art
Disclosure and Outside-In Cafe
2012
Disclosure and Oustide-In Café grew out of a six-month residency in an abandoned shop front at the Central Institute of Technology in Perth Australia.
By manipulating the interface between the street and the interior of the building, the installation brought a heightened experience of street-movement inside the space.
Panels routed by hand with marks abstracted from a text in six languages, filtered sunlight reflected off passing cars, projected a changing play of light and shadow onto the walls of the rooms. The exterior of the panels (facing the street from inside the show windows) were painted by Perth-based painter and street artist, George Howlett. The space was open to the public as a bring-your-own lunch café – flipping the idea of the sidewalk café where interior commercial activity is allowed to spill into public space; here instead the public sidewalk was extended into the 'private' space of the shop. The project provoked conversations about sanctioned and unsanctioned art in the public realm and reflected on Hannah Arendt's ideas about the 'vita active.' Arendt maintained that human creativity only finds true expression through speech and action - through disclosing to the world ‘who’ we are in distinction to 'what' we are. Action and speech are communal, social activities which are meaningful and truly creative only when performed with others in a shared forum. Outside-In Café offered the possibility of such a forum.
Materials
Sunlight, mdf, paint, automobile windscreens, tables and chairs
