Pennies and Pints is a large-scale poster that brings to life the many maps, near misses, and apocalyptic moments of Fitzroy’s history.
Artists Anne-Sophie Poirier, Briony Galligan and Rebecca Czapnik examine the bond between people and place through these images, presenting skewed perspectives of the ever-evolving history of Melbourne’s first suburb.
The work, which adorns the outside wall of the Union Club Hotel, invites the viewer into an inauthentic ‘historical world’ of boundaries and streetscapes.
The poster offers a window into the area’s resilience as well as its discord. Through the endless stories about Fitzroy (from the 1905 Mayor who opened the Fitzroy Pool in a small rowing boat, to demolitions, and corruption money pilfered from tip jars), through its images, and through its archives, this graphical mash-up of Fitzroy’s past plays upon memory and nostalgia.
NEW VIDEO
The banner for Pennies and Pints was installed recently at the Union Club Hotel. Here is a video of how they did it:
Rebecca Czapnik is a writer and producer who has worked extensively with new technology and digital media. Rebecca’s background in anthropology and development enhances her perspectives of new media, how spaces are encroached on, forgotten and constantly recreated by technology in our everyday lives. She has spent the last three years living in Latin America and is quite fascinated by how local history and culture layers itself upon place.
Briony Galligan is a writer, producer and arts worker. She has co-organised a number of projects including Framed, a photography competition; Tastings, a short script development project; and mudfest10, a student arts festival. In 2006 she curated Pushing Boundaries, an exhibition run in conjunction with the Network of Women Students Australia Conference. She was also an editor for above water, a creative writing publication produced for the Melbourne Writer’s Festival. Briony is a keen photographer, and is interested in the thrill of chasing historical tales. She is currently curating Top Designs, an exhibition of student design work held at the Melbourne Museum April 10-June 29 2008.
Anne-Sophie Poirier is a French architect and photographer currently based in Melbourne. She has a number of interests and approaches to her work touching on the areas of spatial representation from a personal point of view. Deconstruction and deformation can reveal a new sense and understanding of the familiar. Anne-Sophie has a great passion for photography from the simplest mechanisms to digital technology. She has had several solo photography exhibitions in France, including Fragments Crois, a compilation of images representing various places she has travelled to around the world. In 2007 her work was selected for Site Unseen, a curated program of public art projects for the 2007 Melbourne Fringe Festival.
