Hugh Jackman kickstarted a multi-million dollar arts fund for WAAPA this year. Consequently, students in the visual arts will be relocated, brought closer to their creative cousins in fashion and design. The studios we shared, where we created, ate, argued, stressed, slept, and expelled objects we found unworthy, will all be demolished and reduced to memory before December's end. And, as one may snip a lock of hair from a loved one, some of us have decided to claim chunks of the floor as memento.
I can't join this year's graduates, nor maybe the year after! I studied units useful to my practice but whose points I can't spend towards my double major -- The History and Sociology of Genocide, for example -- and I've no regrets about it. My ambition is to make and contextualize great art. The qualification will arrive with time and patience.
The last inhabitants of Studio 4.112 have compiled a zine as companion-piece to the Visual Arts exhibition, and as farewell to the space. Though I'm absent from the show, you'll still find me in that zine! Amongst wonderful people who earned their awards, whose dedication I admire, and in whose company I was very fortunate to spend so much time.
Now: at this show, and outside the building, isolated from the rest of the artists, sits a work of particular beauty and independence: Rebecca Jensen's For those who come across the seas. Hundreds of gently embroidered sheets line the inner walls of a white, open sea-container. One steps up and into the space to read them more clearly, and discovers himself surrounded by quotes of Australian bigotry and appalling xenophobia, and that he's now standing in the place of their stowaway target. Such careful trapping of the viewer, by use of silent allure and a humane twist, makes for the strongest kind of art installation: not merely glimpsed over, but experienced by active participants with living bodies. It's the kind of art that people preserve in essays; that they travel far to encounter. You've got to see this.
I can't join this year's graduates, nor maybe the year after! I studied units useful to my practice but whose points I can't spend towards my double major -- The History and Sociology of Genocide, for example -- and I've no regrets about it. My ambition is to make and contextualize great art. The qualification will arrive with time and patience.
The last inhabitants of Studio 4.112 have compiled a zine as companion-piece to the Visual Arts exhibition, and as farewell to the space. Though I'm absent from the show, you'll still find me in that zine! Amongst wonderful people who earned their awards, whose dedication I admire, and in whose company I was very fortunate to spend so much time.
Now: at this show, and outside the building, isolated from the rest of the artists, sits a work of particular beauty and independence: Rebecca Jensen's For those who come across the seas. Hundreds of gently embroidered sheets line the inner walls of a white, open sea-container. One steps up and into the space to read them more clearly, and discovers himself surrounded by quotes of Australian bigotry and appalling xenophobia, and that he's now standing in the place of their stowaway target. Such careful trapping of the viewer, by use of silent allure and a humane twist, makes for the strongest kind of art installation: not merely glimpsed over, but experienced by active participants with living bodies. It's the kind of art that people preserve in essays; that they travel far to encounter. You've got to see this.
The Transit Lounge exhibition runs from 26 November - 12 December
Edith Cowan University's Mount Lawley campus, building #3
Event map
Facebook event page
Edith Cowan University's Mount Lawley campus, building #3
Event map
Facebook event page
