Visual Art students visit Melbourne

At 7:30am Friday the 22nd of June members of both year 11 and year 12 visual arts classes gathered at Sydney airport to disembark on a weekend in Melbourne. The flight was short and before we knew it we were on our way to check in at our hotel in Melbourne. After a short stop in a nearby food court to grab a quick lunch we were travelling on a tram  down to the NGV.

The focus of our excursion was to see MoMA at NGV: 130 Years of Modern and Contemporary Art. Lots of us were excited to see works from masters like Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cezanne or Pablo Picasso. Salvador Dali, Frida Kahlo, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol were also included in this exhibition filled with over 200 works arranged in 8 sections.  We also saw works from Marcel Duchamp, helping bring artworks we were studying in class to reality. It was amazing to see so many famous and influential pieces of work in one place, I know a lot of us were surprised by the size of Dali’s Persistence of Memory. After a long day of looking at art we headed back to the hotel and tucked into a feast of Indian food at the restaurant next door.

On the Saturday we returned to the NGV for another day full of art. We looked at the feminist Guerrilla Girls exhibition which provoked questions about women in the art world and society in general and explored the NGV’s permanent collection. We then moved across the road to the Ian Potter Centre at Federation Square, which is dedicated to Australian art. Here we saw Colony: Frontier wars which explored the period of colonisation in Australia as well as The Field Revisited which displayed colour field painting and abstract sculpture in Australia. But for us, the most interesting part of this gallery was Top Arts 2018, which is Victoria’s version of ARTEXPRESS. Looking at works by fellow school students is always interesting and it provided inspiration and encouragement to us, who are either completing or will have to start our major works.

On the last day of the trip we embarked on a street art tour around the streets of Melbourne. Our guide was eccentric, to say the least, but it allowed us to see street art from an insiders perspective. We learnt about the methods street artists use, the meanings behind some works and the popular places for the rich street art community in Melbourne to create.

Overall, the trip was filled with lots of art, lots of food and was very informative and enjoyable to all of us. We would like to thank Ms Thompson and Ms Starr for organising the excursion and for giving up their weekend so we could have this wonderful experience.

Sofia Locke
Year 11 Visual Arts