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The arcade is undergoing a two-stage upgrade. Stage 1 comprises this commission. Stage 2, to be implemented later in the 2013-14 financial year, is the installation of a second Light Locker Art Space exhibition site. Proposals must therefore consider how the planned placement of five exhibition light boxes and an information light box will be integrated into the artwork concept.

Artists are encouraged to think beyond 100% aerosol and take advantage of the many mediums that could work within this interior public space.

To answer a few common questions:

1. There are no set parameters on start/finish dates but it would be nice for the work to be finished before the rooftop cinema opens (this usually happens mid Oct). However that’s not a deal breaker.
2. The ceiling is not off limits. A scissor lift can be supplied in kind, however if you don’t have a ticket (ie training and licence to use) the cost of staffing it is $80p/h.
3. You will receive help with approvals etc. The idea is foremost, all the other details can be figured out..

All enquiries should be directed to:

Katie Lenanton
Youth Projects Officer (Monday-Thursday)
City of Perth
Tel: 08 9461 3181
Email: Katie.lenanton@cityofperth.wa.gov.au

Anna Dunnill
A Short Lesson in Embroidery, 2013
Graphite, archival paper, thread

Anna Dunnill’s practice investigates language and communication through a variety of forms. In the context of the Light Locker she has considered the notions of containment, boundary and the human need for instruction, reflecting on the body as a tenuous container of ‘self’.

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Nathan Beard
Whoopikabinet, 2013
Treated wood, clay, gold and silver leaf, metallic spray paint, acrylic paint, digital photographic print

Nathan Beard is an artist based in Perth, Western Australia who received his Bachelor Arts (Art) with First Class Honours from CurtinUniversity in 2010.

Notable projects include The Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere collaboration with Abdul Abdullah and Casey Ayres, presented at the 2012 Next Wave Festival. He is also a recipient of a 2012 ArtStart grant from the Australia Council.
Whoopikabinet continues Beard’s investigation into shrine based sculptural installations and esoteric pop cultural influences. The work imagines the light locker space as a public shrine to the significant achievements of African-American actress, comedian and talk-show personality Whoopi Goldberg. The Light Locker is transformed into a facsimile of Ms Goldberg’s trophy cabinet, housing a primitively rendered depiction of her EGOT (the highest achievement in show business comprising of a competitive Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony) alongside crudely manufactured sculptures depicting African fertility dolls.

The work is intended to act as an elegy to a period in the early ‘90s crucial to the development of the artist, where Ms Goldberg was a significant pop culture figure and box office draw at the height of her career. What makes this achievement more significant is that she is an eccentric and abrasive, sometimes controversial, public persona who is not considered conventionally attractive, now inexplicably relegated to co-hosting daytime television. The work earnestly celebrates and laments these achievements and her career (the digital print is of Ms Goldberg’s most recent Academy Awards appearance which was roundly criticised), offering a sly critique of the notion of an apparently post-racial American cultural climate where an ‘exotic’ persona similar to Ms Goldberg’s would now struggle to achieve a comparable degree of success or sustained public consciousness.

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Devon Ward
Waypoint d’ironie, 2013
Paper and Wire

Devon Ward is a graphic designer pursuing a master’s degree at the University of Western Australia. His work is examines the underlying meanings within typographic marks and their use as a system of navigation.

Waypoint d’ironie uses punctuation to create a three-dimensional structure from a two-dimensional plane. It explores the space between traditional methods of navigation and the actual terrain.

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Amber Harries
Drift.Sink.Settle, 2013
Salt crystals, twine, wire, timber, light globe, glassware, plant life, water colour on detail paper 

Amber Harries is an emerging artist from Perth, WA. She graduated from Central Institute of Technology in 2009 with an Advanced Diploma in Visual Arts. Amber participates in many community based art projects and contributed to Royal Perth Hospital’s Artists in Hospital Program in 2007-2008. In 2010 she was selected for the Hatched National Graduate Exhibition at PICA. Harries had a one year studio residency at VENN where she developed her solo show Wonderhost for freerange gallery in 2011. In 2011 she co-founded the artist run gallery/studios Paper mountain. She is currently working on her second solo show Marine Snow furthering her research into life cycles and ecologies.

Drift.Sink.Settle is an exploration into the life cycle of debris both organic and man made from its origin to final settling. Twine and salt threads bind factory with hand made components weaving natural and artificial into one.

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Tiffany Moffat
Sky crystals, 2013
Play dough, plastic rocks, glitter, photo prints, pipe cleaners, plastic sheeting, plastic bottle tops, paint, string, pompoms, silicone beads

“I am humbled by the universe- the vastness, the life forms, life cycles, landscapes and energy.  When I think about the big questions, the questions without answers, the possibilities of possibilities, I know I am a tiny speck of wonderment.  My mind and body want to reach, grasp and explore so I play with materials at hand to try to learn.  This leads to more questions, questions made tangible.  We can go to other places making tangents with the mundane, other worlds in reality and reality in other worlds.  I am nourished by the soup of existence.”

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Laura Kelly
You’ve Got An (Optic) Nerve, 2013
Acrylic yarn, felting fibre, stuffing, embroidery thread, glass cloche jar

Laura Kelly’s mother introduced her to knitting 18 years ago. Since then she has taught herself other craft techniques like crochet to enable the hand building of 3D images from her imagination. Informed by her life-long love of puns, this work playfully explores the traditional study and old-fashioned display techniques of human anatomy.

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Georgia Kaw
Euro Parkett, 2013
Photographic print on perspex

Georgia Kaw chose to address the limiting internal framework of the light box space. She is currently interested in how boxes can formally merge notions of two and three-dimensionality. The form can simultaneously operate like a screen or painting through surface graphics, or remain a hollow support structure.

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Loren Kronemyer
Advice Box, 2013.
Frames, cloth, paper and paint

Loren Kronemyer was born in Los Angeles,California and recently received a Masters of the Biological Arts from the University of Western Australia.

Advice Box was inspired by the text work of Cary Leibowitz and Barry McGee. It plays with the ambiguous space of the alley and the intentions of the viewers who may happen upon it in either daytime or night.

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Rebecca Orchard
Here, As Elsewhere, 2013
Collected wood chips, house paint, board

Rebecca Orchard is interested in flora as found in domestic nature. Perfect and precise, it can be found on cushions, carpets, toilet paper and floors. She explores the binary of indoors and outdoors through collecting natural elements from the environment and altering and adapting them to suit the domestic space.

Domesticity influenced Rebecca’s choice of materials, including a wooden chair’s cushion embellished with flora from her house. Household paints were selected in reference to this fabric. Their shades – Rose Brown, Lavender Dusk, Grass Green – reference nature.

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Korrin Stoney
I wanted to stare in that direction but I was afraid to lose my momentum, 2013
Digital photographic print, ink on paper, found objects

Korrin Stoney explores interior and exterior spaces, whether physical, psychological, biological or philosophical. This new work examines the decay of urban spaces and man-made places alike, pointing to the absence of life in the fragments of life left behind, the nature of decay and disintegration, and the ‘rot’.

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Hailing from almost all of WA’s art schools are five early career artists with distinctive voices.  Casey Ayres committed to a light box terrarium – an idea many others have considered but never executed. His DIY drip watering system aims to nourish vegetable seedlings throughout the summer, although it is almost inevitable that the water will run out. In the adjoining light box, Jill Travers continues her exploration into industrial materials with a pulsating LED light work best viewed at night. Her TAFE classmate, Antoinette Stewart, developed intricate anatomical composites rendered in both 2D and 3D. New Zealand-born SymbioticA artist in residence Shannon Williamson took this opportunity to experiment with a drawing practice primarily concerned with representations of the slumbering body, while Joshua Cobb-Diamond’s representation of commuter movements hovers between art and architecture.

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Antoinette Stewart
Inspection, 2012
Sculpy, jar, paper, fine liner

Antoinette Stewart is interested in anatomy’s often foreign or alien qualities. For this installation she designed fantastical and hybridised animals, sculpting forms that progress through the stages of development – pre-born to fully-formed.

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Joshua Cobb-Diamond
Grand Navigators, 2012
Concrete, steel and plastic optical fibres

Celebrating the routine movements of people as they journey throughGrand Lane, Joshua Cobb-Diamond’s work explores the sites’ process of construction and collapse. By mappingGrand Lanein terms of its usage and function, the artist collected, translated and solidified data into a concrete and steel construction.

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Shannon Williamson
Between the sheets and patches of sleep ii, 2012.
Tracing paper, pigment and cotton

This multilayered hand stitched portrait, Between the sheets and patches of sleep ii, explores the idea of the ‘lover’ as both an extension and restriction of the self.

In keeping with Shannon Williamson’s recent studio practice, fragmentation of the body is used as a device to communicate notions of anxiety vulnerability and fragility.

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Jill Travers
What do you see RGB?, 2012
Polyethylene plastic, LEDs, Arduino interface

Jill Travers has focussed on colour and its ability to affect and challenge emotions and environmental perceptions while influencing responses to everyday materials and the urban environment. The installation uses colour to attract the viewer’s attention to objects that may normally be overlooked.

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Casey Ayres
This is all you’ll ever get, 2012
Plywood, acrylic, PVC, soil, glass, chilli plant, apple cucumber plant, water

This work is a prototype for a long-held idea that Casey Ayres pondered but never executed. Its title can refer to the limited amount of water in the hovering tank. He is amused that regardless of whether the plants live, fruit or die, the outcome may not necessarily fail as an artwork.

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The fifth Light Locker exhibition is up until December and features some great new works from a talented bunch of local artists. Check them out around dusk when the lights turn on! Here’s a taste of the artists’ research and process, along with installation images of the final work.

Fragments, 2012. Acrylic and Resin.
When considering the laneway site, Rhiannon Birch was drawn to the remnants of weekend revelry. Employing the intricate design of Gothic rose windows, her illuminated interface speaks of fragments, debris and broken glass.

Rhiannon Birch. Process, 2012. Image courtesy of the artist.

Rhiannon Birch. Process, 2012. Image courtesy of the artist.

Rhiannon Birch. Fragments, 2012. Acrylic and Resin. Image courtesy of James Graham.

Rhiannon Birch. Fragments, 2012. Acrylic and Resin. Image courtesy of James Graham.

Tombstone made of found objects, 2012. Stone, cement, enamel, oil, charcoal, soil, bulbs and found objects.
Utilising objects recovered from the city’s debris, Kate Mullen has established a makeshift vivarium to house Everlasting wild flowers. In questioning whether native life can be sustained within a foreign context away from its original soils, the artist pre-emptively offers a grim response: a stone mural that could double as a tombstone or shrine, honouring synonymic built environments.

Kate Mullen. Process, 2012. Image courtesy of the artist.

Kate Mullen. Tombstone made of found objects, 2012. Stone, cement, enamel, oil, charcoal, soil, bulbs and found objects.

Kate Mullen. Tombstone made of found objects, 2012. Stone, cement, enamel, oil, charcoal, soil, bulbs and found objects. Image courtesy of James Graham.

Treasure Forms (2012). Nylon twine, spray paint, watercolour paint, ink and graphite on watercolour paper.
Teelah George treats the light box as a diorama or display case in an effort to visually represent minerals that have topical significance to Western Australia. The collection of objects within Treasure Forms examines parallels between mineralisation and the processes used to represent them, while tension is created by a colour palette synonymous with mining and her very domestic treatment of materials.

Teelah George. Self Study, 2012. Image courtesy of the artist.

Teelah George. Documentation, 2012. Image courtesy of the artist.

Teelah George. Treasure Forms (2012). Nylon twine, spray paint, watercolour paint, ink and graphite on watercolour paper.

Teelah George. Treasure Forms (2012) Nylon twine, spray paint, watercolour paint, ink and graphite on watercolour paper. Image courtesy of James Graham.

The serene life of ornamental cats, 2012. Fabric, wood, ceramic found object.
Kelly Patchett’s recent work examines how decoration and ornamentation operate as both a relic and a symbol of nature within domestic spaces. In this installation, she removes the ornament from its domestic context and places into the public realm. The artist questions if it’s possible for ornaments to transcend their role of reflecting the individual’s particular quirks, tastes and foibles and speak of some greater truth.

Kelly Patchett. Testing, 2012. Image courtesy of the artist.

Kelly Patchett. Testing, 2012. Image courtesy of the artist.

Kelly Patchett. The serene life of ornamental cats, 2012. Fabric, wood, ceramic found object.

Kelly Patchett. The serene life of ornamental cats, 2012. Fabric, wood, ceramic found object. Image courtesy of James Graham.

I don’t know what I want and I want it now, 2012. Poem on Marble, Exercise mat as sky.
“I made this poem up in a dream so I can’t say with one hundred percent certainty what it means. I suspect it’s about balancing risky exercises with a faith in the classics, laying down your bets with confidence though you can’t be certain you’ve backed a winner and making goddamn sure you’re looking sharp on race day regardless.” – Patrick Miller

Patrick Miller. I don’t know what I want and I want it now, 2012. Poem on Marble, Exercise mat as sky.

Patrick Miller. I don’t know what I want and I want it now, 2012. Poem on Marble, Exercise mat as sky. Image courtesy of James Graham.

Light Locker Press Release, October 2012.

Embedded within the 99m long mural inGrand Laneis Foodchain’s Light Locker Art Space, a collection of light box ‘cabinets’ showcasing 2D and 3D artworks.

Without thematic parameters, young artists create new and contemporary works that employ a variety of approaches and mediums including textiles, ceramics, sculpture and photography.

Located within Grand Laneoff Murray Street Mall and viewable from Barrack Street, the Light Locker Art Space can be accessed 24/7 but is best viewed at sundown when the lights turn on.

Since launching in June 2011, the space has supported and commissioned new works from 21 young artists, with many more to come!

This exhibition is the fourth in a year-long program of peer curation, resulting in an organic approach to mapping out artist networks and commonalities.

As well as creating a site-specific light box installation from June to the end of August, exhibiting artists Kenya Bedford Armstrong, Lyle Branson, Dale Buckley, Stephen Genovese and Joe Matthiessen nominate an artist peer to respond to their space during the next exhibition period.  Without thematic parameters, the artists have created new works that employ a variety of approaches and mediums.

Surface Series 1, 2012. Acrylic, lacquer paint.
Joe Matthiessen’s background in architecture and design informed his investigation into subtle surfaces and spatial qualities. He was conscious of creating a distinct and different experience for the viewer during day and night.

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Living without language eating speech acts, 2012. White cement, bitumen, gouache.
Harnessing the incompatible materials of cement and bitumen, Dale Buckley has developed a durational work that examines language’s failings. As the bitumen slowly moves south, the ambiguous six-word sentence will steadily become incoherent. At different times during the exhibition, the sentence may momentarily make sense then later become indecipherable.

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Jasmine, 2011. Digital print.
Regularly incorporating friends and family in her carefully constructed tableaus, Kenya Bedford Armstrong has devised a striking depiction of a saccharine childhood.

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The Malthusian Trap, 2012. Wood, glass, mirror, light emitting diodes, electronics.
Stephen Genovese continues his investigation into the ever-increasing disparity between technology, the environment and humanity. Appearing as a mirror during the day but becoming a LED installation at night, the work explores the illusion of technology and the biological limits imposed on us by the physical world.

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Pink and Gold, 2012. Wood, survey flagging tape, spray paint.
Lyle Branson envisages the light box as a Museum display case, housing an object signifying a spiritual and important connection to the landscape ofPerth,West Australia. The object, an axe handle, has been decorated as a ritual tool to represent how landscape has turned into a commodity to enrich our own culture.

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Light Locker Press Release, June 2012.

Family, 2011. Gold flock curtain, found photograph, bronze rosette medallion.

Ten years ago, Anthony Kelly found this photograph at theBarrack Street end ofGrand Lane. He hopes members of the family might still live or work in the area and stumble across the installation.

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Kiki Hunwick continues her ongoing investigation into the essence of light. Across multiple filmed projections sessions, she captures the process of light degrading to create a dynamic composite image from nine layered projection stills.

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Lauren Ravi’s recent work has explored ancient vs modern methods of construction by using bricks as a starting point – mud, limestone, hand hewn and engraved.

This installation of real and cast bricks serve to prioritise the process of making over the sculptural outcome. They are infused with qualities found in their originals. However although they are seen as practical objects, they ably function as instant artefacts when contextualised within an exhibition space.

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Continuing her fascination with representations of decorative beauty in a contemporary context, Tash Gray created this striking tableau in the creek in her backyard.

Inspired by the sumptuous decorative aesthetic of Pre-Raphaelite painter Waterhouse, the work investigates ways to represent the intersection of the spiritual, mystic and decorative in portraiture.

A painterly subject matter is photographed to capture the agony and ecstasy of a spiritual moment. Check out the gallery below to see the research images and test shots that informed the final work.

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