Review: TIME • RONE at AGWA

TIME • RONE at AGWA
Saturday, July 13, 2024

After being staged in an abandoned wing of Melbourne’s Flinders Street Station throughout 2022 and 2023, the multisensory immersive installation TIME • RONE has shifted and adapted to the spaces underneath and behind the usual exhibition rooms at the Art Gallery of WA (AGWA).

Down a set of stairs, behind usually closed doors, the Centenary Galleries at AGWA have been transformed into a portal to another time. TIME • RONE is a series of vignettes, or meticulously staged rooms filled with objects, capturing moments in time, suggesting stories of the people who passed through them. The rooms appear to have been quickly abandoned, with the everyday items of work and life left where they were last placed in the early 1950s, now covered with dust and spiderwebs. The lighting effects draw the viewers in and deliberately shift focus around the space in a choreography cleverly entwined with the haunting soundscape of music by Nick Batterham. The music is a crucial aspect of the whole, giving emotional direction and heightening the intensity of the experience.

In every room, a ghostly mural of a young woman’s face watches the visitors to the abandoned rooms. She is recognisable as the type of beautiful woman often painted by the artist in street murals in the past. Her presence is mysterious and unexplained. Is she us, observing history from a distance? Is she watching all of us in a diorama of the artist’s making? Is she a metaphor for the fleetingness of youth, beauty and vitality? She is open to interpretation, but she is also a reminder of RONE’s evolution from a street artist and of the constructed nature of the scenes that feel so real and enveloping.

TIME • RONE poses many questions, and visitors will have to come up with their own answers. What will we leave behind? What, if anything, will all of the billions of records of modern life mean in the future? There are paper records everywhere in TIME • RONE. From the beautiful library full of books to the mailroom, the typist pool, and the head office, there are thousands of maps, messages, receipts, and memos as physical manifestations of the data that piles up every day in modern life, increasing by the second as visitors take more photos of the spaces.

In part, it feels like a museum of working-class life. Viewers may feel nostalgia for the objects they find there and the way of life they represent. They may also be filled with foreboding, as the abandoned rooms suggest an apocalyptic event. The scenes certainly invoke the Cold War fears of nuclear fallout, but visitors may also find themselves thinking of Chernobyl, Fukushima, or any fictional town after a zombie plague.

TIME • RONE leads the visitor through an exquisite and mysterious reminder of mortality. The emotional experiences will be as varied as the people who visit, but the fully immersive quality of the space, the music, and the ghosts of stories mean that visitors will leave feeling like they have been on a journey. TIME • RONE is showing at AGWA until Monday, September 30.

SAMANTHA ROSENFELD