If you want a briefing on the non-objective art scene in Sydney, Home from Home is worth a visit. The exhibition is in a flat in Paddington. The key is left out on a chair. The surprise factor works in favour of the experience.
The theorist Nicolas Bourriaurd wrote about taking art out of the gallery. This installation is in a flat.
Keeper of the “gallery” is well-known artist, writer and activist Ruark Lewis, an old hand at the soft art of intervention.
As senior curator for Sydney non-objective network SNO, he lives next door and was part of the push to cover abandoned buildings during the lockdown with non-objective art. A photograph of a work painted on a building near Rosebery is in the exhibition.
“We didn’t get permission,” said Lewis, who is a master storyteller. “We photocopied the painting on A4 sheets and stuck them on the building.” They were part of a construction site two days later.
The painting was selected by two stalwarts of the Art & Language movement, Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden. It was conceived as a poster for an exhibition at the Château de Montsoreau Musée d’art Contemporain in France.
Genealogies are Lewis’s thing, as geometric overlays, repetitions, letters, tracings and all manner of connections with artists of the past and present. Hospitality, in the form of welcoming other artists, is his thing.
In the exhibition are a range of theoretical publications that visitors can peruse. Any questions and Lewis is waiting next door.
The block of flats was designed by Bill Lucas in the 1960s as a modular art centre. There is so much cultural history in the site it can be overwhelming. Lewis was injured in an accident and never leaves the flat, he says, which doubles as a studio.
“The late 1960s and early ‘70s were a special moment,” Lewis claims. There were people in Seattle, the West Coast, Latin America, all doing op art and other abstract experiments. It’s important they get recognition.
He has many stories about people getting into art influenced by the greats of the past and not knowing anything about them. The truth is that a story either works in the moment or it doesn’t and no amount of history will bring it alive.
Lewis certainly achieves this aim with his own finely crafted paintings lying around casually, doing their work in the kitchen.
Home from Home was conceived during the lockdown and it still has kudos today as a discussion point about the role of artists working outside institutions.
Home From Home
SNO Contemporary Art Projects Sydney
Information: www.sno.org.au
Image: Ruark Lewis – photo by Rhonda Dredge
Words: Rhonda Dredge