/ Current Exhibitions

PLAYTIME
Amusing Melbourne Through the Ages
8 December 2007 – 24 February 2008

Playtime transports you into the kaleidoscopic milieu of Melbourne’s amusement parks, circuses and travelling carnivals, with all their dizzying sights, heady scents and abandonment of reality.

Be lured in by the dazzling array of artefacts and ephemera, and relive your childhood dream of ‘running away with the circus’ – or perhaps – create those dreams now! Indulge in displays of amusements from bygone eras, evocative photographs, nostalgic keepsakes and significant works of art.

Playtime spans from the first quaint beginnings of freak shows and sideshows along the banks of the Yarra and the decadent pleasures of Bourke Street on a Saturday night, through to the present-day travelling juggernauts such as Circus Oz and Ashton’s Circus.

Melbourne has been long reputed as an entertainment capital, with many of Australia’s best-known amusements emerging from this city. This continual immersion in fun challenges the arch image of the dour Melburnian, asserting instead that while Melbourne may indeed be a very serious city, we are doubly serious when it comes to the business of amusing ourselves.

CURATOR: Simon Gregg

PLAYTIME
Amusing Melbourne Through the Ages
Fully illustrated 48-page catalogue available from City Museum Shop
RRP $10.00

ARTEFACT
A Melbourne Keepsake
28 July 2007 to 24 February 2008

Artefact is where art meets historical relic in Making Melbourne, City Museum’s chronological survey of Melbourne’s evolution. Thirteen contemporary artists weave their small-scale works through the historical artefacts of the permanent exhibition – works that grapple with questions of narrative, with traditional forms of display, with diorama and the relationship between physical objects and technology.

Artefact enriches Making Melbourne with the mystery and seduction of craft-based art practice, just as the museological context of Old Treasury’s nineteenth century environs inject an elegiac disquiet into the contemporary installations, playing off their allusions to grandeur.

CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN SILVER AND METALWORK
AWARD 2007
1 December 2007 to 24 February 2008

This is a selection of silver and metalwork by contemporary Australian artists from the major exhibition held at Buda Historic Home and Garden, Castlemaine. The Contemporary Australian Silver and Metalwork Award first commenced in 1988 as a biennial event and is one of the very few exhibitions in Australia designed to encourage and promote the work of contemporary silver and metal smiths.

As the only award exhibition offered for hollow ware in Australia, it attracts artists from across the nation, and encourages original concepts, innovative design and excellence in craftsmanship.

/ Coming Up

MELBOURNE, AND OTHER MYTHS
8 March – 25 May 2008

See the city in a strange new light as Melbourne and Other Myths infects the City Museum this autumn.

Bear witness to the lives of three Melbourne eccentrics as they explain their unique visions of the city. Through the stories of these odd characters, illustrated with sounds, images and curious artefacts, the exhibition explores Melbourne's urban myths and impossible secrets. Other surprises – some fact, some fiction – will leave unsuspecting visitors seeing familiar landmarks in peculiar new ways.

Melbourne. Maybe it's not where you think.

Making Melbourne

Tracing the story of the city from early settlement to the present day.

Built on Gold

The story of Victoria’s gold, its journey and legacy in the years 1852-1862.

Growing Up in the Old Treasury

Recreating the caretaker’s apartments, as occupied 1916-1928.

Gold and Prosperity

The Vizard Foundation collection of colonial gold and silver.

/ Events

Friday 8 February
2.00pm
Curator Talk
Join curator Simon Gregg for an informative tour of Playtime: Amusing Melbourne Through the Ages.
Free with entry

Wednesday 20 February
2.00pm
The Games Children Played
Join Stephanie McCormick for an insight into life for the Maynard children, residents of the Old Treasury 1916-28.
Free with entry