The Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA) is currently closed until further notice.
Artist and musician Laurie Anderson has branched into virtual reality in a collaboration with Taiwanese new media artist Hsin-Chien Huang. Chalkroom, part of this year’s Perth Festival, utilises as a guide Anderson’s disembodied voice, familiar to audiences since her 1981 hit single O Superman. Visitors enter a black room, with phrases and song lyrics painted in white on the walls and ceilings. Anderson says she and Huang created this environment “full of shadows and darkness” as a deliberate antithesis of the “brittle and bright” aesthetic of the virtual reality world. Putting the VR headset on, the white graffiti becomes a multichambered journey. Words fly past, then disintegrate and reform.
The Washington Post reports that Anderson had tried as long ago as the early 90s to pull off a virtual reality project with singer-songwriter Peter Gabriel but that early VR work failed because of the then technological limitations. More than two decades later, Chalkroom “establishes Ms Anderson as one of the artists VR was invented for”, writes New York Times co-chief art critic Roberta Smith. Before making its way to Perth, Chalkroom has now been seen by audiences in the US, Denmark, Italy and Taiwan.
In a video interview on her website, Anderson says: “I wanted to see what it would be like to travel through stories. You begin slowly moving into this world of ramps and hallways, and it opens up to huge towers, and they’re all covered in language. Sometimes letters float towards you; like snow, they’re there to define the space … they’re fractured languages.”
Her main inspiration, says Anderson, was to allow people to fly, “like you do in your dreams”.
Chalkroom
Laurie Anderson & Hsin-Chien Huang
Perth Institute of Contemporary Art
8 February – 19 April
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is an extraordinary account of the unique art of this continent, published alongside a landmark exhibition at the Potter Museum of Art. Necessary and urgent, it tells the story of Indigenous Australian art; a new art history unlike anything we’ve seen. For Jane O’Sullivan, it’s a remarkable and must-read book.
In a new series of illustrated postcards available as a free gift with purchase only at the Art Guide Bookstore, Oslo Davis takes on classic and contemporary art terms and genres and reimagines what they could be referring to.
With so much to choose from, we’ve rounded up the major summer exhibitions in each capital city, open all summer long. Spanning Yayoi Kusama, Magritte, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and many more.
Past meets present in Leyla Steven’s latest exhibition, now showing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and co-curated by Artspace. The Australian-Balinese artists adopts a collaborative approach to restitution, scrutinising the systems of conservation and documentation we have inherited.
bagan bariwariganyan: echoes of country, curated by Jonathan Jones and now showing at Bundanon, highlights a long history of Indigenous art on the New South Wales south coast, with works and installations from Jones, Aunty Julie Freeman, Aunty Cheryl Davison, and Mickey of Ulladulla.
About Face is a smart piece of marketing. The new book on portrait painting from Australia and New Zealand has a mission to change buyers’ minds about the field. But as Jane O’Sullivan discovers, any sales pitch wears thin if it’s repeated often enough, and the close attention to how portrait painting is received by the market means that other important conversations fade to the background.
