Rone Exhibition - Art Gallery of Western Australia

 Hi all, I hope you and yours are doing well. Life has been busy here and I haven't blogged the last few weeks, and now it is December already! But I have been busy - mostly with getting ready for a market, family things, photography and writing, etc etc just life really. In there I managed to get myself elected as Secretary of my photography group - and at the moment it is a steep learning curve. 

However last weekend we did take some time off and went to Perth for a few days - mainly to see our sons compete in the Chung Wah International Dragon Boat Festival, but also to visit the  Art Gallery of Western Australia, and the WA Museum. 

Wow - the Rone Time Exhibition at the Art Gallery was amazing!

I have never experienced anything like this amazing immersive art experience which was shown in the historic Centenary Galleries of the Art Gallery of WA. Installed in 12 rooms over 2 floors, it was the first time the Centenary Gallery had held an exhibition in almost 20 years.

As you walk through the rooms you step you back in time, where it appears that people have suddenly left leaving everything as it was and the rooms shut up for years - exploring places lost in time.

Rone says he hopes his work acts an an emotional catalyst and an open-ended narrative with no right or wrong way for people to experience the space. He says it is not just the painting on the wall, it is the objects that surround it that really tell a story, playing on all our senses.

Taking Tyrone ‘Rone’ Wright and his crew several months to set up in completely empty rooms, every part of the worlds they created is specifically placed, including especially made cobwebs. It is like walking into a time capsule - an art piece - overlaid with music. Amazing. It is quite overwhelming and you need to slow down and take your time to take it all in. You can walk around as long as you don't touch or move anything. The back of each room is a painting of a girl. Her eyes seems to follow you. His art work is so detailed, you would think they were photographs.

The exhibition invites you to consider time and how it has worn away so much, with dust settling over the detritus. But through the peeling paint and cracked ceilings, life persists. Faces search out for something, for all of eternity.

Below I share a few photos (yes you were allowed to take photos) Considering I was just using my point-&-shoot and the subdued lighting, I was very happy with them. But I know my photos won't do justice to them.

As you enter the Art Gallery the foyer is dominated by the glass house - imagine sitting here sipping tea.

My favourites were: the library - I love old libraries - with books lining the walls and on the floor, the spiral staircase. We read later that they weren't really books, just made to look like the covers, as the weight of them all would have been too much.

I've always dreamed of having a dedicated library in my house - with walls lined with bookshelves and those ladders that slide along - or indeed a spiral staircase! And comfy chairs beneath a window to sit and read.

Another favourite which kept drawing me back - The dinner show. Backstage elevates you from the viewer to the performer, placing you in the spotlight.

You stand on the stage where there is a microphone and lights along the edge, and look out over the room where there are tables set up for dining. There is a light on each table, coats on the backs of chairs, a handbag or hat here and there, bottles of wine, place settings.

I could relate to the typist pool with the old manual typewriters like those I learnt to type on, with the boss's office just beyond. And that somewhat sad look on the girl's face as she looks out the window dreaming of another life perhaps. I wish I had paid more attention to what they were typing.

The boss's office - the inner sanctum, not a place for mere typists.

the telephonist room - my Mum was a telephonist in a Western Australian wheat-belt country Post Office during the late 1940s early 1950s. Pulling plugs, connecting callers. A few years ago we went to her country post office and I asked if I could see the room - it was tiny!

The sewing room - with material laid out ready to cut - and paper patterns hanging on a rack. Old sewing machines and huge rolls of thread.

In the old shop the top newspaper on a stack of newspapers was printed 2 days before my husband was born - 17 December 1955. My Mum and Dad ran a newsagency in South Perth for many years.

Another of my favourites - the store room with shelves of boxes of all sorts of things. The clock face in silhouette is not really a clockface - it is a back lit piece made to look like a clock on an outside wall. We checked - no clock outside.

The mail room - unfortunately because of the low light it was hard to get a photo of the mail bags attached all around the edge of the desk. And I don't like to use flash. I used to deliver mail around a library at a university in my first job out of school.

The art room - at the back below the image of the girl was a place, on the rug,  for the models to sit

You can read more about the exhibition and Rone the artist here - ArtGalleryWA-Rone-Media Release

A previous exhibition was created at the Melbourne Flinders Street Station in Victoria, Australia. You can go here to see a video, which will give you a better idea of the detail in the exhibition - www.dezeen.com-Flinders Street station

You can also read more on his web page - Rone.Art

If you are in Western Australia and haven't seen the exhibition yet, I suggest you do. It is on till February (yes you do have to buy tickets). They even have a dining and bar experience. How amazing that would be! time-rone-agwa.com

We are fortunate to have Rone street art in Bunbury where I live in Western Australia. They are on a wall in a carpark. I have always thought how amazingly life-like they are considering they are painted on a brick wall.

A snapshot about Rone: Emerging from the fertile underground street art scene in Melbourne, over the past two decades, Melbourne-based artist Tyrone ‘Rone’ Wright has established an international reputation for his distinctive large-scale portraits and hauntingly atmospheric multimedia installations – which, since 2016, have pursued an increasingly ambitious scale.

Rone has carved a distinct niche for himself, drawing acclaim and growing audiences to his large-scale installations that breathe life into forgotten rooms, buildings and eras. More than just murals, these are collaborations with the very spaces themselves.

Rone’s work is held in permanent collections at the National Gallery of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria. He is co-founder of Everfresh Studio, an artist collective based in Collingwood, Australia.    

..... with thanks to Art Gallery of WA for some of the information in this post. 

I hope you have enjoyed my share today of the Rone Time exhibition in Perth, Western Australia. Have you ever seen anything like this? Perhaps you would like to share in your comments. 

Thank you so much for stopping by. I value your comments and look forward to hearing from you. I will try to visit your blogs in return. Have a wonderful week. 
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