It’s not just large public buildings and infrastructure that are lit up to celebrate Dark Mofo in Hobart (see my pics of the Tasman Bridge from an earlier post). Hotels and homes are also glowing crimson through the long winter nights, showing the way as normally diurnal humans venture out into the darkness in search of adventure.
The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, which is hosting a major exhibition as part of Dark Mofo, mixed it up a bit, with a cool blue glow, and some technicolour treatments on its sixties-era stairwell on Argyle Street.
A group of young artists has taken over the pedestrian tunnels leading to Hobart’s Railway Roundabout for an art happening called ‘Neither Here nor There’.
The Marine Board tower has had a rocket put under it.
Even the No Visbible Means humble abode has a warm interior glow.
In Hampden Road, the Narryna Museum was lit up, but not in red. It was showing off a display of bonnets representing female convicts transported to the colony in the first half of the nineteenth century, part of a long term project by artist Christina Henri.
The Hotel Grand Chancellor had a pulsing heart-beat lighting up the many floors of its atrium, visible from across the waterfront, while the white crystal glow of the Glasshouse at Brooke Street Pier contrasted the redness emanating from Salamanca and Princess Wharf 1, home of the Winter Feast.
All around town, bronze busts of the great and the good have been given a facelift by being shinkwrapped in bright pink plastic. Especially striking is the statue of colonial Governor of Van Diemen’s Land and Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin; the fountain on which he sits has just been refurbished and was lit up in rainbow colours in memory of the victims of the Orlando massacre.
The highlight of the second week of Dark Mofo is the Winter Feast, the cool season counterpart to Summer’s Taste of Tasmania. The island’s leading caterers descend on Princes Wharf No1 and the adjacent areas adjoining Salamanca Place attracting gourmands for five nights of feasting.
References
- Dark Mofo Winter Feast
- Tempest – Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery
- Paint the Town RedPaint the Town Red
- Roses from the Heart
You saw most of those I saw (the reddening lights in Winter Feast and on the Tasman Bridge are two extras) and quite a few more that I haven’t yet noticed. This is such an exciting time of the year – visually.