Curator Peter Keen Serves Up Some Sweet Interactive Treats At Sugar Mountain

Partygoers descending on Sugar Mountain's cultural confluence of music, art and food when it returns for a sixth outing this year — headlined by The Avalanches who stepped in valiantly when Blood Orange was forced to pull out — will pass through a towering, eight-metre-high archway. 

Marking the entrance to the festival grounds, centred in and around Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), the vast edifice, accompanied by a camera obscura-bearing viewing platform and matching main stage, is the offering of Supergroup London. Otherwise known as UK design luminaries Morag Myerscough and Luke Morgan, they're renowned for this kind of bold architectural statement.

The spectacular frame forms a bright beacon for the loose artistic themes binding this multi-disciplinary event. "We're trying to explore lines, colour and form this year," says Sugar Mountain's creative director Peter Keen. "Each artist addresses that simple approach from their own well-considered perspective."

In the spirit of creative collaboration, which Keen insists is key to Sugar Mountain's continued evolution, two large-scale artists will add to an existing, much-loved relic of Sugar Mountain past: the explosively colourful Dodds Street car park mural sprayed by VCA alumni Ash Keating using his signature paint-filled fire extinguisher.

"People are so used to seeing art stuck on walls and we're trying to explore that delivery in different ways and allow people to interact."

The massive new works have been commissioned from Australian artist Elliott Routledge and New Orleans-based MOMO. The latter's vibrantly clashing coloured lines writ 50 metres high link the main stage to one curated by global music platform Boiler Room, where Routledge's clash of expressive form and geometric abstraction takes over. 

"MOMO uses interlacing line and colour combinations that almost blur and jitter, creating an incredible visual illusion," Keen says. "Routledge, who's based up in Sydney, has a very similar approach but [it's] realised in his own personalised way."

Creating stunning backdrops of impressive scale, the Boiler Room area will also play host to Melbourne-based, Newcastle-raised Caleb Shea's sculptures. Like multi-coloured cartoon characters frozen mid-tumble, thankfully they'll be mounted high enough to avoid dance-related incidents prone to damaging either artwork or shins.

"Even though they are stationary, there feels like [there's] quite a lot of movement because of their angles," Keen says of the seemingly kinetic, yet actually stationary creations that will throw down alongside Sugar Mountain's revellers as they soak up the sounds of Mood II Swing, Baba Stiltz and CC:Disco!

"We're stepping away from the typical face of a music festival and offering a greater experience that's reflective of the smaller circles and creative communities of Melbourne," says Keen.

If festival crowds sometimes find themselves in a slightly altered state of mind, then the playful contribution of Aussie artist and Tokyo export Karan Singh fits in perfectly, although his perception bending is entirely legal and unlikely to result in a horrendous comedown. The visual artist and illustrator demonstrates a simple sensibility borne of graphic design. His large-scale 2D works surrounding the V MoVement stage can be brought to spectacularly augmented life using the Sugar Mountain festival app. "People are so used to seeing art stuck on walls and we're trying to explore that delivery in different ways and allow people to interact," Keen says. "Especially as everyone's bound to be on their phone throughout the day, so we may as well put them to work."

Two separate installations by Canadian contributors expertly bridge the art/music divide. Montreal composer, digital artist and performer Myriam Bleau will bring her globe-hopping installation Soft Revolvers to Sugar Mountain. A sort of ghostly DJ deck, the transparent, spinning acrylic disks emit a haunting light and a suitably glitchy, synthy sound. With Bleau in the driving seat at various points throughout the day, festival punters are encouraged to take over for a spin themselves between her appearances.

In a similar style, sculptural installation artist Robyn Moody, in collaboration with New Yorker and Chairlift frontwoman Caroline Polachek, presents a restaging of her 2005 massive laser work Harp. Evoking '80s cult hit movie Tron or Tom Cruise's classic Mission: Impossible, 48 red lasers are beamed from one wall to another, creating a giant instrument with each 'string' assigned a distinct sound by Polachek. Unlike Cruise's character Ethan Hunt, the idea is to break the beams so you can play Harp by hand, Keen says. "You can make your own song or an orchestra of noise."