Patricia Piccinini and Peter Hennessey
Presented by Detached in association with Dark Mofo
Pliny the Elder famously relates that the beginning of Art was when a love-sick teenager, fearing the veracity of memory, traced the outline of her lover’s shadow. For Ovid the shadows are where one can summon the past, the spaces where poetry and music can occur. This quasi-archaeological turn is apt when considering the extraordinary journey that Patricia Piccinini and Peter Hennessey created for audiences at the new site of Detached Cultural Organisation in Hobart.
Acquired in 2013, the grand 1930s façade of the Old Mercury Building runs for two city blocks, and hides some 50,000 square meters of space soon to be redeveloped for a variety of art/cultural uses. The sense of the spectral looms large in most disused post industrial spaces. Indeed this site grew higgledy piggledy from 1853 to the 1970s, to accommodate burgeoning reprographic technologies and their associated workforce—at one stage the Mercury newspaper employed six hundred people on site, a huge number considering the generally Lilliputian Hobart population. Digitalisation means that Tasmania’s leading newspaper is now printed in Melbourne, and shipped in for daily distribution—so more shadows, more traces.
The shadows calling is the stunning result of a two-year commission. The first public collaboration of artists with distinct separate practices, the experience has obviously been liberating. This new dialogue between life partners has shifted, maybe even exploded, an increasing tendency towards an overwrought Cute-ism, particularly in Piccinini’s work.
Consisting of twenty four pieces (!), the majority made for this installation, as one would expect with such senior artists there were familiar echoes and returns—bravura, sometimes breathtaking technical skills, the hybrid, the doppelganger, the ugly/beautiful, the handmade/machine