The digital mural Gladwell vs Tirkot, is a collaboration between Gladwell and local Bondi photographer, Dean Tirkot. The title references DJ battle culture in which two DJs play against each other from adjacent locations at a party and the mural playfully delights in visual puns such as where Tirkot’s skateboarder, flying above the Bondi skatepark in a manoeuvre known as a stale fish, is given a fish’s head in the image.

Briefed by the QT Bondi design team LoveArt commissioned video artist Shaun Gladwell to create a split screen video and digital wall collage installation for the Lobby. Referencing the artist’s epic video set for the staging of Wagner’s opera, The Flying Dutchman, Bondi is reimagined through the combination of music, sound, silence and images. This iconic and familiar location is imbued with a sense of magic and the unknown.

LoveArt’s brief was to form a world-class collection of video works that offer guests an experiential and transformative engagement with contemporary art and culture. Daniel Crooks’ digital installation in the lobby visualises the passing of time, stretching crowds into abstract bands of colour as they navigate the city streets. Other works that feature throughout the hotel, evoking the immediacy we experience in the world of electronic media are by Daniel Boyd and Grant Stevens. Both Crook and Boyd were in the inaugural exhibition at the newly redeveloped MCA in 2012.

The digital mural Gladwell vs Tirkot, is a collaboration between Gladwell and local Bondi photographer, Dean Tirkot. The title references DJ battle culture in which two DJs play against each other from adjacent locations at a party and the mural playfully delights in visual puns such as where Tirkot’s skateboarder, flying above the Bondi skatepark in a manoeuvre known as a stale fish, is given a fish’s head in the image.

Crooks explores alternative ways of experiencing time and space through the moving image. He investigates the formal treatment of time…but as a spatial dimension. In doing so he graphically reveals the underlying rhythms and patterns of the physical world we navigate daily. He digitally re-imagines new ways of seeing. Here a street view is abstracted into a study of time, motion and colour. Forms come and go, shapes shift.

Creating an engaging and contemporary public space, Gladwell leverages local context and the inherent romance of landscape – urban and natural, to create a work that is as dynamic as it is evocative. With image references spanning skateboarding and surfing to Star Wars, this work expands the artists’s themes of landscape and the body in an inclusive, playful and humorous manner.

Boyd’s work feature in the lifts and Guilt Bar. His 5-channel video installation, was specially commissioned for the elevators of QT Hotel Sydney. Referencing The Jungle and The Universe, shimmering fields of coloured dots drift between abstract images and figurative ones. The subject is dark matter, particle physics & indeterminate cosmologies. Interactive, it defines the mood of the lift.  When crowded it becomes psychedelic and disco, whereas a solo occupant renders it contemplative and cosmic. This work was also exhibited in the prestigious Asia Pacific Triennial in 2012.

LoveArt commissioned London based Australian artist Shaun Gladwell to create an elaborate, projected chandelier for the elegant foyer void in EVT’s signature new headquarters. Gladwell used footage from the Cinesound Archive of Australian Feature Films, now owned by Event, to create a playful medley of moments that reflects the idealistic concerns of Australia in the 1930s. Footage from the archive has been re-edited to create a moving montage of isolated action moments such as dancing, kissing, driving, hand shaking etc.

These images silently play across custom made geometric screens to capture the period’s dream like quality in a dynamic contemporary work. The installation consciously engages with neighbouring lobby icons such as the Sol LeWitt mural in Australia Square and the huge Frank Stella installation in Grovesnor Place to foster a space where the viewer can, wait for their appointment while dreaming cinematographically, pondering how we see and represent ourselves both culturally and artistically.

In a breakthrough use of video art in hotels, QT purchased the entire rights for Grant Stevens’ work, The Drift, 2010,  for use throughout the hotels 200 guest suits. Instead of the usual hotel branding image and music, QT guests are greeted on arrival with Stevens’ video work, the content of which combines humour, insight and poetry with an engaging and relaxing display. An online dating profile, The Drift continues Stevens’ investigation into consumer culture and the internet as a conduit for human intimacy and connection.

LoveArt’s customised moving image installations for QT Port Douglas offer guests an engaging and novel experience during check in. Japanese artist Hiraki Sawa’s work Tracking [From Zero], 2011 is presented across a bespoke 7 screen plasma display behind reception in the hotel’s lobby. An ocean view melds into a flock of flying Australian Cockatoos, soaring through a desert sky. The usual travel fatigue is soothed as viewers are engaged and enveloped in an immersive world of sound and image. The work relates to the sound installation ‘O’, originally commissioned by the QAGoMA for The 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane, Australia.

LoveArt’s brief from QT hotels was to form a world class collection of video works that offer guests an experiential and transformative engagement with contemporary art and culture. Crooks’ imposing video installation in the lobby comprises a day (here) and night component that visualises the passing of people and time by stretching crowds into abstract bands of colour as they navigate the city streets while galvanising the Hotel’s lobby.

As dawn breaks Daniel Crooks work Static No. 6, 2003 takes over the screen, setting the scene for morning check ins and those making their way to the beach. A traditional Australian beach scene becomes as hyperreal as it is hypnotic and strange as Crooks continues his ongoing Time Slice project through investigating the formal tangibility of time. Extracting thin slices from a moving image and then recombining them using spatial and temporal displacement, his work ruptures the space/time continuum to retrain the eye into new modes of perception.

The night component of Crook’s video installation formally treats time as a spatial dimension. It graphically reveals the underlying rhythms and patterns of the physical world, that we navigate daily..and nightly to abstract an exotic urban night scape into a panoplay of time, motion and colour.

Jennifer Steinkamp is an important Los Angeles based media artist who employs computer animation to create large-scale installations that explore ideas about architectural space, motion, and perception. Her work Orbit 10, 2010, spans across a series of custom-built LED screens in the hotel’s lobby and depicts the celestial mechanics of a planet spinning through its year. The lens moves through various tree branches as their leaves and flowers are blown by turbulent winds conveying the passage of time. It becomes apparent that we are experiencing the seasonal changes in a splendid yet wholly unnatural tree, imprisoned in a digital realm.

Boyd’s four-channel video now plays sequentially on the flat screen in QT’s Gilt bar, but was originally shown as a floor-to-ceiling projection in the prestigious Asia Pacific Triennial. Shimmering fields of coloured dots drift and slide as fields of image and space abstract and reconfigure. All to a psychadelic sountrack and adds to its mystery.

Global Switch, an international data storage
company, engaged LoveArt to commission a work
for its 50 metre street front in Sydney. Issuing a
targeted invitation LoveArt received over 30
proposals from reputable young artists, convened
a selection panel, selected 4 proposals for
development from which one, Melbourne artist
Peter Hennessey, was finally chosen. LoveArt
negotiated contracts, liaised with Government and
oversaw installation, PR and launch.

In a breakthrough use of video art in hotels, QT negotiated the right to use Grant Stevens’ video, throughout the hotels 200 guest suits. Instead of the usual hotel branding image and music, QT’s guests are greeted with Stevens’ video, which combines humour, insight and poetry with an engaging and relaxing on screen display.

The brief was to activate the street front and
engage both passing road traffic and pedestrians.
Root Level, 2010, one of the largest public artworks in
Australia, is a giant plywood root system over 3
metres in height and 50 metres across.
Referencing the building’s function, the roots seem
to continue beyond the window, connecting the
interior of the building to the rest of world, hinting
at a strange garden growing inside.

Japanese artist Hiraki Sawa’s customised moving image installation plays across a 7 screen display in the hotel reception. An ocean view melds into a flock of flying Australian Cockatoos, soaring through a desert sky, soothing travel fatigue as viewers are engaged and enveloped in a world of sound and image. The work relates to the sound installation O, originally commissioned by the QAGoMA for The 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art.

Convergence, is a site specific sculpture by Australian artist Chris Fox commissioned by LoveArt for Global Switch’s Paris Data Centre. It was produced during 2010-2011 between Sydney, London and Paris. An ambitious project, it was two years in the making and utilises 370 metres of steel, realised using intelligent modelling software and advanced fabrication techniques.

Photograph by Jerome Epaillard

LoveArt continued its ongoing relationship with artist Daniel Crooks to install his work Static No. 6 for the morning component in the reception of this beachside hotel. Taking over the 7 screens, it sets the scene for the those making their way to the beach as a traditional Australian beach scene becomes as hyper as it is hypnotic.

From the lobby through to the atrium, the sculpture converges above you, coming to ground amongst three quotations embedded into a termination point for the cluster of steel spines that flow above the visitor. Developing out of the building fabric, Convergence is the physical representation of the systems of the building.

Photograph by Jerome Epaillard

LoveArt commissioned Orbit 10, to span a double height custom-built LED screen in the hotel’s lobby. Orbit 10 depicts the celestial mechanics of a planet spinning through its year as trees with their leaves and flowers are blown by turbulent winds as the seasons pass. As the lens moves around and through multifarous billowing branches, we can relax into delightful discombobulation.

Global Switch, an international data storage company, engaged LoveArt to commission a work for its 50 metre street front in Sydney. Issuing a targeted invitation LoveArt received over 30 proposals from reputable young artists, convened a selection panel, selected 4 proposals for development from which one, Melbourne artist Peter Hennessey, was finally chosen.

W Hotels’ first Chinese outpost was the new 393
room W Hotel Hong Kong located on the harbour
in the buzzing financial district of West Kowloon.
Over an 18 month period, from concept to
completion, the developers Sun Hung Kai
Properties enlisted an internationally recognised
team comprising LoveArt, Sydney’s interior design
firm Nicholas Graham & Associates, Tokyo-based
designers Glamorous and Melbourne’s Fabio
Ongarato Design.

LoveArt negotiated contracts, liaised with Government and oversaw installation, PR and launch. The brief was to activate the street front and engage both passing road traffic and pedestrians. Root Level (2010), one of the largest public artworks in Australia, is a giant plywood root system over 3 metres in height and 50 metres across.

LoveArt sourced internationally important new
work –the breathtaking chandeliers of Korean artist
Lee Bul, videos by leading Australian digital artist
Daniel Crooks and Turner Prize shortlistee Kutlug
Ataman, and commissioned site specific work by
New Zealand’s Michael Parekowhai and
Australia’s James Angus and Hany Armanious.
Armanious and Parekowhai, have since been
chosen for the 2011 Venice Biennale.

Referencing the building’s function, the roots seem to continue beyond the window, connecting the interior of the building to the rest of world, hinting at a strange garden growing inside.

Convergence, is a site specific sculpture by Australian artist Chris Fox commissioned by LoveArt for Global Switch’s Paris Data Centre. It was produced during 2010-2011 between Sydney, London and Paris. An ambitious project, it was two years in the making and utilises 370 metres of steel, and was realised using intelligent modelling software and advanced fabrication techniques.

The complexity of the data centre is revealed as the nervous system and arteries of the building. The installation condenses the logic of the building and impels it throughout the lobby and atrium spaces. It offers a dynamic and intuitive approach to the space, employing the actual services of the building and transforming its systems into an artwork.

From the lobby through to the atrium, the sculpture converges above you, coming to ground amongst three quotations embedded into a termination point for the cluster of steel spines that flow above the visitor. Developing out of the building fabric, Convergence is the physical representation of the systems of the building.

Working closely with Sun Hung Kai Properties and their design teams for the public spaces. LoveArt argued for a shift in curatorial focus from The Enchanted Forrest theme to a more theoretically resolved Nature and the imagination. Suspended spectacularly over the entrance Bul’s work dripps with metal, crystal and glass to invoke the idea of crazy, excessive stalactites in a futuristic cave with awe and grandeur.

LoveArt uses a changing video work to alter the mood and feel of the reception space. Vibrant for day and more mellow approach of Australian artist Daniel Crooks relaxes the atmosphere at night.

Steinkamp, reconfigured her wall installation Rapunzel to feature in a custom made oversized LED screen behind the welcome desk. In a maze of colour and movement it animates the lobby all day.

Perched upon a central column, the wondrous multiplicity of natural reproduction presents itself in the form of a lowly mosquito. With this surprising, somewhat quirky sculpture, an overscaled, exaggerated, everyday natural form, the artist reminds us that nature is at once huge and powerful, geometrically precise as well as intricate and, most importantly, unpredictable.

Armanious stretched industrial tape around the walls and ceiling of the W Hotel dining area to visually and physically surround the viewer. The word current in the title suggests the presence of movement – the fluidity of water, circuitry of electricity. These currents in nature and technology never stop and the stream evokes questions about the beginning and end of the journey, and the purpose of what happens in between.

A Steinway concert grand piano balances on the nose of a seal, presenting elements of form (gravity, mass, shape, composition) in a theatrical fashion. The shape of the sculpture also represents the shape of Gondwana, a large southern land mass that existed around 200 million years ago before the current continents broke away. The work mocks our use of natural history as entertainment – the stuff of the Discovery Chanel on cable TV.

For the state of the art Audi showroom in Paramatta, LoveArt facilitated a collaboration between Patricia Piccinini and the car giant, to install her signature Panel Works in the mouthwatering colour, texture and form of Audi icons themselves.

The sensual pleasure we derive from these images and objects is intrinsic to our conceptual engagement with Piccinini’s ethical position where beauty wakes up perception and introduces us to a standard of care we can extend to other more ordinary things.

The artist has since represented Australia in the Venice Biennale.

Cleopatra was an old guest colonial house in the Blue Mountains just outside Sydney. With a plush comfortable fit out by New York designer Neil Bradford, the brief was for art that an elderly maiden aunt–who hung out with and mentored the avant-garde artists of her time–would have collected. The small rooms demanded potent works that animated the spaces without crowding them.

The conservatism of the decor made it important to
choose contemporary art with a sympathetic
aesthetic. One of Australia’s most
important living photographers, Tracey Moffatt’s
laudanum series was itself filmed in an old colonial house and playing
out a historic drama, was perfect.

In any collection humour is such an important
feature. Humour engages audiences, while adding
drama and frisson to a space, increasing the
impact of the collection as a whole.

Mood and Beauty. A private art collection should reflect its owners taste while creating a beautiful and interesting environment with positive energy.

Combining works of different media punctuates the
collection and creates a technological edge and
feeling of contemporaneity.

Installation is crucial and must follow and use the logic of the space to create drama and beauty.

An exuberant yet shocking account of the interrelationships of life and death, Understorey contrasts two views of the tropical environment: the eighteenth and nineteenth century European notion of the jungle, as a site of luxuriance, fecundity and adventure (and zealous specimen hunting) and the contemporary reality of ongoing civil unrest and the displacement of people from traditional territories due to land clearance, urbanisation and the political after-effects of colonisation. It depicts elements of plant and human material using a variety of media, particularly glass beads–the currency of colonisation. A recurring motif is the use of camouflage, a contemporary symbol that transforms the patterns of nature into the fabric of conflict and hostility.

Painting from her own snaps, with the extraordinary confidence and balance of a tightrope walker, McNeil applies the minimum amount of paint to evoke the image and the memory. In so doing, she straddles the schism between the immediacy of the photographic record and the slowness of the process of painting as it reviews remembered events. Observing that a memory exists not in the bland overall detail of a photograph, but in the parcels of information perceived in the first instance, MacNeil’s institutional works (here the Botanic Gardens) move toward the idea of the collective memory; the Tropical Centre paints a picture of us now, for future generations, but the canvas will always be incomplete.

H2N.Y. Homage to New York Auto-Destructs in the Sculpture Garden at MOMA 17 March 1960 is part of a prolific series of drawings by Landy, based on the sculptor Jean Tinguely’s self-destructing machine constructed in the garden of the MoMA in 1960. It was set into motion for 27 minutes before bursting into flames but failed to fully destroy itself as firemen and museum guards were forced to take action. Landy’s fascination with Tinguely’s work dates back his retrospective at the Tate London, which he saw as an art student. For almost two years, Landy obsessively worked on a range of drawings in charcoal, ink, oilstick, glue and gouache, all of which reveal both his extraordinary draughtsmanship and his far-reaching concern with concepts of auto-destruction in art.

MacPherson has been producing the Mayfair series since the 1980s. Mayfair Bar was the name of the café where for many years he bought his lunch. This personal ritual of returning to the same place daily is elaborated through various idiosyncratic means in this body of work. In Mayfair: Six for Bubbles, Easter, 6 Masonite panels abutting each other on the wall define the cultural and religious parameters of our time. Painted in white on masonite, the panels act as road signs, or body paint, whose witty content belies a potent meaning. These permutations are a significant aspect of MacPherson’s work, recognising the diminishing nature of our vernacular history and its particular regional characteristics, not to mention the economics of mass culture in an expanded capitalist system.

Paradise Omeros is a 20-minute cinematic triptych based upon the Nobel Prize winning epic Omeros by Caribbean poet Derek Walcott. The film follows its young protagonist from the rich tropics of St. Lucia to gritty urban England and back to St. Lucia, exploring the unique and confounding experience of creolization, the psychological and linguistic impact of colonisation, immigration and globalisation. These are part of a photographic series of prints Julien has produced whose imagery is culled from the rich, island-hued visuals of Paradise Omeros.

The Story of Yishan Island tells the tale of 16th Century fishermen lost and in danger at sea. At the heart of the legend is Mazu (pictured here, played by Zhao Tao) , the goddess of ships, the sea and silence. who leads the fishermen to safety. Using this fable as a starting point, Julien deftly works in details of the 2005 Morcambe Bay Tragedy, involving 25 Chinese migrants who drowned cockle picking in the rising tide. This image, of Mazu encapsulates a key point in this rich, 9 channel film that speaks so poetically on death, displacement, spirituality in contemporary China and how it is seen, both outside-in and inside-out.

Much of Lambie’s work is connected with music: works are named after bands (Soft Cell and Status Quo) or song titles, clubs (Rainbow Room) and objects made from records like Weird Wig, or record players covered with glitter (Soft Cell). This also harbors an ironic nostalgia: Lambie demonstrates out-dated technology as a fetishized artefact. Many of his works are called after cool old-school haircuts and styles, referencing his past career as Boy Hairdresser. Belts, which usually bind things together, are in a sense taken apart by Lambie as if to see how they work, here a mass of belts is descending from the wall.

In summer 2010-11, Casula Powerhouse exhibited a selection of works from the art collection of Amanda Love, curated by Casula Powerhouse’s Director Stephen Alderton.

Featuring works by over 72 artists, the exhibition included works by Tracey Emin, Hany Armanious, Tim Noble and Sure Webster, Rosemary Laing, Adam Cullen and Patricia Piccinini.

The exhibition received high attendance and generated significant press and attention, raising awareness of art collecting and its nuances in general.

Praying to a Different God presented new work by internationally renowned British artist Tracey Emin in the Sydney home of Amanda Love. All new work, it represented the broad spectrum of Emin’s multi-disciplinary practice, including neon, embroidery, film and mono prints. It just happened nightmare drawing, 2010 has the appearance of the constellations mapped out in thread. An ill-defined night sky offers little solace to the dreamer, as subconscious images try to conjure themselves into being but in the confusion become wholly nightmarish.

Working in neon since 1995 Emin now owns this medium, often using poetic and emotive language. I Whisper to My Past Do I have Another Choice, 2010 embodies her affinity with the transference and energy that neon emits, literally, through its chemical and electrical charge.

In No Chance To Forgive, 2010 Emin returns to the carpet, a subject mythologised in her work since the mid 1980’s. Never magical, never mystical, rather a metaphysical device to stop the figure floating around in no man’s land. A manifestation of her emotional state, the figure is suspended in some kind of angst that is amplified in the turmoil of the patterned carpet.

Akio Makigawa’s works are features in themselves. In a space with abundant windows and breathtaking views, the sculpture maintains the harmony of Renzo Piano’s architecture whilst adding scale and drama.

Works should punctuate the space, following and enhancing its logic. Luring viewers through each space with the promise of another.

Since being included in this collection as young artists, Ricky Swallow, Bill Henson, Patricia Piccinini and Simryn Gill, have all gone on to become Australia’s most prolific artists, respectively representing their country at the Venice Biennale. Tracey Moffatt, also an emerging artist at the time the collection was compiled has since garnered international status and success, exhibiting her photographic works at MoMA in New York, in 2012. Gill’s participation in dOCUMENTA (12) in 2007 and dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012, the most prestigious showcase of cutting-edge contemporary art is further testament to her critical and commercial acclaim.

Works in meeting rooms, which often stand
alone, must be able to hold their space and
galvanise the room. A bare wall is better than a
token work that supposedly matches the carpet. A
pre meeting conversation about an artwork is both
an icebreaker and a useful management tool.

Works by emerging, (now well-established) Australian artists were
sourced and commissioned for the collection. With
a strategically simple placement of works in the
open-design of the offices, the works not only
speak to each other conceptually but function as
an important and strategic conversation-starting
point for the directors with clients and guests.

Ferrier Hodgeson wanted inexpensive but
museum quality art to add a visual and intellectual
edge to their new offices in Sydney’s iconic
Grosvenor Place. The aim was to reflect the
partnership’s strong, progressive attitude to its own
business – already exemplified in the move to new
premises – with art that has resulted from a
parallel, but creative, process on the part of artists.
In other words, to balance the firms business
creativity and prowess with its counterpart in art.

Artworks properly placed enhance the logic of
spaces, humanising them and facilitating easy
negotiation.