Artworks light up Adelaide Festival Theatre shells for community enjoyment

Adelaide Festival Centre’s Festival Theatre shells are currently being animated with new large scale projections by local South Australian artists, in a collaboration with the award-winning creative team Electric Canvas. The light exhibition is running nightly from 7pm until 3rd June.

Artists Jake Yang, Cedric Varcoe, Bridgette Minuzzo and Sue Michael have each created a series of work exploring a theme of personal importance. 

Adelaide Festival Centre Senior Exhibition Curator Charissa Davies notes “to see these four local artists bring existing artworks from their studios and have them brought to life as animated projections that fill an entire building is a wonderful sight to behold! It has been an honour to work with each of them and to see their work light up the Festival Theatre shells for all to enjoy.” 

Adelaide Central School of Art graduate, Jake Yang, explores identity and self with strong links to his Chinese heritage and the influence of contemporary Western culture. 

Narungga and Ngarrindjeri artist, Cedric Varcoe, has participated in the OUR MOB exhibition and many community art projects. He works mainly in acrylics on canvas and his subjects are usually lizards, snakes and stylised male figures.

Adelaide-based visual artist, Bridgette Minuzzo, has over 20 years’ experience in creative practice. Her commissions include work for Art Gallery of South Australia, Flinders Medical Centre and several local councils. In 2013 Bridgette documented Adelaide Festival Centre: the theatres, backstage, roof spaces and exterior, to create Phantasmagoria for Adelaide Festival Centre’s 40th anniversary. Bridgette animated layers of photographs to create a series of kaleidoscopes, a reference to the psychedelic 70s and the use of octagons in the building design.

Award-winning artist, Sue Michael, explored regional South Australia during her Visual Art PhD and has become known for her artworks that display often overlooked aspects of domestic life in South Australia. She has presented an appreciation of those aspects: modest Lucky Bay beach shack interiors, and galahs flying along the World’s End Highway, as well as attenuated local landscapes made through collage processes.

Michael feels particularly honoured to have been given this role as a communicator with the overlooked, on such an expanded scale and adds “the artist can leave a trail of poetic thought and sentiment, that potentially lingers beyond their work. The animal world has been brought to life in a holistic overlay; even extinct creatures now grace the Torrens riverbank. Aspects of place can endure, and stretch out beyond their time and location, to carry meaningful messages that may help to ground us.”

Future projections include artwork by Craigmore and Salisbury East High School students from the Children’s Artspace Exhibition Legendary Textile Tales (4th June until 14th July); and contemporary First Nations artist artwork from the Illuminate Festival exhibition New Light (15th – 31st July).   

For more information about Adelaide Festival Centre Exhibitions

Images from top: Adelaide Festival Theatre Shell Artwork, Artist Cedric Varcoe; FT Shell Artwork Artist, Jake Yang; FT Shell Artwork Artist. Bridgette Minuzzo; FT Shell Artwork Artist, Sue Michael. All images credit: Simon Rogers.