INHABITING BENDIGO June 19 - July 14, 2013
... at the very first word, at the first poetic overture, the reader who is ‘reading a room’ [reading a house] leaves off reading and starts to think of some place in his own past. You would like to tell everything about your room [your house]. You would like to interest the reader in yourself, whereas you have unlocked a door to daydreaming. The values of intimacy are so absorbing that the reader has ceased to read your room, [your house]; he sees his own again. He is already far off, listening to the recollections of a father, ... a mother, ... in short, of the human being who dominates the corner of his most cherished memories.
Gaston Bachelard Poetics of Space, 1964 p. 14.
The La Trobe University’s Visual Art Centre in Bendigo has held its first ‘architectural’ exhibition in its Access Gallery, Inhabiting Bendigo June 19 - July 14, by architects Dennis Carter and Peter Williams.
Carter and Williams have been colleagues, collaborators and friends for many decades and this exhibition is a celebration their personal journeys, influences and works in ‘becoming’ an architect.
The Access Gallery is a specific ‘local artists’ gallery; Carter is a resident of Bendigo, while Williams has a farm at Resedale, a small hamlet fifty kilometers south east of Bendigo.
The exhibition is simple, intimate and thoughtful. It is poetic.
There are no grand gestures, no polemic, no architectural egos. A rare feat for two fairly architecturally opinionated passionate practitioners.
As you walk into this small gallery on the far wall, directly in front are two projected screens of images; photographs of non-architecture and architecture, Afghanistan, Australia, France, Germany, Hong Kong, cars, people, architectural offices, fisherman and guitarist - a whole assortment of disparate lives, travels, experiences, remembrances and interests - on two slightly out of sync 20 minutes loops. So the visitor, who may sit in one of the two domestic lounge chairs that the gallery so artful placed in position, can watch both screens at once, concentrate on one or the other, get lost in the imagery, the exotic, the unexpected that references these two different but not dissimilar men.
While sitting and contemplating the images, one can also listen to the pre-recorded conversation between Carter and Williams as they discuss their travels, their experiences and how that has inculcated on their architectural practices, their philosophies, their successes and their dreams.
On one of the side walls are cantilevered architectural models. Not the grand statement models, but more the working models that many architects make ‘in house’ to question their own designs or to explain design ideas to clients.
This is a gentle show, a private contemplation on the making of place. It offers the visitor with time and an open heart a space for reverie.
Karen Ward July 2013