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
Developed in 2022 by Artback NT as part of Apmere Mparntwe—the Australian Ceramics Triennale— touring exhibition Clay on Country, showing now at New England Regional Art Museum, showcases the diversity of ceramics in the Central Desert.
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.
In Anmatyerr artist Elizabeth Mbitjana Pitijana’s first solo exhibition in Melbourne—which focuses on the Central Desert food source Arnwekety (bush plum)—the influence and love of her Country and culture is palpable. Elizabeth Mbitjana Pitijana is now showing at Niagara Galleries.
For Lardil and Yangkaal writer and curator Maya Hodge, Archie Moore’s presentation at this year’s Venice Biennale is a powerful symbol of reckoning—one that asks the world to bear witness to the long shadows of colonial violence and clears space for possibilities ahead.
Curated by Lee Kinsella, Stuffed, Bolstered and Upholstered—on now at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery—looks at how woven and fibre objects align with the human form, encompassing the practices of over thirty artists working across textiles, painting, ceramics, sculpture and installation.
In a new exhibition at Australian Galleries, Kyoko Imazu’s intricate papercuts show worlds in miniature—Some of works are only 15 centimetres tall, yet their detail is meticulous.
