Minerva, Sydney

Minerva, a new gallery in Potts Point, Sydney, opens today, Saturday 8 February 2014, from 16.00-19.00!

The inaugural exhibition, '"Sunny and Hilly"' features the work of a great line-up of Australian artists:

Hany Armanious,
Andy Boot,
James Deutsher,
Fayen d'Evie,
Helen Johnson,
Jonny Niesche,
Joshua Petherick,
Marian Tubbs.

Melbourne philosopher Justin Clemens has written a poem, 'Minerva's Superfetation', for the press release:

‘The owl of Minerva only takes flight at dusk.’ — G.W.F. Hegel

Here, now, in Sydney, the Oldest West of White Australia —
Still the bastard love-child of Bentham and De Sade
(As Robert Hughes puts it in The Fatal Shore) —
At an indistinct yet absolute fault line of the city
Where the oleaginous networks of fiscal ascendancy
Lick the drug-bespattered arse of the rotten Cross,
And the junky dancers can barely be told from rich joggers,
All lycra and navel-piercings and tans-so-fake-they-must-be-real,
There stands Minerva, ‘an historically-significant inter-war building’
Bridging the hard corner of Orwell and Macleay Streets,
Named for the Roman goddess who presides over art,
Wisdom, schooling, medicine and war, arrogant, virginal,
Not born through parthenogenesis nor pollination nor sexual reproduction,
But from the first thought of Jupiter, Lord of the Gods,
When they cleft his forehead and his daughter leapt out
Screaming a war-cry so terrible the skies themselves trembled,
That one gets the derivation from Sanskrit, *men-, ‘mind,’
As the original terror of thinking entering the world
On wings as deadly as the owl her spirit companion,
Black eyes without profile at the last hinge of day and night,
Giving ten thousand works to be seen that were never before.



For those in Sydney, the show runs through Saturday 15 March 2014 and the gallery is open Wed-Sat, 12-18h00. The address is: 4/111 Macleay Street, Potts Point NSW 2011.