SHED
Back again for the Adelaide Fringe Festival, Tony Kearney’s long running series of themed exhibitions staged in the amazing Hart’s Mill, is open.
Tony began the show as a way to highlight the industrial beauty and history of Port Adelaide, and the potential for its evaporation at the hands of developers. His own boat shed and many like it were unhesitatingly demolished and left vacant (still) waiting for some soulless apartment complex to bury it for good.
Port Adelaide is a really special place, but as in many instances in South Australia, there just isn’t the money nor the long term thinking that would see such history nurtured into useful contemporary buildings that carry it forwards. It’s pretty grim.
So as a protest of sorts, Tony has formed this collective of artists that rotate through and put on a pretty interesting show. It’s a mixed media show, and it attracts rank amateurs like me, newborn artists like my daughter Josephine, and established masters like Hossein and Angela Valmanesh, who come to play in this low stakes opportunity to show old work, or new ideas.
Tony gives us one word, and we work around that. As literal or figuratively as you can conjure.
I see art as a puzzle I want to decode, so I’m always making conceptual work, that is frankly a little too literal, but I want my viewers to share in the intentional message, and enjoy the decoding as well.
I planned something grand for the show, and as sometimes happens, it became whittled down. Still I like what I presented. I’ve been wanting to tell the story of the richness of America’s climate, how regular rains create massive rivers that struck me dumb when I first saw them.
So I chose a comparative pair of photos, one from Pennsylvania, showing and 1800s grand mill painted boldly in red. The other a hut weathered to the bones in the northern Flinders Ranges. It too built in the 1800s. The hut sits higher in the cameras framing, in its red dirt surrounds, showing the dominance of the environment that has forced its fate. The Pennsylvanian mill is Trumpian, the horizon is low in the frame as it stands out in full pride and drama illustrating mankind’s hubristic dominance of the surrounds. The story is titled “build near water “, I used Latin to make it read like a parable.
Here is the label information:
Aedificare luxta Aquam
(build near water)
2024 - Pigment ink on archival fibre based paper, framed, 1 offL: Windowarta Hut SA, Holowiliena Station, on Andyamathanha Land, South Australia.
R: The Roller Mills Shed, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, USA, on land home to Lenape, Susquehannocks, Iroquois, Erie, Shawnee, and Arandiqiouia peoples.
Both sheds were built at a similar time (mid to late 1800s), undoubtedly the intentions of the builders were similar, they saw a future for their enterprise.
Windowarta is on land surveyed by George Goyder, and is built beyond Goyder’s line. A geographical line used in South Australia, above which, the rain fall makes western style agriculture a struggle.
Cyrus Hoffa built the Roller Mill’s Shed and operated it as a flour mill. The grand scale of North America’s rain fall, and the broad rushing rivers it releases is a shock to anyone who has lived with the Murray as their BIG river. Let alone Windowarta Creek, occasionally trickling it’s way through the hollows.
The Roller Mill is Trumpian alongside Windowarta Hut. It bursts from the ground, loudly scraping the sky with an unaware confidence that comes with abundance.
And in a last minute twist, one of the artists, Thom Buchanan, withdrew leaving a big gap in the front room. Tony and I in a hurried call on the morning of the opening decided to show another photo I’d taken of a shed. Very literal.
It’s a picture of the Cathedral of the Malle, the Horsham’s Stick Shed, the largest shed structure like it in the southern hemisphere. It’s a massive early 20th century grain store. Massive doesn’t do it justice. It’s titanic.
Tony and I visited it in 2019 and promised to return with all of our camera gear, but still haven’t. But I had a decent iphone8 snap of Tony awestruck in it. So I used all my skills as a printer to interpolate the iPhone snap up to a 1.3m wide print of the shed. And it works.
So that’s my SHED. :)
p.s. My wunderkind daughter Josephine was also in the show, and killed it with a series of latex casts of bottles, they’re so beautiful.
