The Monash Gallery of Art is a small but very pleasant gallery. Even the cafe is nice!

Just been out there today to view the Seidler Dupain “Building as muse” exhibition. Harry Seidler designed well over 180 buildings in Australia and is quite well known for them, and Max Dupain is a renowned Australian photographer.

Seilder designed the buildings and Dupain took the photos, and its a combination that worked quite well, in fact the blurb at the exhibition said that they had a close working relationship, resulting in some stunning images.

There were some very interesting images of buildings from the 1950’s onwards, not just the buildings but the furniture and knick knacks in the houses from years gone past.  The photos were quite exquiste, not that I’m much of an expert mind you.  The thumbnail opposite (click to see the full image) is on display – well not that one as the original image is so much better, the framing of the building in the ‘tear drop’ which is possibly a window or a door, was clever, as was the image of the Sydney Harbour bridge from the inside of one of Seidlers Buildings in Sydney.

There are three exhibitions on at the moment.  Paul Dunn has an exhibition on “Imagined Communities” where he has taken photographs of billboards depicting new housing estate developments and show what life ‘will’ be like once the development is all done.  Of course, we all know that images of happy families riding bicycles and young beautiful couples cuddling by the lake are not the reality; the reality is more likely to be parents yelling at their kids to keep off the road and couples swigging a few beers by the lake while lobbing the empties at the ducks.  Once I understood what the artist was attempting to do I walked around the images again and took note of the ‘concept’ and then thought about the reality of housing estates, how they isolate people, are removed from public transport and other facilities and how they encourage us to travel by car more, to work or even the super market.

The final exhibition was by Robert Ashton, “Photographs from the Edge” and again a stunning collection of images from a variety of places around the edge of the Australian continent.  I took delight at seeing so many images of the water and sky, my favourite being a wet shaggy dog jumping through the water.  View the images from the exhibition here and “Into the void” a happy dog here.  Michael quite liked “The Beast“.

We then had a toasted sandwich at the gallery cafe, which was pleasant enough.  The gallery is out on Ferntree Gully Road in Wheelers Hill, its a small gallery but was well worth an hour of my time to just wander around and enjoy the exhibitions.