The Illawarra Pavilion
Confabulated by the ArtHitects out of 3,563 overlapping sheets of 80 gsm photocopy produced on a KYOCERA TASKalfa 2554ci office copier The Illawarra Pavilion is a handmade print on a uniquely large scale. As a (fine) art print, The Illawarra Pavilion engages with printmaking’s legacy status as a minor, (undervalued) artform to explore aspects of contemporary Australian identity through a dialogue with selected items from Wollongong Art Gallery’s Mann-Tatlow Collection of Asian Art and Antiquities.
The Illawarra Pavilion’s architectural features are confected out of (high-resolution) photographs of Qing furniture details which are subsequently reinserted into the illusionistic, multi-perspectival architectonic environment produced from and with the furniture’s own material and cultural language. The resulting pedagogic image is a feedback loop of illusions and allusions actualising the (increasingly) blended societal experience of contemporary, multi-cultural Australia.
The process of disembodying doors and backs of Qing dynasty furniture items and incorporating them into a (complex,) spatialised image acknowledges the wider discourse of displacement, relocation and integration that are lived experiences for many in our community. Likewise, the Illawarra Pavilion’s multi-perspectival rooms and chambers and non-linear temporalities speak both to the past and future of a visual language that proceeds from an exchange (and synthesis) of cultures embodied (in the present) by the different backgrounds, generations, and professional identities of the ArtHitects.
The detachment and reuse of parts of buildings and monuments is termed spolia a practice common in antiquity. Spolia is the repurposing of building and construction materials for the creation of new edifices and has practical, philosophical and dialogistical implications that the ArtHitects use in part to propose a visual language that reflects identical social, political and economic developments they encounter in (daily) life. In this regard, The Illawarra Pavilion expresses the ArtHitects interest in arcane, forgotten and overlooked knowledge as an antidote to the increasing uniformity and ubiquity that characterises a world in which biological diversity is similarly diminishing because of how economic forces (equally) affect both nature and culture in the same way.
The Illawarra Pavilion is a continuous image 61.5 meters in length and took 24 (long) consecutive days to install. As a fine art print, it draws inspiration from the (stupendous) wood block works of artist’s such as Durer which were also composed of numerous small units that (seamlessly) cohered into monumental structures. As a handmade print, larger and more complex than any being produced in the world at this time The Illawarra Pavilion enacts The ArtHitects commitment to contesting the collapse of the value of labour relative to capital. They believe this is a corrosive social, political and economic issue that has alienated working people from their (historical) commitment to progressive causes such as those related to the environment, refugees and the status of minority groups and their access to visibility. As such, The Illawarra Pavilion is not an image of the transubstantive, cognitive and magical capacity of hand but its enactment.
The ArtHitects (Gary Carsley & Renjie Teoh) were assisted by Karan Singh Shekhawat