A visit to PICA (Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts) over the next few weeks will enable you to see three outstanding shows collected in a single venue. But be warned. It amounts to a feast of high quality contemporary art that can overload a viewer’s senses, and more than a single visit may be needed to take it all in.
As you enter the gallery’s Central Space from the main entry, the works of Beckon will challenge you. They are installation pieces that all obviously result from extremely work-intensive processes, and I’m told some of them took years to complete. The first work you’ll encounter is Josh Webb’s The Gift, a towering Baroque-style sculpture which questions the hidden motives of public monuments and memorials and the ‘sanitising’ of violence in the service of money and power (serious stuff). Another piece echoing Webb’s employment of the extravagance of Baroque art (but in this case, in the later Rococo style) is Kate Rohde’s Chateau Fatale. This is an unsettling piece, with the materials used turning out to be not as they seem. Nearby is Mikala Dwyer’s Tubeweight, which invites interpretations from viewers that may not necessarily be those of the artist (wow). There are many other exciting works in Beckon, but the one, which really delighted me, was Natasha Johns-Messenger’s Peek. Imagine my surprise when I looked into a mirror expecting to see my familiar image but was confronted by another person. It’s an effect achieved by angled mirrors and what I actually saw was the face of another viewer peering into a separate ‘looking glass’ in a nearby but partitioned area of the room. It brought home to me in a rush that we take our own image so much for granted that we seldom see ourselves as we are, and can even have a time-warped mind’s eye imagining of ourselves at a much younger age than truth reveals (here’s looking at you, Kid). But, seriously, this really blew me away, and I found myself like a child in a fun house looking at the back of the ‘mirror’ and wandering about until I could figure out how it was done.
On Pica’s upper level you’ll find Richard Giblett’s New Dystopias. Giblett, in my view, is a rival for Ricky Swallow. He has the same obsessive application in creating art that is really well made and time-consuming to complete. His astonishing Subcity: While you were sleeping is an incredibly detailed sculpture in plywood of a futuristic city that at first appears as a utopian vision until you realise that the artist has described it as a Dystopia. A dystopia of course is an imaginary place where everything is as bad as it can possibly be. And now it can be seen that this ordered but extremely clinical city with its bewildering array of architectural ‘masterpieces’ is a totalitarian nightmare that is entirely bereft of the individuality of human nature and evolvement of a lived-in city. No less impressive is System, a linking of 90 panels of gouache on paper depicting another futuristic city of the imagination. And in Raw Nerve: 66 Manhattan Punctures Richard Giblett draws attention to the undersides of cities through photographs peering into holes and fissures made to access the foundations and networks of cables and pipes that underpin and service the buildings above (a continuing theme in his work).
Down the hall on PICA’s upstairs level you’ll find Project Video, featuring the moving image works of more than 30 artists. It amounts to a time capsule of the creativity of artists who are now established within Australia’s video culture. Collectively these works explore filmic techniques and genres and provide a snapshot of the concerns of contemporary video artists and the directions in which they are moving. Curated by the Melbourne-based video installation artist, Brendan Lee, this is a show that provides invaluable references for students and devotees of video art.
These offerings at PICA should not to be missed. Enjoy!