Untitled (from A House for Hermes)
Exhibited in Shelter: On Kindness
Location - RMIT University Gallery, Melbourne, Australia
Date - 2009
Untitled 2009 is part of an ongoing series of works called A House for Hermes. Amongst many things, this project performs a prolonged musing on what constitutes ‘house’, ‘home’ and ‘place’ in a contemporary condition of ceaseless change, displacement and exile. As such it begins to suggest what could be described as a kind of un-homed geography.
A House for Hermes consists in part of an archive of over two hundred images of ceilings I have slept beneath over the course of the last two decades. These images form part of A House for Hermes 02: Bella Povera. The work for this exhibition is the first public configuration of this material: a kind of etude. For this iteration of the work I was particularly drawn to the ‘corridor’ between the main gallery entrance foyer, lift and exhibition space 6. This is a kind of non-space - a kind of blind spot or overlooked space in the gallery as a whole. As a transitional space, it seemed an opportune space in which to make a ceiling of images of transitional mobile experience. Indeed, there is a resonance here with those similar non-places in the urban fabric which provide shelter for the displaced and in which the homeless can make a temporary home. The relational and peripheral status of this space is also in keeping with a kind of unspectacular tangential work, a work which is not immediately obvious and which invites a different axis of looking or mode of approach.
Links
Media:
Hélène Frichot, Architecture Australia, September/October 2009.
Stuart Harrison, ‘Shelter: On Kindness’, Architecture Review Australia, No. 113, Summer 2009/10.
Andrew Stephens, ‘Close Encounters with kindness’, The Age, September 23, 2009.
We All need Shelter At BMW Edge, ABC Melbourne Festival - a feast of art on Digital Radio, http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2009/10/23/2722625.htm - 23 Oct 2009.
Christopher Allen, ‘The house as a mind on the edge’, The Australian, Tuesday 20 Oct 2009.
Megan Backhouse, ‘Domestic Tales’, Art Guide Australia, September/October, 2009, p.14-15.
Olivia Collings, ‘Bushfire sparks Japanese teahouse’, Architecture and Design, 16 Oct 2009.
Ray Edgar, ‘Beyond the Façade’, The Age, 2 October 2009, p.19.
Louisa Marks, Artlink, Artlink #29
Robert Nelson “The artistic abode: designed to entertain and threaten”, The Age, 16 October 2009, p20.
Andrew Stephens, ‘Close encounters with kindness’, The Age, 23 September, 2009, p.17.
Publication
