Travelling north on the 86 for the group exhibition Five rooms and house rules at Bundoora Homestead Arts Centre, I find myself playing a kind of phrase association to see how frequently I can think of different idiomatic uses of ‘house’ and ‘home’. For the most part, the ‘home’ sayings encircle the same kind of twee sentiment invoking belonging or comfort, the kind that you’d expect to read on a cursive decal printed on the walls of a last-minute Airbnb: ‘there’s no place like home’, ‘home sweet home’, ‘home away from home’, ‘home is where the heart is’ and so on. After the two-in-one ‘to make a house a home’, we move onto the house, which is where it starts to get interesting (I hope). ‘It’s on the house’, ‘play with house money’ and ‘the house always wins’. I’m starting to realise that ‘house’ is a notch more ambiguous; a placeholder snuck into phraseology to function as a kind of non-entity softening the dehumanised economics of the service industry. Who is this house after all and why do they keep winning? I’m spit balling, but this discursive plug-in fashions house as an ersatz commercial spectre, leading me to think something might just come from further unpacking its clearly nuanced formulation.
The Homestead is an impressive house that someone, at some point, must have made a home. As not only a protected Victorian Heritage-listed building but the public gallery for the City of Darebin and its art collection, there are, as one would expect, provisional guidelines that regulate the ways in which potential artists and curators may formulate exhibitions at the Homestead. These take the shape of both conceptual and formal conditions. Whether it concerns the content of works (scrutinised on behalf of the gallery’s municipal function) or the presentation of the works (instructions for the ways in which one can install artworks or access certain parts of the property), the house rules reign supreme. Curator and artist Tim Woodward has supplanted these rules as the conceptual framework for a group exhibition including the work of Jessie Bullivant, Steven Bellosguardo, Mitchel Cumming, Hilary Jackman, Erika Scott, Rachel Schenberg, Lilly Skipper and Charlie Sofo. While the so-called house rules aren’t particularly unique to the Homestead, with derivatives and similar guidelines in place at various heritage homes-turned-exhibitions spaces alike such as Heide Modern, Villa Alba or The Johnston Collection, this exhibition corrals artists whose respective practices sidestep formalist dogma and museological oppression. That is to say, the works on show are particularly attuned to values of precarity, responsiveness and variance as ongoing principles.
Hilary Jackman’s Remanent 2 (1994) is the oldest work in the show and the first work I encounter. A highly traditional motif of fallen autumnal leaves softly illuminated against a tenerbrist backdrop, the work is almost hidden in plain sight in the exhibition, appearing most familiar to these decorative surroundings. House rules are in full swing here, as Woodward and Jackman elect to perch the painting atop a well-buffed mantelpiece to avoid damaging the walls. Formally it’s a sensible choice; the density and opacity of the thick gilded frame rhyme with the heftiness of the antique shelf supporting it. Centralised on the mantel, Jackman’s work emits a glow pulling me in akin to the tabernacle at an altar. And yet, recirculating an almost three-decade old work, Woodward’s inclusion of Jackman’s painting sets a characteristic tone for the rest of the exhibition. Jackman’s well-established painting practice is hinged on the perceptive awareness of community and surroundings told through a choreography of objects, thus precipitating a curiosity to phenomena, objects and furnishings throughout the show otherwise demarcated as familiar.[i]
Across the room, dynamic stripes of varying width span the dimensions of tall sash windows overlooking the verandah. Each diagonal line sharply courses across the panes, redacting parts of the view with a greasy coat of blurred fingerprint markings. For the site-specific Sensitive Work (2024), Jessie Bullivant applied a store-bought resin salve composed of oil and wax to the exterior of the window which in turn, captures the pollen from the trees and plants in the Homestead’s surrounding vicinity. With access to the verandah prohibited on account of the unregulated bannister heights, Bullivant’s salve blurs sections of the exterior world to negate the Romanticist compulsion for the panoramic vista. Haptic and resourceful, the work shrinks the aperture and insulates the space by reverting attention back into the room. This hyperlocal intervention foregoes spectacle in lieu of environmental rumination and sensorial stock-taking. It pivots my thinking toward the environmental specificities and historical implications of building on unceded land, shifting away from the splendour of the Homestead as an apparatus recounting such history.
In the adjacent gallery, an entangled assemblage of timber Bentwood chairs flank the hardwood floor. For Lilly Skipper’s Tendencies to linger (2024), the artist appropriated a number of chairs from the Homestead’s own reserve of café furniture. A simple, repeated motif articulated from multiple vantage points, Skipper’s work reminds me of the analytical cubist endeavour to denote the truth of an object by seeking out each angle or side, irrespective of the proportions of the single pictorial frame. The chairs provide a disembodied, almost corporeal reference that accentuates the idea of the house-as-spectre. Interpolated in the space without pretence, Skipper extends a vein of institutional critique established throughout the show, turning the lens back on the Homestead’s own circulation of bodies and vernacular objects. No stranger to a museological context, the chairs are unremarkable in their utility. Yet when repurposed in this cohesive and strict context they become a subject of curiosity themselves in a way that negates service or usefulness. Skipper shrouds their functionality through a profoundly phenomenological endeavour that rehashes what it means to apprehend an object and name its function.
Skipper’s second, smaller assemblage of white Bentwood chairs in the next room ushers me toward a triumvirate of rectangular abstract compositions by Rachel Schenberg. Fragments of discarded fruit boxes are repurposed as tiles or pieces as the artist adopts a granular vocabulary of abstraction. Positioned alongside Skipper’s recirculated chairs, each one of Schenberg’s panels embraces the afore-established state of flux: the piecemeal and fragile modalities of making, the constant exchange and changing hands of materials and objects and the circularity of commerce and capital.
Faced toward the earlier Tendencies to linger and similarly circumscribing a recess of the gallery, Steven Bellosguardo’s installation As if you could kill time without injuring eternity (2024) shrugs off any concern about the viability of exhibiting painting in a space with seemingly impenetrable walls. Its construction, like much of the sculpture in the exhibition, can be understood at a glance. A geometric grid of eight cement sheets suspended in the air, each bearing the same muddied imprint of twelve bricks stacked alongside one another in a rectilinear formation known as a stack bond. Self-sufficient and unilateral, nothing here is hidden as Bellosguardo bucks the rigidities and prescriptions of the Victorian gallery model. Embracing the utopian spirit of transparency associated with decolonising approaches to exhibition design of the 1960s, Bellosguardo deftly hoists each panel with a lightness antithetical to its material construction. Reliant only on a scaffolding system that frames the airborne panels, this is a work of spatial certainty articulated to the point of contextual indifference. To peek behind the frame, I must turn my back to the crown moulding, the stained glass and the garden view. Bellosguardo’s are an aesthetics of labour and lucidity, calling attention to the mechanics of a repetitive act. He seamlessly entangles both painting and sculpture to emphasise the primacy of process.
Encompassing the adjacent room is Charlie Sofo’s sculptural, sound and video installation Storage Solutions (2024). Sofo employs an unresolved approach to aesthetic definition that embodies the prosaic spirit of the ‘house rule’: flexible, unremitting, subject to modification and, more often than not, arbitrary. Audible from before one crosses the threshold, an uninflected voice enumerates the seemingly haphazard collation of objects and detritus: manhole, cigarette butt, chain link fence, elastic band. A similarly disparate assembly of objects scale the four walls at varying altitudes: coat hanger, exercise ball, keyboard, blanket. A video patches together snippets of refrigerator doors opening and closing to reveal their contents and context, ranging from the abundant domestic to the sanitised corporate. The dissociative quality of Sofo’s work gives it a gravitational pull that inserts anything and everything into its orbit. Though it is unclear if this is Sofo’s attempt at ordering chaos or projecting the mundane. Perhaps it does both. At first, attempting to make sense of the ultimately fallible notion of the universal ‘everyday’ and then, a portrayal of an individual, collective or the ever-elusive ’house’ as told through its discordant furnishings and draw-fillers. The work cuts through a surplus of meaning and ploy for authenticity that characterises much of contemporary art today. Enveloping socially mutual materials in a self-governing, contiguous web, Sofo, like Bellosguardo, spotlights a fiction fundamental to the romance of the museum and its methods of display. His installation enmeshes the viewer in a formless fabric, reducing entities –including the self – into the role of subject at the liberty of museological administration.
After a perambulating post-show walk around the verdant grounds of the building, grandeur has sufficiently waned and evaluation ensues. Noticing the building a little closer, a surfeit of discordant architectural features jut out to adorn the facade at will irrespective of aesthetic cohesion or structural dependence. Cast iron friezes wrap around a veranda supported by ornate spindles. Terracotta tiles line a mock-tudor gabled roofs, while roman arches preside over oriel windows. Protected as an example of Revivalist architecture built in the Queen Anne Revivalist style, this eclectic composite embraces the illogic of nostalgia. Revivalism, like other Historicist styles of the nineteenth century, hinges on a voracious metabolising of moribund stylistic traditions at a time of cultural identity crisis and political turmoil. Erected amid imminent Federalisation and burgeoning colonial expansion, the Homestead fortifies its historical and spatial dominance over the now densely suburbanised area via a fiercely protected cultural cachet. British architect George Gilbert Scott (1811-1878) and Revivalist practitioner described the phenomenon as ‘craving after the resumption of a national architecture, the only genuine exponent of the civilisation of the modern as distinguished from the ancient world, of the Northern as distinguished from the Southern races [sic.].’[ii] An inert emissary of intoxicated taste, the colonial soft-power of the Homestead maintains architectural, aesthetic and, given its municipal standing, political dominance over its domain.
Architectural history aside, the Homestead’s partitioned gallery spaces facilitate an interiority to their exhibitions which sustains the dialectical logic of Woodward’s show. The institution’s unabated sense of permanence is afforded by its heritage status and imposing aesthetics. In contrast, Woodward’s exhibition leans into the benefits of transience, selecting artists who lay bare the realities of exhibiting in conducive environments at a particularly fraught time. Often extant materials are transfigured without coy speculation or narrative push. This mode of production, or better yet, circulation fosters a critical analysis of historic systems of value and function that are embedded throughout the gallery without having to name them directly. Postulating the physical, historical and emotional governance of the Homestead, the exhibition establishes a prescient material correspondence that bears the symptoms of studio practice today. While it remains unclear if this exhibition occurs in light of or in spite of such governance, there are wider, resonant implications in responding to the contingencies and limitations of a space that cannot escape the residual stains of history, no matter how well the walls are preserved, the wood is polished and the windows are kept shut.
Supported by Creative Victoria, City of Melbourne and City of Yarra. Edited by Sofia Sid Akhmed (Skobeleva).
- [i] Parlane, Anna, ‘Passages of Light, Interview with Hilary Jackman and George Criddle,’ Memo Review, 4 September 2021. https://www.memoreview.net/reviews/passages-of-light-by-anna-parlane
- [ii] Scott, George Gilbert. Remarks on Secular and Domestic Architecture, Present & Future (London: John Murray, 1857), 11–12. In Martin Bressani, “Historicism, the Beaux-Arts, and the Gothic,” Nineteenth-Century Architecture, eds. Bressani and Contandriopolous (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), 6.