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Celebrating its 40th anniversary and 20 festivals, the 2015 Castlemaine State Festival – titled ‘Before & Beyond’ – presents its largest ever program of music, performance, film and visual art.
Founded in 1974, the festival was modelled on Europe’s famous small-town classical music festivals. A unique event in its time, the festival opened up the regional touring circuit for organisations such as the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. In subsequent years, it has grown into a multi-artform festival, committed to artistic excellence in a regional setting, specifically aimed at creating a context for valuing the arts in Victoria.
Provocative, playful and probing, the 2015 Castlemaine State Festival’s Visual Arts Program (VAP) features new work by local, national and international artists who have responded boldly to the Festival theme, ‘Before & Beyond’.
Curated by Neil Fettling (Director, La Trobe Art Institute), Kelly Gellatly, (Director, Ian Potter Museum of Art) and Jennifer Kalionis (Director, Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum) VAP is presented across a range of sites within Castlemaine and its surrounds. VAP offers participatory engagement with a range of visual artworks that explore notions of transience, history, place, environmental sustainability and material ethics.
The Old Woollen Mills will host two compelling large-scale, site-specific works that are both premiering as part of Castlemaine Created festival commissions. Each presents a unique experiential encounter that draws together the past and the future.
RKM Collective is a group of Castlemaine-based artists who will develop and present the Road Kill Mausoleum (RKM) – an interactive public artwork that is spatially designed after the architectural cruciform footprint of the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, Italy. Built from thousands of VHS tape memory vaults, RKM is a walk-through memento mori. It explores death as obsolescence, collective and genetic memory, and the relationship between the experience of being human and our inner beast.
Castlemaine Art Gallery will be home to the ‘Museum of Holes’, a comprehensive exhibition of artworks and objects collected by the artist and selected from the entire range of both the Gallery’s and the Historical Museum’s collections by significant artist Patrick Pound. Thematically and symbolically, a hole can conjure up a vast and surprising variety of interpretations, also linking historically to Castlemaine’s goldmining past. This exhibition will be at once amusing and telling, and will redraw our attention to the things with which we have become too familiar. The selected works and objects will be found and made to work differently through this poetic exploration.
On the ‘grassy knoll’ outside the IGA shopping complex, people will encounter Anonymous, a sculptural installation by playfully macabre visual artist Jessica Ledwich. The work explores the commemorative markings created to celebrate the life of someone revered and respected. It consists of a custom made concrete sarcophagus, with a taxidermy fox curled on top at one end. The fox’s unexpected location gently challenges viewers to consider their own relationship with mortality and question contradictory notions of death and passing: absolute finality versus transition from one state to another.
Pennyweight Flat Cemetery will be the site of ‘Unsettled’, by Frank Veldze, Suzanne Donisthorpe and Kate Osborne. A major interactive sculptural installation, Dream Home by Frank Veldze, will be placed on site, transforming at night with light, soundscapes and projections of Kate Osborne’s Ghost Colonial Woman, exploring challenges faced by the communities who have lived in the region since colonisation – from Indigenous, settler and mining communities through to today.
Castlemaine State Festival
13 to 22 March, 2015
Victoria
Edgar Hechavarria Ricardo, Memorias… (Memories …) (detail), 2009
Courtesy the artist and Castlemaine State Festival
