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Early last year, I was invited to participate in the core program of the Ballarat International Photo Biennale to be held in Australia in September. Having not previously gathered the requisite momentum to mount a solo show of my work, this invitation was just the push I needed to finally make it happen. After settling on a theme for the show,tentatively titled Immediate Future, I threw together a little marquette of the room I was to occupy at the historic Ballarat Art Gallery and began figuring out what could possibly go where.

Remarkably, the photographs of the model became the perfect reference when we set about hanging the show a few days before the opening.

The gorgeous large scale prints were crafted by Brian Gilkes at Pharos Editions. And thanks go to Tugi Balog at Graphic Art Mount in Sydney for the great job with mounting and delivering the final works to the gallery.

More information on the Ballarat International Photo Biennale can be found here.

And stay tuned for more information on future dates for an updated and expanded version of the show in Singapore (late 2009) and Stuttgart (early 2011).

I can’t help thinking that this model wasn’t given an adequate site safety induction.

Surely she must have know the dangers of working on a construction site without a hard hat. The text to the right read The Sky is Not the Limit. It  certainly didn’t say the sky was a dangerous place with loose light fittings that can swing down and knock you unconscious.

South of Los Angeles at BIOLA University, Gensler has for many years been involved with the planning and design of the growing campus. When documenting one of the new additions recently, we certainly didn’t have to look far for inspiration. The basketball team is apparently the envy of the west!

Every time I walk into one of those enormous John Portman lobbies, I can’t help but think of that Gursky photograph of the Grand Hyatt Shanghai (designed by SOM). You know, the rather dull one looking straight across the otherwise dynamic and soaring atrium space….. I never really got the whole Dusseldorf school’s thing about non-participation. 

Photograph Artwork by Andreas Gursky

Admittedly, seeing the large scale print of the Gursky image in a museum was rather impressive but having spent a good deal of time photographing the same space for the Hyatt some years earlier, I can’t help but feel his was a pretty demure response to what I thought was pretty entertaining architecture.

In any case, here’s my ten seconds worth of input into Ode to Andreas at the Marina Mandarin Hotel in Singapore.

Still in Singapore, recent Aga Khan Award winners WOHA Designs were testing the lighting on their Iluma mixed use project. The project, located in the bustling Bugis Junction part of town, comprises theatres, nightclubs, restaurants and retail. It is due to open to the public in the next few months.

Working with renowned German lighting designers Tim and Jan Edler of realties:united, the external facades along Victoria Street have been covered with a series of interconnected lighting pills that can be individually programed to actively display an astounding array of visual wonders. The effect on the street was mesmerising and each night during the tests, crowds of passers by would stop to marvel at the display.

Throughout the test sessions, the realities:united team commandeered a cafe sidewalk table across the road from the project. From this vantage point they used laptops to tweak the programing of the building computer system driving the facade. The different data sequences being fed into the laptop appeared instantly, in grand scale, across the street.

With testing over for the night, we returned the table to a more profitable use (from the cafe owners perspective at least). Waiter, another round of Pils, if you will.

Still at the Academy, the first part of a specially commissioned, multi-site artwork by Maya Lin has been installed on the western edge of the building. The theme of the artwork revolves around the idea of “missing” and is a memorial of sorts to the rapidly increasing number of species that are no longer with us.

The work so far consists of a large grid of metal rod that has been distorted to follow the contours of the California coastline, The animated grid hovers above the paved terrace, moving amongst the slender vertical columns that support the glass canopy above.

The overall piece is perhaps best appreciated when looking back towards the building from the lawn.

Looking up through it from beneath reveals the degree of detail involved in tracing the topography of the Bay Area coastline.

In addition to this part of the work, other installations by Maya Lin at the Academy will likely include some photography and video components. The completed project is set to launch on Earth Day in April 2009.