Jess Scully

In her final guest blog as part of Time Out Sydney's 52 Weeks of #SydCulture campaign, curator and City of Sydney councillor Jess Scully draws a line between a city's nightlife and its arts life, and advocates for the hybrid spaces and after-dark hives of creativity that are currently an endangered species. What's the connection between culture and nightlife? Can you have a great creative life in a city that dozes after dusk? Sure, there are art capitals without a banging nightlife – unless I am missing something major about Basel in Switzerland, home of Art Basel, or the sleepy German town of Kassel, which is transformed into an art Mecca every five years during Documenta – but they are the exception, not the rule.  Basel and Kassel and their respective art fairs/festivals are places where art is exhibited and traded, not created. They’re the end of the creative food chain, not the beginning. If we look to the cultural hives of the Western world, however, we see a pattern: in Berlin, Berghain and clubs in general are part of one ecosystem with the studios and art spaces; likewise, the bars and venues of Bushwick feed Brooklyn’s creative community.  In these ‘cultural capitals’, after dark watering holes and party playgrounds are not optional extras, they’re at the foundation – places where artists and creative thinkers work, meet, test out ideas and invent the new. If we want Sydney to be a place that generates new thinking, we need to champion places where people can let go

Welcome to the third guest blog post of Time Out Sydney's 52 Weeks of #SydCulture 2017 challenge! Every Tuesday of January, curator and City of Sydney councillor Jess Scully is telling us what she loved the week before. Think of it as your recommendations for this week, from someone who sees a helluva lot of arts and culture. Over to Jess. Did you march on Saturday? Don't feel too bad if you didn't. Certified feminist friends were absent and asked, what exactly were you marching for? Reminding the world that women exist? “We’re here, we’re…50 per cent of the population?” It's a statement of the bleeding obvious, but unfortunately, one that still needs to be made. The Women's March started a day in which I contemplated the absurdity of oppression (and I wonder why I'm single); or rather, a day of experiencing some of the humour, sensitivity and skill that artists use to break oppression apart. After marching with thousands of strong women, I rode down to Firstdraft to see Walan Yinaagirbang (‘Strong Women’ in Wiradjuri) an exhibition of work by eight female Indigenous artists brought together by curator Emily McDaniel.   Amy Tracey 'Girra-maa' at FirstdraftPhotograph: Daniel Boud     Amy Tracey’s bouquets of native flowers adorn the brick of the stairs, sanctifying the space. Everywhere, women's knowledge is honoured. Lucy Simpson’s weaving spans across one room, caked in ochre, facing Tamara Baillie’s Awash. Cast in cotton stiffened by sugar, river networks and waterways fl

Welcome to the second guest blog post of Time Out Sydney's 52 Weeks of #SydCulture 2017 challenge! Every Tuesday of January, curator and City of Sydney councillor Jess Scully is telling us what she loved the week before. Think of it as your recommendations for this week, from someone who sees a helluva lot of arts and culture. Over to Jess. I’ve heard that our sense of smell is the one most closely aligned with memory, and I think that’s true: when I’m in Chippendale, or walking along Broadway, the old CUB Brewery aroma wafts out of the past like a ghost. The heavy, yeasty brewing mist that used to hang over the suburb until the early 2000s is still there, lurking down a drain or resting in the branches of a tree, waiting for the right breeze to set it free. Scent of Sydney, by artist Cat Jones, captures the evocative connection between smell and memory, and even re-creates my most-favourite, least-favourite smell, that brewery haze, thanks to the recollections of academic Dr Michael Darcy.   Artist Cat Jones (second from left) with participants at the 'Scent of Sydney' installationPhotograph: Jamie Williams     Seated at hexagonal tables, I put on headphones and listened to stories from a cast of Sydneysiders. Auntie Fran Bodkin shared memories of sharks and eels shimmering across a waterway, and as she talked, I cradled a stoneware cup to my face, native frangipani plunging me into a distant summer. Journalist Patrick Abboud took me into the West, potent za’atar, sesame,

Welcome to the first guest blog post of Time Out Sydney's 52 Weeks of #SydCulture 2017 challenge! Every Tuesday of January, curator and City of Sydney councillor Jess Scully is telling us what she loved the week before. Think of it as your recommendations for this week, from someone who sees a helluva lot of arts and culture. Over to Jess. Just as we’re groggily emerging from that hazy holiday period, when you’re never really sure what day it is, Sydney Festival appears. Before we return to everyday life, we have the chance to interrupt our usual thinking and expand our perspectives. Sometimes it can be meditative and gentle, like floating in a ballpit (I have to get to that next week), and sometimes, it can pack a punch. I copped a SydFest one-two wallop on Friday (Jan 6) and Saturday (Jan 7): first the head, and then the heart.   EXIT by Diller Scofidio + Renfro – installation view at UNSW GalleriesPhotograph: Prudence Upton     On Friday night I experienced EXIT, an immersive video piece from designers diller scofidio + renfro, which has been shown at all the gatherings of global leaders you can imagine. It stopped Clover Moore in her tracks in Paris, at the COP21 Conference, and she worked with UNSW Galleries to bring it to Sydney. EXIT plunges you into the tides of human migration, accelerated today by the effects of climate change, conflict and industrial disruption. It sounds depressing, but it's worth wading into these data waters to see the many threads that connec