Wednesday, August 7, 2013

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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


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.