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From a viewer's perspective the most significant contribution of Alice Springs's only artist-run exhibition space has been to challenge the local dominance of two-dimensional art. While landscape is no longer the overriding impulse in the making of art in Central Australia, painting certainly remains the dominant form. This is possibly due, in part, to the invigorating influence of Indigenous painting since the late 1970s. It may also be that artists of European origin who have chosen to base themselves here-as opposed to the cities where, tor most, their art practice originally developed-have done so in order to continue to paint.
However, two artists with an installation practice recognised across state borders have been based in Alice Springs since the early nineties . They are Pamela Lofts and Anne Mosey, both among the founding group of artists of the gallery they dubbed Watch This Space (WTS) . Others in the group were textile artist Jan Mackay, painter Angela Gee and ceramicist Pip McManus. A survey of events in WTS since it opened in February 1994 reflects the diverse interests of all these artists as well as a commitment to exhibiting opportunities for visiting artists from interstate and overseas, and the development of an informal community arts space. Yet what stands out as absent from elsewhere in Central Australia is an openness to experimental work, work-in-progress and, in particular, installation practice.
As a physical space WTS could not have been better designed to generate possibilities for artists wanting to work in this way. Built as an ice and soft drink factory in 1951 , the main gallery has been cleaned and whitewashed but left otherwise untouched. Its former industrial use left behind