The St Albans Suite
As the learned historical exhibition Views of Melbourne begins its useful and instructive tour of Victoria from the Bendigo Art Gallery, the inaugural venue has daringly problematized the survey with a contemporary show in an adjoining space. The St Albans Suite, a collaboration between Robert Cirelli, Eamon O'Toole and Bryce Ritchie, undermines nearly all the pictorial conventions seen in the main space, in which Views of Melbourne is studiously devoted to documenting the visual experience of Melbourne from European settlement in huts and tents, to the eighties building boom.
Melbourne viewers would be especially aware of the connotations of the title, The St Albans Suite, for St Albans is a western suburb which lacks the prestige of the numerous leafy zones of the prosperous, spreading metropolis. St Albans is also the name of a rail line. We have therefore an outer suburb with a terminus, a point beyond which there is no more metropolitan Melbourne
The suburbs distinguish Australian cities from all their international counterparts; yet the suburbs are the circumstance least explored in Views of Melbourne. Recently, the 'suburbs' have entered consciousness much more than previously. The Bendigo Gallery has acknowledged this change in emphasis from an earlier concerted focus on ‘The centre", to the nineties nomadic expression of periphery.
The works in The St Albans Suite lack the stiff upper-lip of Melbourne perspectives: they are casual and shambling; the slightly chaotic energies of the garage dispel all sense of the authority which is so much a part of the visual containment of previous pictorial conventions. Robert Cirelli paints on masonite rather than canvas and, against all museological protocols, screws the standardised sheets directly into the gallery wall. Their