Window of Opportunity
A gallery close to home and worth a closer look.
I’ve walked past Project Space, the gallery on level two of RMIT’s Building 94, every day for two years and never once strolled in. Not for lack of curiosity. I often linger by the outside window or notice the sign ‘Gallery Open’ while I wait too long for the lifts. Maybe it’s the barren floor — I picture someone ready to pounce with small talk. When I enter a store, I’m armed with, “Just looking,” to send the shopkeeper away. That line wouldn’t work in a gallery.
I glance at my phone. I have eighteen minutes until my next class. There’s no better time than now to take a look. I peek around the door and see that there’s no one inside.
I’m surprised to see a film playing on a large screen and six leather beanbags awaiting an audience. I expected paintings on rectangular canvas hung on the walls. A black curtain divides the room in two. Crossing over to the other side, I find postcards hung in white frames. On one, there is a picture of a crowd of people sprawled out across the beach with umbrellas and sun lounges. Madeira is written in black letters across the top, but Western Sahara is written in a font that looks like it has sand speckles over it. While walking towards the back of the room, passing the film again, I wonder what it all means.
“I was looking for sand,” a British woman’s voice says over the speakers.
I walk through a doorway into another room. Necklaces hang on the wall made of bits and pieces of phones. I can’t imagine wearing them, but I’m intrigued by the creativity it takes to made trinkets from a device, piecing them together. I stare for a long time, finding familiar parts like a camera lens and a sim card. Walking back out, I find someone circling the room. I stand near the beanbags directing my attention to the film in what I hope to be a studious gaze, pretending I already understand what’s going on.
Eerie soundscapes of what I later learn are NASA space recordings of Earth fill the space. Her repeated line, “I was looking for sand,” is haunting. While she was looking for sand, she only found hollow holes where it had been. Black spots that, “Mark the disappearance,” the British woman’s voice explains.
Back on the outside of the glass doors, I find a clipboard holding an A4 page with a blank table. I fill out my name and email address in the first row so they can update me about the next exhibit. Finding three email addresses on their website, I decide to email them all. Verity Hayward’s reply is almost immediate. We agree to meet in her office for a quick 10 minute conversation so I can learn more about the space. I leave after twenty.
As curator and administrator, Verity Hayward works in a tiny office between the automatic entry doors of level two and the gallery — blink on the way to the lift and you’ll miss it. She seems young — blonde ponytail, mid to late twenties perhaps — at the beginnings of a promising career, though she speaks like she’s been in the business of arts management for decades.
She works as part of the wider Intersect team, managed by the RMIT School of Art. Intersect run six creative projects that together form a dynamic program of exhibitions, residencies, creative laboratories, talks and events, using contemporary art as a way of intersecting with and enriching RMIT and the wider community.
Verity coordinates two of these creative projects in Building 94: Project Space and the adjacent Spare Room, which can only be accessed through a door within Project Space. Exhibitions often co-exist in the two spaces, one acting as a counterpoint or link to the other.
“We put a sign out the front, but we do see people standing there asking if they can go in,” Verity says. I nod along, pretending I wasn’t one of them.
“We want to bring in current, relevant and exciting, contemporary art that shows students something they may not see every day,” Verity explains. “We’re not presenting static artwork on the wall to be looked at. It’s about ideas.”
I learn that Project Space has been home to the work of Enar de Dios Rodriguez, an artist from Spain who lives and creates in Vienna. Her project Vestiges looks at our insatiable demand of sand — a resource as finite as water, but not nearly talked about as much. Beach nourishment, where sand is mined from one place and dumped in another, is doing irreparable damage to our lands.
“In Majorca, all the sand is brought in from Dubai,” says Verity. “They bring in sand for tourist beaches around the world — they’re not authentic anymore.”
I didn’t understand everything Enar de Dios Rodriguez was trying to say when I walked around Project Space. There were two thick black lines painted around the room and I didn’t know what it meant. On a small photocopied, hand-stapled booklet I found outside her exhibit, Rodriquez explains, “There, on the two walls on the back, there are black lines dividing the pristine white space … One line marks four centimetres, because if you own a piece of land in Australia, you only own the top four centimetres of its topsoil; everything below is owned by the state. The other line marks 155 centimetres, the point at which artworks are considered properly placed.”
“Now imagine sand as a scale of something greater.”
Alongside the exhibit in Project Space, Nicky Hepburn — an alumni of RMIT’s Gold and Silversmithing program — Liv Boyle and Belinda Newick explored e-waste and the repurposing of materials into jewellery through their project Adapt in Spare Room.
The three artists put a call out for broken or unused mobile phones from their community of friends and family, which resulted in a sizeable stack. Liv Boyle used the tiny camera lenses from the phones to make wearable pins, and Nicky Hepburn linked microphones, camera lenses, volume buttons and motherboards to create necklace chains.
Belinda Newick removed all the inner workings revealing the phone’s structure and shape, drawing connections to precious metals and rare earth elements. Through her art, she asks, “If we could see the shiny gold, would we apply more value?” I also find this in a little folded booklet that reminds me of a publication my friend made for a zine fair earlier this year.
“There are more mobile phones in e-waste than there are humans in Australia,” says Verity, sitting across from me in a swivelling office chair. She’s been so engrossed in the artists’ work leading up to the installations that she hasn’t needed to peek at notes to tell me about sand in Majorca or e-waste in Australia. I’m the one that’s relying on notes, furiously scribbling it all down.
While Verity invites artists to showcase work at Project Space through partnerships with festivals and residencies, First Site Gallery on Swanston Street, which is also one of the six creative projects that make up Intersect, is open for students to exhibit — and not just from the School of Art.
“It’s about cross-collaboration,” Hayward says. “They want to encourage writing projects and all sorts of ideas in that space.”
First Site is led by a student committee who program exhibitions and set the vision for the gallery. Over the past 23 years, First Site has presented over 850 exhibitions involving 4,000 students. There are call outs to exhibit work each semester and opportunities to be involved in the 2020 committee.
Through a 20 minute conversation, Project Space has transitioned from a window my friends lean against while smoking, and a door I rush past to get to class, into a space that is sparking and challenging ideas and is part of a wider contemporary art offering throughout our university and city buildings.
In 2019, Project Space and Spare Room hosted art that addressed marginalisation, female leadership in Indonesia, body identity, the idea of home, and queer rights and marriage equality. Artists from Taiwan, UK, Germany, Spain and, of course, Australia have exhibited.
I’ll admit, I didn’t alter my life after the exhibitions. I still have two old mobile phones at home that I don’t know what to do with. One fell into a toilet and the other is too old and slow to turn on properly. I don’t want to wear them around my neck, and I don’t want to donate them to somewhere where they might be able to turn them on and find all my old pictures and messages.
But it was refreshing to find a space dedicated to ideas. In class, we’re focused on learning and progressing forward. Here is a space to just be. To look at something from a different perspective, with no right or wrong answers. Everything is open to interpretation. I wish I used the two years I’ve studied here as a window of opportunity to engage sooner.
Follow @RMIT_Intersect for upcoming exhibitions and events or, when next lingering by the window, just walk in.
