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Wednesday, August 7, 2013
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
A Bloody Good BLOG: Te Papa NZ
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Fascinating sunfish facts
Te Papa recently received a rare sunfish specimen from Auckland Museum, so we decided to find out more about these mysterious ocean-dwelling animals. Here are our fascinating facts:1.Sunfish don’t have a tail! Some people call them a ‘gigantic swimming head’ (which seems a bit rude). Instead of a tail their dorsal and anal fins are fused together into a rudder-like structure called a clavus. The sunfish swims by flapping its dorsal and anal fins synchronously, like oars. This is a common sunfish, also called an ocean sunfish, Mola mola. Our specimen is the rarer sharp-tailed sunfish, Masterus lanceolutus.
2. There are four species of sunfish: common sunfish (Mola mola), slender sunfish (Ranzania laevis), sharp-tailed sunfish (Masterus lanceolutus) and southern ocean sunfish (Mola ramsayi). The species at Te Papa is a sharp-tailed sunfish. Scientists know the most about the common sunfish, so we’re pretty excited to be able to find out more about the rare sharp-tailed sunfish.
3. Sunfish are the heaviest bony fish species alive today. Common sunfish weigh around a metric tonne on average. The biggest common sunfish ever caught weighed over two metric tonnes!
Art Forum - Denise Green AM, Australian-American Artist and Writer
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The Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery and the Tasmanian College of the Arts (Inveresk) invites people in Launceston to an Art Forum by Australian-American Artist and Writer
Denise Green
TIME:
12.30pm Thursday 12 September 2013
PLACE:
Gallery 2, QVMAG Art Gallery, Royal Park
2 Wellington Street, Launceston
Admission is free
RSVP by Monday 9 September 2013 on T 6323 3798 or E bookings@qvmag.tas.gov.au Friends please quote your membership number
Denise Green (born Melbourne 1946) studied at the Sorbonne in the late 1960s and received her MFA at Hunter College, New York in 1976. She has lived and worked in Australia and New York since 1972.
Green first received public recognition through her participation in the Young American Artists: 1978 Exxon National Exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the seminal 1979 New Image exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Over the last decade, surveys of her work have been shown at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; MoMA PS 1, New York; and the Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Germany. Green is currently a senior visiting critic in the Graduate Department at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. She is represented in all major Australian collections.
She will talk about the challenge for an artist to fashion a career on three separate continents (Australia, North America and Europe) over four decades, from the late 1960s through to today. In her lecture she discusses her response to the dominant credo of the 1970s, which asserted that artworks should speak for themselves and that artists should not have to explain the underlying meanings in their work. In the 1990s she began writing about art to counter these arguments. She recounts how being more articulate about her work opened up a dialogue and helped cultivate relationships with galleries and museum curators in Europe and the USA.
Denise Green is one of a small number of Australian artists who have established significant careers as artists internationally, whilst maintaining strong links with Australia. We are very privileged to host Denise Green's brief visit to Tasmania and warmly invite all those interested in art to attend this most significant forum.
Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum
In 1999 grazier David Elliott stumbled over a large fossilized bone on his property near the outback town of Winton, in central western Queensland’s “dinosaur triangle.” The bone belonged to a twenty-metre-long, four-legged dinosaur that lived more than ninety-five million years ago. The discovery was proclaimed as Australia’s largest sauropod find.
After unearthing hundreds more fossils, David and Judy Elliott lobbied for funding to establish a museum near Winton to display the dinosaur bones. State and federal governments and the local council all chipped in and the architect and building contractor worked pro bono on the first phase of the building program, the reception centre for the museum.
A local landowner gifted the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum of Natural History a mesa or “jump-up.”
This dramatic, flat-topped outcrop of land rises steeply out of the extended plain, a commanding site. On top of the jump-up, the Elliotts first put up a big tin shed to serve as a workshop where tons of fossils being unearthed in the Winton region are cleaned, sorted and stored.
The area has yielded the world’s largest collection of dinosaur bones. Next they planned for this small interpretive reception centre that has been built five hundred metres from the workshop.
The Elliotts heard about an architect in Brisbane. It would be longer than a year before Cox Rayner took on the project, but when the architects did become involved, they were won over by the Elliotts’ enthusiasm and knowledge ... CLICK HERE TO READ MORE & GO TO SOURCE
Renowned potter Gwyn Hanssen Pigott dies, 77
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BALLARAT born ceramicist Gwyn Hanssen Pigott has died in London aged 77 after suffering from a stroke. The internationally renowned potter was born in 1935, and learnt the craft of ceramics from the ground up. Having received numerous awards including an Order of Australia medal in 2002, Hanssen Pigott was recognised as one of the most distinguished potters in Australia.
Art Gallery of Ballarat registrar Anne Rowland said the former Ballarat and Clarendon College student travelled across the globe, training and working at leading potteries around Europe. She said Hanssen Pigott was renowned for turning ordinary items into works of art.
“The styles of her arrangements and the finesse she would bring to making her objects means she will be remembered for a long time,” Ms Rowland said. From today, [JULY 8] the Art Gallery of Ballarat will showcase some of Hanssen Pigott’s work in the upstairs contemporary gallery. The work on display will include a set of inseparable bowls, a teapot, still-life arrangements and a dish spanning between 1978 and 1992.
Saturday, July 6, 2013
Democratic Museum Funding in Toledo
Local voters get one last
chance to revive Toledo science museum
BY ALEX M. PARKER BLADE STAFF WRITER
After failing twice, museum
organizers are pulling out all of the stops spending at least $167,200 raised
from private donations in a campaign to persuade Lucas County voters to reopen
the museum.
Science and technology is
the base of our work force. It's where we're going and where our county is going, said Lori Hauser, the museum s director of
operations. COSI is around to spark a wonder in science and math and also to
get people excited in this field.
Issue 37, the additional
five-year, 0.17-mill levy request, would cost the owner of a $100,000 home
about $5.21 a year, according to the county auditor. It would bring in $1.25
million annually for the science center s operations, according to levy
advocates.
Local businesses such as
Owens Corning, First Solar Inc., Xunlight Corp., and BP PLC s Toledo Refinery
all said they would not only help fund the levy campaign but would also assist
the museum once it opens with new exhibits.
It s a quality of life
issue, not just for Toledo, but for all of Lucas County, Maumee Mayor Tim
Wagener said.
COSI officials are sticking
to a pledge they made during the last levy campaign in 2007 that, if reopened,
the museum would have free admission for children from Lucas County on
Saturdays, if they are accompanied by an adult.
The museum opened in 1997
and closed in December, 2007.
If the levy does not pass,
Ms. Hauser said it would close permanently and its exhibits would be shipped to
other museums.
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