There's something interesting about seeing what other people see of the area that you live in, what one person finds beautiful, finds intriguing, finds mysterious, is going to be very different to another.
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Hi, I'm Mark Chu, and I'm a painter who's recently been exploring the streetscapes of Boroondara. Look, what really strikes me about Boroondara and what makes these streets worth capturing in art is that these roads and streets are so lived in. There are all these designed elements that a lot of people actually spend a lot of effort and a lot of intelligence putting together. The stripes on the roads that tell us how to drive safely the electric poles the electric wires and all these technologies I think are worth romancing and are worth paying attention to and cherishing.
Hi, I'm Danny, I'm a painter. My work looks at the everyday, the urban landscape, the culture of the city and what it means to be a stranger living among strangers. For sunrise one morning I was sort of walking around just seeing what was going on at that you know ungodly hour and I walked past a bakery just down there on Glenferrie Road. They were getting ready to open up and there was something very magical about the light that was just spilling out when the street was still very dark. I came up here late in the afternoon when there's a lot of high contrast light, and I was walking past these really beautiful shopfronts just up the road there, and there was just this great moment that happened where this mom and her young daughter walked past. A lot of my work sort of relies on these fortuitous movements I guess where things just sort of happen, and you're either there and ready or not. For anyone with a relationship with Boroondara, I'd say one of the great things about this exhibition is that you'll see facets of the streets that are being captured for you now that will eventually change. So you might see a sign of a nightclub that's already closed, you might see your local bank, you might see a bicycle shop that your kids bought their first bike at, and there's something about treasuring that streetscape, and really making sure you acknowledge that these are special places because they're not going to be here forever.
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