, “High Street Northcote is one of the oldest retailing strips in Melbourne. It has so many layers of history and taste, it’s lovely to add colour to that through permanent or semi-permanent art pieces.”

Benita says her customers are also excited by the possibilities that the event brings, “They love seeing the landscape change. It makes you appreciate your environment in a new way.”

Exhibiting artist Leith Walton believes the event is groundbreaking, “Making the connections in community between business owners and artists is an excellent way to build community, and keep that arts culture alive as well as being beneficial to business owners. Just this concept that the whole street is the exhibition is almost radical and something that will really brighten up the street.”

Belinda Wiltshire the Small Works, Small Spaces Coordinator admits that initially it was hard to convince some of the locals, “Some traders worried about what it would lead to. Street art is a positive thing and not necessarily graffiti.” During the planning stages of the Small Works installations there was a strong focus on easing the community into the idea of using their surroundings as a canvas for art, “We’ve kept it all very easy, moveable and viewer friendly so that people get more of an idea of the concept of street art.”

As a painter and street artist herself, Belinda’s biggest challenge was trying to harness an art form that is typically spontaneous, “[There’s a] fine line between keeping it street and keeping it under control.”

The installations are deliberately small and easy to miss if you’re not paying attention. “The nature of the artwork is to be found and not pointed out. Part of the joy of finding a tiny sculpture and interacting with the urban environment is discovering it and not expecting it.”

The 21-artist lineup promises an array of surprising urban art. Artist CDH’s Gift Wrapped installation will be using everyday street architecture such as bike racks and air conditioning units and giftwrapping them. A possible homage to Jeanne-Claude and Christo’s wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin, Belinda says, “It’s a little unexpected joke. A lot of them are jokes.”

Other weird and whimsical works to look out for include a spider web woven from red and white hazard tape and a tiny hidden island landscape, complete with thatch hut and palm tree.

Northern Exposure is an interactive festival and relies on the viewers’ participation. Depending on where you are looking, each visitor will take away with them a different experience to the next person. “It’s three fold,” says Benita, “artists create the installations specifically for the business or building, which is then being interpreted by the customers who visit that space.”

One of the biggest challenges of incorporating a dynamic art installation is that it’s exposed to the elements. Weather and security issues may make an impact on what does and what doesn’t make it to the end. “Some of the artworks may not last the whole two weeks, some might not last the night,” says Belinda. This was something that was taken into consideration during the months leading up to the event. Benita and Belinda selected works with a “curatorial eye”, making sure the various installations worked both together and within the environment, “You can’t put 2D work that’s fragile up in a pizza shop or something that’s 3D and sculptural where there are kids running about,” says Benita.

The official Small Works, Small Spaces guided tour will be hosted by singer Susy Blue on opening night. The musical, pied piper-style art trail will meet outside the Uniting Church and hunt for hidden works by torch light.

Organisers are hoping the event’s success will help gain support from the local community to commission some permanent street art installations. Benita feels the Northcote community has been so supportive of its creative inhabitants, “It would be nice to bring the urban inner city art to the burbs.”