Chris Orr's work was featured as part of the iconic Bakehouse Art Project from Thursday 22 September 2022 for two weeks.
Situated between North Richmond Train Station and Hoddle Street, Bakehouse Studios is a beloved cultural icon in Melbourne. The Bakehouse Art Project invites Australian visual artists to create giant billboard sized Public Art paste ups that appear on the studio's Hoddle Street wall, with up to one million motorists on Australia’s busiest road passing by every week.
LHS: Lickety-Split
Naarm/Melbourne is built on basalt foundations. From the dispossession of colonisation, through the gold boom and bust. From classical Italianate architecture all the way to the popsicle coloured skyscrapers that pincushion our cityscape. As a built environment our city is always yielding to ravenous change. This artwork delves into our city’s urban archaeology with playful and imaginative tableaux. It invites the viewer to contemplate the bones of the past alongside the restless voracious terrane of the future.
RHS: Motherboard
During the pandemic, our concept of community was distorted and redefined. We were forced to rely on our personal devices for communication, work, recreation and commerce.
Motherboards, the functioning interior of all those devices, control everything on our devices, thus they were our most vital ventricle link – the saviour of connection. In this work, Chris Orr arranges imprint tracings of motherboards over old etchings, marrying the past, present and future. With tears of anguish and hope it rejoices and languishes in the constructive and destructive ingenuity of human generations that has kept us connected to each other.
Both artworks have a symbiotic interaction specifically created for the Bakehouse installation.
