More support needed for new artists

Today's Sydney Morning Herald has a very interesting article on the exodus from the city of exhibition spaces for new and emerging artists. In Visual Arts Sunanda Creagh explores the closure of the Artist-run-Initiative Space 3 at Chippendale. Apparently the victim of creeping land prices and speculation as market forces march inevitably westward from Paddington, clearing Surry Hills, East Sydney and now Chippendale before it. Council can not and should not try to hold back the tide (just as we barely make a dent with an aggressive affordable housing policy) but Council can play an important proactive role in providing subsidised space for new artists to create and exhibit within the city.
At a recent Council meeting I amended the subsidised accommodation policy to include a new plank allowing suitable medium to long term vacant Council owned commercial space to be leased at a peppercorn rent on a month by month basis. This would target suitable emerging artists. I had in mind the huge empty spaces Council owns along William Street (eg the old Suttons Holden space) and the empty floors on 94 Oxford Street. The Lord Mayor accepted my innovative suggestion and I await a response from staff who I suspect are not as enthusiastic.
Part of Council's role in creating and maintaining a sustainable City of Sydney is to support the arts community. It's a sad fate for this city if we don't make efforts to prevent the exodus of artists from the inner city. Artist of all ilk provide colour, movement, understanding, reflection and interpretation to our day to day existence. Artists give meaning to our lives and often awaken slumbering issues within our society. I will be raising this matter again at Council and look forward to Council sponsored exhibition space opening sometime in the not too distant future.

Urban squeeze makes space the final frontier
August 18, 2005


Bad news ... Artist and exhibition space director Mark Drew rues the closure of yet another inner-city avenue for exposure.Photo: Lisa Wiltse
Emerging artists are struggling to find cheap, inner-city venues where they can show their work, writes Sunanda Creagh.
It's almost too big to be noticed. From the outside it looks like an old hotel, with balconies around the top, peeling white walls and gorgeous arched doorways. On the corner of a busy Chippendale intersection, 151 Regent Street is the sort of place you walk past a thousand times before you even realise it's there.
The building has, at various times, been a bank, a hat factory and an artist's studio, but for the past five years it has been known as Space 3 - a free space where artists, not the gallery owners, ran the show.
More than 600 events were held in this time, ranging from art exhibitions and sound installations to experimental music concerts and artist talks.
The voice of one of the gallery's co-founders, Rully Zakaria, echoes round the enormous rooms as he remembers the heyday of Space 3.
"The improvised music scene started off here, in a way, and we had shows once or twice a week. I was holding drawing classes as well, and there were yoga classes," Zakaria says. "It became an active space, not just a gallery. It wasn't just a set of walls."
Though plenty of artist-run spaces had been around longer, Space 3 soon earned a reputation as a hub of creative activity, bringing together varied communities of inner-city artists and inspiring others to start their own artist-run initiatives.
But real estate realities loom large in the inner city. In early July, the Space 3 artists received a termination notice; they had a month to leave. The building has been listed for sale and is expected to fetch up to $1.4 million.
Melletios Kyriakidis, another of the founders of Space 3, says: "I think the landlord is just trying to sell it at the right time and this is the right time, apparently."
Kyriakidis notes that Chippendale is becoming a more polished place. "It's a classic case - move the artists in, the area gets gentrified, apartments get built up, the artists move out.
"It happened in Surry Hills 10 years ago, it happened to Paddington. It's global."
Exhibitions scheduled for the rest of the year have been moved to emergency locations, such as China Heights, an artist-run space in Surry Hills.
Mark Drew, the co-director of China Heights, says the closure of Space 3 has resonated throughout the community of artists running their own galleries. "We were all pretty shocked because they are a bit of an institution and a bit of a model for what we have done here as well," he says.
For artist Zanny Begg, the Space 3 story is all too familiar. Begg was a co-founder of the Wedding Circle, an artist-run space just down the road from Space 3, in Meagher Street.
Begg and several others ran an experimental, free-to-exhibit gallery for almost 10 months before the City of Sydney Council ordered them to close. The official problem was the holding of "illegal assemblies".
Begg accepts that, but suspects noise complaints might be behind it - well-heeled, trendy types in new apartments aren't as accepting of exhibition openings extending late into the night as the old neighbourhood may have been.
"Chippendale is one of those places that's going to dramatically change in the short term. It's got that kind of dilapidated warehouse, empty feeling but it's also very, very inner city and there are a lot of trendy yuppie apartments there," she says.
For most Sydneysiders, Space 3 and the Wedding Circle won't be missed. But they are not the only casualties as warehouse spaces traditionally used by artists for exhibitions and studios are rapidly being converted into small units and apartments with rentals out of reach for the average artist.
But some artists say spaces like these - not-for-profit galleries where one can exhibit cheaply or for free - are vital to the health of the Sydney art scene and have a flow-on effect for the wider arts community. Read more here.