Nite Art Melbourne 2014

24 July 2014 | 2:25 pm | Martin Shlansky

This involved galleries and museums extending their opening hours.

Nite Art 2014 kicked off with a bang at the Karen Woodbury Gallery, with guests from a large cross-section of the cultural community invited to inaugurate the second year of the event.

Nite Art is a city-wide happening, with a focus on finding a personal experience of Melbourne’s artistic landscape. This involved galleries and museums extending their opening hours; artists creating installations, music and discussing their work; and curators bringing everything together. Roger Alsop's In and Out, Over and Under at the Grainger Museum

Deputy Lord Mayor Susan Riley officiated the launch, noting the role of the arts in Melbourne’s identity and the importance of encouraging accessibility through events like Nite Art.

Co-ordinators of the event also spoke of their hopes for what this year’s event would offer, and what the event can do for Melbourne.

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My first port of call was the Flinders Lane Gallery, where contemporary painter Claire Bridge worked publicly on a new piece. I went down Flinders Lane, going from restaurant to gallery to lobby to alleyway, to the Arts Centre, Fed Square and up to Melbourne University and Luke Paulding’s installation Vessel beneath the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

Overlap with the 2014 AIDS conference meant that work related to AIDS awareness and queer identities was also in the forefront.

Speaking with the artists revealed a widespread satisfaction with the opportunity to engage new audiences, and some of them simply relished the chance to show their work at night. Kyoko Imazu’s intricate paperwork dioramas at the Athenaeum Library were subtley backlit — adding to the already eerie atmosphere of the rarely-entered-by-Joe-Public heritage site.

Personal freedom was a running theme throughout the night; people were seeing what they wanted to see, they were arranging with friends to meet up ahead, to split off and reconvene as they wanted. The experience of site selection was very liberating, and I for one can’t wait for future years of this event to bring art and people closer.