The T-Shirt As Art

NEWS RELEASE
March 6 2013

The T-Shirt As Art

In the second Urban Dream Brokerage public art project of 2013, Your Message Here, artist Daniel Webby invites you to sit down with him in a currently vacant Wellington retail space for an "identifying statement" consultation. The project is open for you to visit at 86-96 Victoria Street (opposite Civic Square) 10am to 4pm Monday 11 to 15 March. Webby explores and workshops ideas put forward by visitors to distil a specific phrase, and the phrase is then hand stamped onto a t-shirt for them to take home. There is no cost to take part.

"While I do see this as a service being offered," Webby says, "participants are showing a great deal of generosity by sitting down to speak with me. The process is collaborative - I start with my own set of ideas, participants enter with theirs - what is produced is something where these ideas meet."
Webby is interested in engaging the public in the creative process.

"In this project the conversations are in themselves an outcome. The t-shirts are really just a way of documenting the encounter."

The space for the project has been brokered in Wellington (it was first presented at Snake Pit Gallery Auckland in 2012) by Urban Dream Brokerage. Urban Dream Brokerage, currently running as a six month pilot with support from Wellington City Council, brings together property managers and the creative industries in Wellington to lead creative development and urban revitalisation through the temporary use of vacant space by innovative projects.

The first Urban Dream Brokerage project in February and earlier this month saw three kinetic artworks by a leading emerging Wellington artist James R Ford play out in a small window in Wellington's entertainment district, Courtenay Place. All paired an item of play with a motorised household object as metaphors for our everyday existence and work-life balance: a pull-along toy on a treadmill, an inscribed cricket bat on a record player and a pair of dice in a foot spa

The Brokerage is rolling out a series of surprising and diverse public art projects in Wellington over 2013. In April a long grafittied wall in lower Tory Street will be the site for a posterwall project by Auckland artist Tessa Laird who will presents a series of hand-screenprinted posters in a range of sizes, styles, reflecting a diversity of cultures, ideas, and opinions.

Your Message Here, Daniel Webby, Victoria Street, 11 - 15 March. Property partner: Prime Property Group.

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ENDS

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