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The Always Beyond

Thea Constantino
Eyeline 80
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It is a well-worn cliché to describe the past as a foreign country, but there is still something persuasive in describing the course of time in geographical terms. We might say of an awkward phase in our lives, ‘I was in a difficult place then’, or ‘I would never go back there’; the passage of time lends itself to comparisons with physical journeys. So it is perhaps unsurprising that in an exhibition which explored the theme of locations elsewhere, that the past would be figured as a realm in its own right. ‘Yonder’, curated by Jasmin Stephens at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), explored artists’ desires to know ‘what’s over there’, focusing on experiences of mobility and globalisation in the contemporary world. However, in grouping together works that explore the desire for places beyond, the exhibition was more revealing of the condition of distance than travel. As the artists attempt to conjure places both real and imagined through cartographic, narrative and aesthetic devices, they tell us more about the winds that blow them off course than the yearned-for terminus. A sense of insurmountable separation pervades many of the works, which is felt most keenly when their destination is not just another place, but also another time.

Helen Smith’s and Clare Peake’s works are incisive responses to the notion of ‘yonder’, because by exploring the yearning to connect with a remote past, they reveal not only the futility of this endeavour, but also its inevitability. Peake’s Prima Materia and Smith’s Reunification Series interrogate a particular form of nostalgia which is predicated upon the impossibility of recovering the absent object of the past. It might be described as an aesthetic... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Helen Smith, Reunification Series, 2012. Found photographs in artist’s book. Courtesy the artist and Goddard de Fiddes Gallery, Perth.

Helen Smith, Reunification Series, 2012. Found photographs in artist’s book. Courtesy the artist and Goddard de Fiddes Gallery, Perth.

Helen Smith, Reunification Series #1 and #2, 2012. Details. Oil on canvas and found photographs in artist’s books. Photograph Bewley Shaylor. Courtesy the artist and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts.

Helen Smith, Reunification Series #1 and #2, 2012. Details. Oil on canvas and found photographs in artist’s books. Photograph Bewley Shaylor. Courtesy the artist and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts.