Lord Mayor Graham Quirk has unveiled Brisbane’s new street art project along Coronation Drive in a world first collaboration with Cirque du Soleil.
Comprising of four murals painted along the Coronation Drive overpass pillars, the artworks are inspired by Cirque du Soleil’s production TOTEM, currently showing in Brisbane.
Local contemporary artist Matthew Stewart completed the project in only six days, despite Friday’s downpour.
“The rain definitely added another day’s worth of work, but I’d been coming here since 5:30am for the last couple of days so I’d managed to get quite a bit done before the rain started really setting in,” he said.
This collaborative public art installation is a world first for Cirque du Soleil, who selected Mr Stewart after seeing his work celebrating the Brisbane opening of The Lion King last year.
“They gave me an open slather, so I basically came up with a concept, sent it over to their office in Montreal and they approved it immediately, so that was pretty amazing,” he said.
“They left it completely to my interpretation.”
The artist’s concept pays homage to TOTEM’s evolutionary theme, with each pillar beholding a set of individual, brightly-coloured eyes, an idea Cirque du Soleil artistic director Neelanthi Vadivel found “especially poignant”.
“The eyes are windows into our world and all the enigmatic characters, but they’re also silent witnesses over Brisbane,” she said.
“To be able to share this with Brisbane is something we’re really appreciative of.”
After adding his own splash of paint to the street-art-style project, councillor Quirk thanked Cirque du Soleil as well as Mr Stewart, calling the murals a “wonderful offering” and “a brightening” in the day of pedestrians and cyclists on the Bicentennial bikeway to the city.
“This is authorised art, this is the sort of stuff we love brightening up our infrastructure the way Matt has done,” he said.
{ SOURCE: ABC, Cirque du Soleil | http://goo.gl/tq704B }
