Joy Ride Enterprises brought together the collaborative team of visual Artist Geoffrey Nees and Minifie Nixon Architects to create a cladding system for a new, highly utilitarian, bridge being erected on the Frankston (Victoria, Australia) foreshore.
For most of the last fifty years Frankston has been known as an industrial satellite town to Melbourne. However, in recent years the emergence of an avid cycling and water sport population has seen more and more Melburnians’ head to the Frankston foreshore on the weekends.
To create a destination point the Frankston City Council are revamping the Frankston foreshore, which includes resurfacing the banks of the Kananook Creek.
The Joy Ride team were shortlisted to 1 of 4 to be the creators of a bridge cladding system that would act as a gateway to the natural terrain of the creek and beach.
The Sway Bridge design was intended to let those sitting in cafes, arriving by car or in a pack of bikes the level of the sea wind. For those walking across the bridge the motion of the sculpture provides musical accompaniment; as each panel of the sculpture moves past another a prong would be struck, causing a note to ring out, much like the mechanism of a music box.
Team:
Creative Director: Lou Weis
Visual artist: Geoffrey Nees
Architects: Minifie Nixon
Collaborators Geoffrey Nees & Lou Weis have been shortlisted for yet another major public art commission in Melbourne, Australia. This time it is a permanent arwork for the Footscray Train Station. The commission has been framed and managed by Footscray Community Arts Centre: http://www.footscrayarts.com/calendar/event/place_art/
Will upload images of the artwork, designed by architect Barend Meyers, in the coming days.
The OverLogo sculpture (2003 City of Melbourne Laneways Commission) has been selected for Moving Galleries, artworks presented on Melbourne Trains. Look out for it on your journeys around town.
Created in collaboration with Jan van Schaik, Minifie Nixon
Photo by John Gollings
Joy Ride Enterprises initiated a joint venture of leading Australian product designers focused around working together on their export marketing strategies.
Each year several Australian product designers travel to Milan to survey the latest design trends and work towards securing deals with European manufacturers. Joy Ride Enterprises realised that a collective would work more efficiently to:
- Optimise opportunities
- Avoid wastefulness during travel and exhibition planning
- Claim Government incentives for export marketing (EMDG)
Commencing in mid 2008 the Joint Venture has resulted in the group sharing a wide range of information on an online project management site and a group Export Marketing Development grant claim, delivering precious cash flow to local design businesses.
Joint Venture members:
Schamburg + Alvisse
Charles Wilson Design
Happy Finish Design
Trent Jansen Design
Adam Goodrum Design
Simone LeAmon
Elliat Rich
Paper Tiger Products
Joy Ride Enterprises was one of four artists to be shortlisted for the Signal Public Art Commission, run by Melbourne City Council.
Our work focused on rebuilding Melbourne as teenagers use it. Anything irrelevant to the teenage experience of the grid was to be erased. The title for the work, and the spirit in which it was to be created, was based around this excerpt from the introduction to a Helen Livett photographic series on adolescents:
…Adolescence is a kingdom of fallen and still falling angels, but it is yet a kingdom, with its own kinds of wild animal glamour, with profundities of grave purity which are peculiar to it; with its unappeasable hunger and pity, and its own awful threshold to the world beyond, that Babylonian captivity in which dreams are either manufactured by outside authorities or rest, as a rule, forever unformed and unsatisfied…
James Agee on the photographic works of Helen Livett
Still of The Teenage Kingdom in-situ.
Still from The Teenage Kingdom video artwork
Collaborators:
Adriano Cortese, Ranters Theatre Company
Peter Brundel, Nice Device
Greg More, oom creative
Geoffrey Nees & Lou Weis have been shortlisted to create a public artwork, a cladding, for a bridge to be built as part of the foreshore redevelompment at Davey Street, Frankston.
KT: the listening room is going to 100% design, as part of a Jury selected section of the Container Park fairgrounds: http://www.100percentdesign.jp/
For further details about the installation: http://www.soundcatch.net/design.html
The project is the result of a year long design development collaboration between MAP & Elastik Architecture Studios who have become producers of the project for the Tokyo presentation.
Derek Thompson, Arup Melbourne, assisted the design process with acoustic design input and entrepreneur Freek Dech was the grease on the wheels: he made things flow!
