Bronwyn Holloway-Smith 2nd Street Art Billboard Winner

Bronwyn Holloway-Smith 2nd Ghuznee Street Art Billboard Winner

Bartley + Company Art is delighted to announce that BRONWYN HOLLOWAY-SMITH is the winner of the second Ghuznee Street Art Billboard.

For her billboard project Bronwyn has employed the strategies and conventions of real estate marketing to promote an imaginary property development on Mars.

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While the billboard may at first glance appear as a genuine advertisement, closer examination will reveal that the ‘new territories’ being marketed by Colonial Real Estate are a fiction. However Bronwyn says with NASA scientists aiming for a human mission to Mars in the next 20 years, and private innovators also paving the way, a Martian colony is not a question of 'if' but 'when'.

The Pioneer City billboard is located just along the road from a similar project marketing the as yet unbuilt Metropol apartments on the corner of Ghuznee and Leeds Street. Bronwyn says the real estate industry has always marketed to human dreams and aspirations for a better life.

“We have seen this with the boom in inner-city apartment living in the past decade. We saw it in the 19th century in the way the New Zealand Company sold a romanticised picture of New Zealand to prospective settlers before they'd visited the country. My project responds to the this kind of marketing in the inner city and draws attention to its timelessness.”

Supported by the Creative Communities Wellington Local Funding Scheme and Bartley + Company Art, the billboard project has been established to give artists an opportunity to work at a large scale and to intervene in the predominantly commercial nature of the city’s visual culture.

Bronwyn's project is the second of three projects selected from a large pool of contestants. Each billboard is up for three months. We look forward to watching response to this project.

Bronwyn Holloway-Smith, who has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Massey University, has a particular interest in new technologies and the futuristic ideals and challenges that these technologies may bring. Her work across diverse media is often sparked by internet culture and virtual experiences and, as in this new project, she frequently draws from the past as a means of envisioning the future and imagining the fantastic. She is actively involved in the local arts community, has exhibited at galleries throughout New Zealand and Australia and has works represented in both public and private collections.

Her billboard is supported by the website: http://Pioneer-City.Com

ENDS

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