The Bishop’s Journey, 1985.
Brian Mckay
1/35
Framed stencil, edition of 35.
This is not a neutral space is the title of an 8-week studio residency undertaken at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA). The title was chosen after discovering a photograph of an installation titled Transition by Paul Hay. The installation was presented in a group exhibition, A spacious central location: installations for PICA and the Cultural Centre in 1990, the first exhibition at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts under the direction of the inaugural Director, Noel Sheridan, and curated by previous acting director John Barrett-Lennard in response to the geographical location and history of the building as a school at 51 James Street. This exhibition was the first and last time an exhibition was held at PICA where artists were asked to specifically create artworks that responded to the architectural specificities of the building.
In Hay’s installation, he had scribed “This is not a neutral space” on a chalkboard, in a room once used as a classroom. John Barrett-Lennard described this as a message about impossibility, can any space ever be truly neutral?
Before my residency began at PICA, I spent several months researching and documenting ephemera from the collections of the State Library of Western Australia, Western Australian Museum, and PICA’s own archive before presenting them in my studio as a quasi-museum collection for the public to view for the first time ever. A 19th-century adult shoe, found in a wall cavity in 2003 by contractors and kept in the board room was given a new display case.
An amalgamation of both public and private archives were collated in the studio, presenting a curated selection of past exhibition catalogues, letters, newsletters, magazines, found objects, exhibition posters and historical documents that were presented categorically to build a specific relationship between the building’s early beginnings as Perth Central School in 1896 and its present, as a contemporary art gallery in Perth’s cultural centre.
A framed stencil print was found hanging askew above the doorway in the tool room gathering dust, the framed print was by Brian Mckay.
Photo: Daniel James Grant and Paul Sutherland.