Skylines/Groundlines was a temporary public art installation at Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market by EXCX for Public Art Park 2023, an initiative of Testing Grounds/The Projects. Digital graphic printed on mesh and video installation.
Skylines/Groundlines responds to the proposed redevelopment of the testing grounds QVM site: a wall of high rise towers to the south, and a new park to the west. The work is a diptych of the modernist model of building mass and ‘green space’ necessarily offsetting each other’s excesses.
The model invokes an ancient dynamic of earth cult and sky cult, one that has consistently reverberated through the QVM site – as colonisation, historicism, exhumation, appropriation, activism and development.
The slivers of brilliant light between the towers and the delving roots, cracks and drains of the asphalt surface create infinitely long edges of sky and earth cast not against one another but against the material of the city, which must mediate between the two irreconcilable perspectives.
https://www.testing-grounds.com.au/event/skylines-groundlines
PAUL VAN HERK 