Open House 2022: "Like many Melburnians, Ying-Lan Dann has long been fascinated by the Mission to Seafarers, in Docklands. When she was invited to create a work in response to a building as part of this year’s Open House Melbourne, she knew immediately which it would be. Taking a peek behind the closed doors of some of Melbourne’s finest and most interesting buildings is a core premise of the weekend event, now in its 15th year. During that time, the program has grown from half a dozen buildings to a 200-plus strong list that extends to Ballarat and Bendigo. “[It’s] much more expansive and citizen-led,” says Fleur Watson, Open House Melbourne’s executive director. “As a public festival, it has always had a spirit of generosity, this gesture of opening up and allowing visitors to come and look and experience things.” Swinging open their doors at the end of the month will be some of the city’s finest mansions, including Villa Alba in Kew and Brighton’s Billilla, the Cairo flats in Fitzroy, the newly renovated Jewish Museum designed by Kerstin Thompson, the Melbourne Quakers Centre, the Albanian Mosque in Carlton North and many more. Considering how to approach the event this year, held remotely for the past two, Watson decided to explore beyond the traditional, with associate professor and director of curatorial practice at Monash University Tara McDowell. The two have co-curated an exhibition of works to run concurrently with the Open House program, called Take Hold of the Clouds. That’s where Dann’s work, Circular Temporalities, comes in, one of seven commissions around town in which local and international artists respond to chosen buildings or sites. A lecturer in interior design at RMIT as well as an artist, she is interested in time and finding different mediums to show things in flux and, having grown up on Phillip Island, she often uses water as a theme. When she started spending time at the Mission, Dann found there was an oculus at the top of the dome, known as the Norla Dome. She thought about how that small but significant opening related to where sailors spent so many months of the year, the sky being the only thing they would see much of the time, stars guiding the way in times gone by, and of the recent stories she’d heard about sailors being trapped at sea during COVID. Built in the Arts and Craft style between 1916 and 1919 and designed by architect Walter Butler, the Mission includes a chapel, clubroom, Chaplain’s house, a small cottage and the Norla Dome, which was apparently inspired by the Pantheon. The Mission was funded by the government and the Ladies Harbour Lights Guild, who Dann was also intrigued by. “One of the things those women identified is that life at sea is very dangerous [and they] wanted to give them a space of sanctuary and support,” she says, adding that for many years, the dome was used as a gymnasium. Her work inside the dome includes a 35-minute loop film, recorded from the ferry during the crossing from Queenscliff to Sorrento. The horizon takes up about a third of the shot and moves as the waves rise and fall, mirroring the journeys made by the sailors who found refuge at the mission over the years; it will be projected onto a gauze-like fabric, allowing glimpses of the building behind. Dann also plans to activate the site over the course of the weekend and will read a poem by Justin Clemens.The articles gives an insight of the création of the artwork by Ying-Lan Dann. digital copy of an article with photographs published in the Ageopen house melbourne, 2022, ying-lan dann, take hold of the clouds, norla dome, exhibition, the age, cultural events

Digital copy of an artistic event catalogue 142 pages.non-fictionCatalogue for an artistic discovery Ttail during Open House 2022.open house melbourne, 2022, ying-lan dann, circular temporalities, norla dome, exhibitions, video installation, cultural events

Take Hold of the Clouds is a curated exhibition featuring two key works by renowned international contributors – Forensic Architecture’s Cloud Studies (2021) and Cauleen Smith’s Sojourner (2018) – along with six, newly commissioned, responsive works from local and national creative practitioners. The experimental exhibition is distributed across seven of the city’s most significant buildings and urban spaces, with each temporal creative work adding a new layer to how we understand these spaces in relation to the world around us. Embedding the work within the city itself rather than a traditional gallery, the exhibition models best practices for high-impact yet sustainable and resource-sensitive exhibition-making. Created in partnership with Monash University, Take Hold of the Clouds navigates the Weekend’s theme of Built/Unbuilt through a series of thoughtful encounters in which artists reveal the invisible stories and issues in corners of the city. The exhibition is conceived by Tara McDowell, Director of Curatorial Practice at Monash Art, Design and Architecture, and co-curated with Fleur Watson, Open House Melbourne’s Executive Director. To create this poster, the artist used a copy of of one of Walter Butler plans for the 7171 building held in the archives as an homage to the architect. The sketch was then retouched to make it loo like a blueprint. The Mission is one of the sites open every year during Open House. A3 size Blue print type plan print on glose paper.open house melbourne, 2022, ying-lan dann, circular temporalities, norla dome, blueprint, plans, walter richmond butler (1864–1949), cultural events