Take Hold of the Clouds

Curated by Associate Professor Tara McDowell and Fleur Watson.

This year, Open House Melbourne (OHM) is pleased to present a curated exhibition titled Take Hold of the Clouds in partnership with Monash University. Take Hold of the Clouds brings together cross-disciplinary creative practitioners from the visual arts, architecture, design, sound and film to make an installation or creative work in response to sites they have selected, ranging from buildings to urban landscapes to community spaces, as part of the flagship OHM 2022 July Weekend. 

Beyond simply placing artworks in buildings, the exhibition—distributed across seven different sites throughout Naarm Melbourne—stages a series of thoughtful encounters between site-specific and temporal creative works and architecture. Each practitioner has responded to both form and context, adding a new layer to how we understand these buildings and spaces in relation to the world around us. 

To this end, the creative practitioners draw our attention to previously invisible connections, stories and issues implicit in these urban spaces: the unbuilt as well as the built; architecture as porous and leaky; bodies and histories rendered invisible or obsolete by buildings; progressive forms of architecture to build community; the natural world in relation to the built environment and the atmospheric effects of man-made processes. 

Importantly, by using the city as an exhibition space rather than a traditional gallery, Take Hold of the Clouds models high-impact yet sustainable and resource-sensitive exhibition-making, and supports the production of curated projects that are light in footprint. 

Take Hold of the Clouds is conceived by Tara McDowell, Director of Curatorial Practice at Monash Art, Design and Architecture, and co-curated with Fleur Watson, Open House Melbourne’s Executive Director.

Screening throughout the weekend at The Capitol, RMIT University, a visually spectacular, art deco cinema designed to evoke a multi-coloured crystalline cave, Forensic Architecture’s Cloud Studies (2021) draws attention to architecture’s gaseous state by investigating different chemical compounds released into the air by manmade events.

Inside the iconic Norla Dome at Mission to Seafarers, Ying-Lan Dann’s newly commissioned installation, Circular Temporalities (2022) brings together audio and video field recordings that consider the site’s relationship to global seafaring, and to the mariners stranded at sea during the pandemic.

At the Brunswick Baths, Alicia Frankovich presents The Eye (2022), a live performance sited at the main indoor pool that recognises climate crisis, including rising sea levels, as a given condition of contemporary life. Bookings are essential.

Julia McInerney’s new installation Joanna (2022) includes photographs, sculpture, and film, unfolding in rooms of the heritage-listed Villa Alba Museum. An exploration of artistic practice as a series of reparative acts, the installation is inspired by the often unrecorded or invisible work of women, including the artist’s mother and Melbourne’s first female landscape architect, Ina Higgins.

Kent Morris, a Barkindji man living on the lands of the Bunurong people in Naarm Melbourne, has selected the St Kilda Foreshore Vaults as the site of a major new public artwork in his ongoing Unvanished series: a four-panel photographic installation of local rainbow lorikeets transforming from black-and-white to full colour.

On view at the Melbourne Quakers Centre throughout the weekend, Cauleen Smith’s 2018 video work Sojourner imagines the possibilities of a deeply generous, feminist, and Afrofuturist community through a pilgrimage to sites of utopian community-building in America.

Snack Syndicate (Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange) will inhabit the Victorian Trades Hall & Literary Institute in order to revive the historic 3KZ radio station for These Thoughts Large and Public (2022), a series of readings, talks and conversations around the history and future of labour, broadcast live throughout the weekend and accompanied by tea and pastries.

Take Hold of the Clouds also includes Open House / Open Access, a research-led access project by Fayen d’Evie with designers Luke Rigby and Yue Yang.

Generous support of Take Hold of the Clouds is provided by the Victorian Government, Creative Victoria, Besen Family Foundation, Monash University, Create New South Wales, City of Melbourne, City of Port Phillip, Moreland City Council, All Are Welcome, Boom Studios and RMIT School of Architecture & Urban Design.