Review: Robbie Rowlands
Incremental Loss
National Centre For Photography, Mitchell Family Gallery
24 February – 10 March 2019
“The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster” writes Elizabeth Bishop in her loved poem One Art.
The first bank of one of Australia’s oldest gold mining towns, Ballarat is a building that feels full of the intent to be lost. It is an onion with many layers waiting for the artist to begin to peel. It is a building waiting for demolition and for the beginning of a new life as the National Centre for Photography a new initiative of the Ballarat International Foto Biennale.
The art that Robbie Rowlands is mastering in Incremental Loss is that of revealing and also somehow concealing. This is not vandalism or destruction. Each room has a hidden story; but we sense, from the purposeful way wall edges have been trimmed and carefully bent in rhythmic arrangements, that the sole aim might not be to reveal the building’s past. Rather, it is creation of a new story educed both from the history of this place and from the urgency of what the building will (incrementally) become.
Image: Last breath – Olivetti Multisumma 20 – 1964 – 2019, Looped paper roll, final calculation, Robbie Rowlands, 2019
I know from my training in heritage values assessment that there is a natural tension between a heritage building’s ‘originality’— it’s beautiful, historic architectural features — and the layers of often less beautiful, but equally intriguing, parts altered by its occupation. These are the features Rowlands works with. The discarded ‘Olivetti Multisumma’ calculator, the built-in front desk, the false ceilings and walls, each a layer of occupational disaster and debris. These additions speak to the people, jobs and ghosts of this former bank, insurance office and home of Ballarat mixed small business. Like the footprints Rowlands leaves in the carpet in his video work, Standing for the Light(ness) all these things reveal human occupation and eventual abandonment of the space.
Image: Standing for the light(ness), Video 2min on loop, Film capture of reflective light,
Compression of carpet through body warmth and weight, Robbie Rowlands, 2019
We often think that more recent additions to heritage buildings inadvertently and rather carelessly strip away heritage values. When we enter the space where Rowlands has cut away a wall to reveal a beautifully preserved mint green 1940s stove in the work ‘I was always here’, or where a ceiling has been delicately cut to reveal a perfectly intact decorative ceiling rose in ‘Contemplating the fall’, we sigh at the thought that these things might have been removed but thankfully were only concealed. And our minds wander to the tragedy of other special items that may have been lost from this place.
However, next week when the exhibition is over, the building begins to take its first baby steps as the National Centre for Photography. When works begin to reveal and restore significant and stunning architectural features, other less assuming aspects will be lost. The 1970s dado panelled walls that tell the story of office workers in front of now foreign-looking calculating machines and the stiff grey carpet that has felt the impression of bank clerk’s 1960s loafers will soon be gone. Heritage restoration is ironically often a process of losing history in order to create new narratives. The old bank is now poised to house international photography and demonstrate successful adaptive reuse in which the ‘in between’ bits of this building, that do not belong to its majestic past nor to its illustrious future, must be lost.
Image: I was always here, wall and veneer shelving cut, 1940-50 wood stove reveal, Robbie Rowlands, 2019
“Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster…
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.”
The artist’s art here is to practice losing farther, losing faster those additions that call him to the act of gentle demolition. Incremental Loss calls us to move with thought amongst the debris. We become a witness to what will be lost over time, objects and images briefly highlighted for us to contemplate their fading.
More details about the work are
available here: https://ballaratfoto.org/events/robbie-rowlands/
Poetry excerpts by Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” from The Complete Poems 1927-1979. Copyright © 1979, 1983 Farrar, Straus & Giroux.