Last trip to Perth I caught the train into town with Mum to have a look at some of the Art in the City organised by Form. Painted over nine days, by forty five artists, Australian and international, on thirty walls. All photos taken on my phone. These are just a sample of the works to be discovered.
This was one of my favourites in Wolf Lane. Mining meets Dr Who meets gaming.
Pilbara Destruction by Pixel Pancho.
The squished car is due to photomerging images.
Child wolf in Wolf Lane by H?
Productive Construction by Heavy Projects
Cheeky Sparrow 2013,
probably not one of the Form ones but I like it - in the outdoor eating space of the Cheeky Sparrow eatery.
Maya Hayuk on curved wall, floating ladies and dresses by ?
Alexis Diaz
Hand detail - Alexis Diaz
Anya Brock and Hurben
GAIA in a car park in Murray St.
Stormie Mills
Rollin
Last Chance
detail - Last Chance
Roa - six stories high
Phlegm - this work is extraordinary full of amazing detail
Over all very interesting - humorous, fun, cheeky, colourful, serious. Next trip I hope to check out the ones we missed. And yes - Mum loved it too.
I was in Perth a week ago. It was hot. I stayed with a friend. We walked down the beach with her old dog. Slowly.
The beach was crowded with dogs and people, all shapes and sizes and colours. Mostly walking. Dogs playing and splashing in the shadows. The calm water was nearly empty of people.
Surprising.
We watched big brown dogs collect together, then a group of small pale dogs sniffed as their humans chatted. They agglomerated then dispersed. A special dog gravity.
We walked around a lake in the evening, and watched birds feed in the receding summer shallows. Muddy edges closed in as the hot dry weather continued.
We stayed to watch the evening colours change.
I loved the last light catching the tips of the pines.
Today we made it to the Fremantle Arts Centre and finally took in Shaun Tan's Suburban Odyssey. It was well worth the trip. There was a selection of his suburban paintings and drawings on show. The drawings show some of his method of working when brainstorming ideas for his stories. Up close there is a lot of detail that is not obvious when viewing images of his paintings. Some of his paintings had plaster on board, building up texture and often combined with a collage type layering of canvas or angular layers of card giving extra depth to the buildings in his suburban street scenes. This was evident in Crows Fighting Behind a Supermarket, 1998. An image of this painting is on my previous blog - Odyssey to suburbia. The foreground had texture from the plaster and the buildings were layered up on top of each other. Totally unexpected and very effective, adding to the sense of crowded space.
I loved the triptych Dormitory Suburb, oil on board, 2001. Two large dark panels with a brighter smaller glimpse of suburbia in the middle with a weird structure foregrounded - shades of his weird and wonderful creatures in his illustrated stories. Endgame, a diptych shows the suburbs, the ubiquitous crows in the foreground, and roads curving out of sight. The second panel, not illustrated has a little window with wooden spars of a ship covered with birds up in the top corner - an example of the bizarre and unexpected delights that Tan is so well known for.
End Game, 1998, main panel
Some sections of his paintings had layers of transparent paint giving enormous depth and complexity to the colours, especially in the darker sections. This contrasted with the richer textures and colour with squiggles and sketchy lines - found in the more organic sections like the trees blowing in the wind. The foreground in his work North Beach had wild seaweedy texture to burn in rich ochres contrasting beautifully with the inky depths of the ocean. The seawall is beautifully rendered with textural plaster and paint. My notes from the exhibition say - texture, texture,texture.
North Beach, 1998
His paintings have a surreal quality to them, forcing a double take on how suburbia is viewed. I love his quirky Cloud painting up high directly on the wall, shown below.
Cloud, 2012,oil on wall
Needless to say I loved his work. If you get the chance - go see it.
On the weekend we did another of our -mad- dashes to Perth, this time to hear Shaun Tan talk about his work and to view the animation of The Lost Thing. This was part of the opening event for his exhibition Suburban Odyssey showing at the Fremantle Arts Centre till 15 July 2012.
Part of the madness was due to a carload of five puppies - six weeks old now - and their mum, Miske. We left at 9am and the first half hour was mayhem, with five crying puppies wanting to be anywhere but in the car - despite the rib bones I'd given them as a distraction. Mark very wisely wore his earplugs while I sat in the back with them till they settled. From Mt Barker onwards things improved, one puppy settled at my feet on the floor of the passenger seat, the rest stayed in the back sleeping and occasionally complaining. Reaching suburbia and running late we quickly organised a car swap. My parents bravely took our car with puppies and we took their car arriving in Fremantle in good time for the talk. Unfortunately because of the huge crowd attending, the talk was moved from the Arts Centre to Notre Dame University so we didn't get to see his exhibition this time around. The day had been quite long enough ... We will see the exhibition next month I hope.
Shaun started by showing The Lost Thing, the trailer for it is above. Its a great little tale about amongst other things seeing the unusual and magic in your everyday life. Travelling up to Perth and into the city one really notices the busy-ness of everyone filling the city malls - endlessly dressed in business black - and the cars zooming along on an endless loop. Caught in the treadmill of our own making. People get so engrossed in what they are doing they miss the little things (or important things) - like the lost thing - until it trips them up. The story is peopled with bored unseeing office workers in a nightmarish bureaucracy but secret places to be found if you look. How many times do we see something strange but not investigate or wonder and simply forget about it?
'A moment of nostalgia on the way home from work'
from the end of The Lost Thing
Some of the background imagery comes from Shaun's observations of scenes of suburbia. They are beautifully rendered, potent with feeling, angular building set against sketchy and mysterious greenery, peopled by crows, the streets one sees in the early hours of the morning. Empty streets that don't quite feel empty. The exhibition is largely about these suburban scenes by Tan. He describes his memories of growing up in Perth as 'long, hot afternoons, wide and empty suburban streets, the drawl of crows, ocean air, unfiltered light ... being somewhere and nowhere at the same time. Sound familiar? Especially the somewhere and nowhere - Perth is so far from anywhere else - you could almost be at the end of the world. And the suburban sprawl ...
Night Train, Mt Lawley
'Fighting crows'
Tan explained how he loved to play with the absurd, the what if of imagination - that along with close observation of that which was around him. He said he loves to play with that - images like the buffalo in the vacant grassy block, directing the little girl - arise from that. Too often we do forget to play with ideas and allow the absurd speak its mind and lead us to who knows where. It reminds me of the vacant blocks we used to play in as kids when visiting our grandparents - we'd imagine all sorts of things in there - apart from weird finds of bits and pieces and spooky dilapidated buildings.
Image from Tales from Outer Suburbia
Another what if - the giant groper in The Red Tree
He describes his work as a combination of reality, fantasy, childish play and adult reflection. This is evident in his illustrated books. They are often thought of as being for children because they are illustrated with little text. However the subject matter often gives pause for serious reflection, poses philosophical questions, plays games and reveals hidden references on closer scrutiny.
Tan spoke about The Rabbits which John Marsden wrote and he illustrated. Its an allegorical tale about colonisation, a subject which Tan says he finds fascinating from a political as well as 'an event of utter strangeness where two very different worlds collide'. The story has echoes throughout the world - the might of power and ignorance playing out with degrees of environmental and cultural destruction. Apparently this book was banned in some Queensland schools - it must have been a bit too close to the bone. I think the book is fantastic (in both senses of the word) even though the end is depressing/disturbing/too true.
'Houses' from The Rabbits
Just to finish - I so love this image from Tales from Outer Suburbia. Two brothers set out to find out if the road just ends where the street directory stops - like a missing page. This is what they find. Paved to the edge of the world. Its beautiful, sitting on the edge of the world ... the birds can fly out past the edge ... and the water draining to the ineffable somewhere else.
'How great it must have been long ago, when the world was still unknown' from Tales from Outer Suburbia
I heard Jagath Dheerasekara, a photographer, being interviewed on radio national today and was fascinated by his subject matter. He is a Sri Lankan refugee who now lives in Australia and much of his work deals with Aboriginals, human rights and environmental issues. There is an exhibition of his work currently on at Customs House in Sydney. Looking on line I realised I had seen some of his work at an exhibition I had managed to catch at the Midland Railway Workshops and at the Fremantle Arts Centre in April. It was part of the Divergence: Photographs from Elsewhere exhibition, which was fantastic, interesting, provoking - but that is another story.
This is the joyful image I remember from the Railway Workshops exhibition. The blurb from the Form Divergence catalogue states:
'Nomination of their traditional lands as a domestic nuclear waste dump site in 2007, coupled with proposals for Australia to "lease" uranium and take back nuclear waste from overseas, have generated justifiable fear and concern among the Aboriginal communities in and around Muckaty (Manuwangku), 120 km North of Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory. Manuwangku, under the nuclear cloud attempts to document the spirit, connection to land and collective voice of this community, as they protest in defence of their right to live in a clean environment, free from hazardous waste.'
Another set of his photographs caught my attention titled The Bed or Stars Sky Breeze Trees. These images were taken in the Ampilatwatja Aboriginal community, 320km from Alice Springs. According to
Dheerasekara the series of images are a comment on their relationship to land and nature compared to the 'colonizer-imposed' confines of house and fence.
They call to mind sleeping out under the stars as a child on stinking hot nights in summer. Outside the air was cooler, the stars so bright, we watched the milky way as it slowly slipped through the sky. The night sounds of the boobook owl echoed around us. Sometimes if we were lucky we saw a meteor shower. When the easterlies started blowing in the early morning, quite cold at times, we headed inside again. I still love camping out, being that much closer to the sun and moon and stars, feeling the breeze or stormy winds, and the damp early morning air. Best of all when sleeping out you can feel the dawn - I love that.
The last images are from Dheerasekara is from his delightfully urban My Clothesline Diary. Just love that sense of backyard, everydayness of them. The gradual change of light and seasonality that we tend not to notice. The variations of clothes on the line speaking about the weather and where you've been and what you've been doing in the previous few days.
It also brings back memories of spinning in circles from the arms of the hoist. In our case there would be four of us swinging, one on each arm. Until we were sprung. I'm sure you've all heard the 'get off that ! you'll break it!' Needless to say the hills hoist never broke, even if it did go a bit wonky.
I can also remember later on hanging headless chooks off the line by their feet. This drained the blood before plucking and cleaning them in preparation for eating. Back in those days I think chooks were a bit of a luxury, certainly not as frequently eaten as they are today. Lamb chops and sausages were probably our daily fare.
