Celebrating urban life

File under: arts, urbanism, Wellington

Speaking of celebrating urban life, while I was at the Arts Centre open day on Saturday I picked up a brochure for an art competition called Urban Life - a celebration in art. It's part of the Year of the Built Environment, and it's fantastic to see this sort of promotion of the joys of urban living. Here are some extracts from the brochure:

... New Zealand cities and towns tend to be overshadowed by our magnificent natural environment. Yet it is our urban environment that much more directly affects our daily lives. ...

The built environment leads to what makes our towns and cities hum - the activity and energy that arises from how we use them.

The competition is open until the 16th of September, so there's still time to enter. It's not specific to Wellington, but the online exhibition of short-listed works will be hosted on the council's web site, and the physical exhibition will be at Shed 11. The brief says that entries can be in any genre or medium, but the fact that there's a physical exhibition will make interactive, animated or performance works rather difficult (I'm waiting for clarification on the details).

The judges include Ian Athfield and Anton Oliver, so I'm planning a work that features the "hum and energy" of a scrum outside the Wellington Central Library.