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Photography: Tony Mott. Image courtesy of The Art Gallery of Western Australia.
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READING THE ROOM

RONE
Q&A

VNTNR has creatively partnered with The Art Gallery of Western Australia to curate St Hugo wine for TIME . DINING: an immersive dining experience blending RONE’s art, spectacle, and ceremony.

RONE: I'm best known as RONE. I don't really know how to define myself as an artist; that's quite a difficult thing, I find, but I'm known as a street artist most commonly. The work I'm doing right now is quite beyond just painting on the wall.

VNTNR: An integral part of your work is the space itself. Could you speak to the walls, buildings and structure of your work as well and how you consider space.

RONE: I had a realisation maybe 5, 6 , 7 years ago now where trying to put my artwork into a gallery didn't really work in the same way as working on the street, and I think it was all about having that context and environment that you have on the street. And what I love most about creating works on the street was - especially going into an abandoned building - there was so many little stories to tell inside these buildings and you could read the room, as such, and the architecture played into so much of that. So, what I've started to do was actually create my own spaces and realise that's a whole new dimension to play with as an artist; having control of absolutely everything down to the sound and the lighting in these rooms. Working with sometimes existing architecture and exaggerating it or deteriorating it, [and] the stories that starts to tell and capture is something that's been a wonderful thing to explore as an artist.

AGWA Collection

VNTNR: That’s not unlike how the context of how or when a wine is enjoyed deeply affects its flavour or reception, and certainly its memory. How have you told a new or old story in the Centenary Galleries for your new project, 'TIME', at The Art Gallery of Western Australia?

RONE:
With the Centenary Galleries, it's the second time we've shown this exhibition. We originally had it at Flinders Street Station and a lot of the installation was built specifically for Flinders Street station. But as I was developing it, there was a huge chance that I was never actually going to get the lease for the building. So I actually started to develop it for other buildings, and so the project became quite modular for that reason. And one of the buildings I was looking at was actually the Centenary Galleries building in Perth. I knew that it existed back then, when I was developing Flinders Street; it was always one of my plan b's; I always have several plan b's for when things go wrong. When we did finally move it to the Centenary Galleries, I didn't really research the history of the building; I more looked at the architecture and the style and what I could possibly make in these rooms because I'm not trying to make a museum/historical kind of walk through the past exhibition of the actual site. I'm more trying to create an emotional journey rather than a factual one. And there was one room that was right in the centre of the Centenary Building that was completely empty. Is has really high 8 metre tall ceilings, but I couldn't fit any of my installations in there and what we decided to do was to build our own theatre within that space. It had these two staircases at either entrance that were kind of just four or five steps and we couldn't really have the guests come in down the stairs and then up out of the stairs; it just caused too many access issues, and trying to make the rooms dark and stairs just don't go together. So we actually put a platform or a stage across the whole room and that became where you enter. And so that almost was the inspiration: people are walking onto a stage and the viewer is simply looking out at the audience. So you have this flipped experience and instantly we knew that was going to create a new experience that not everyone kind of gets to have, and when you do have that experience to walk out on stage, it is something. It gives you maybe butterflies in your stomach even on an empty stage when no one's there; or it might be inspirational for some people; this is a dream, they want to be on a stage like this. So to create that; I just instantly knew it would be something that people would want to do - just to have that moment. So it was really lovely to make something completely new for the Centenary Building.

St Hugo Single Vineyard Barossa Valley Koch Shiraz 2018
St Hugo
Single Vineyard
Shiraz
2018

VNTNR: While planting people in the middle of a historical building, how much of you is centred in the exhibition?

RONE: I feel like all of myself is really in my work. It's me trying to convey these emotions in such a big way and I know working with Nick Batterham, he puts a lot of his own emotions into the work, and you can definitely hear it within the music. Working with Nick, it just exaggerates the work that I'm trying to create, and even the lighting and trying to make – to boil it down – it is this melancholic feeling. I feel like for myself, there's been these influences growing up, as a skateboarder and I've always been into things like heavy metal and that kind of imagery. I've had that realisation where the most poignant works that have really touched me, have kind of been on that edge of something that’s scary but beautiful as well.

VNTNR: Could you just speak on how the sound is constructed and what this contributes to the work?

RONE: With this project 'TIME' that we have on display now, there's this typing pool where what we've done is there's about 10 desks, and inside each desk we've cut a giant hole and put a 8 inch speaker underneath the typewriters. And unlike modern computers, the typewriters are completely hollow underneath, so the sound just permeates through all the keys. Nick went out and recorded an entire orchestra but he recorded them one instrument at a time, so he has them all in separate tracks. And then the sound engineers programmed it so each single instrument goes to each single desk. So when you walked into that room, it's like walking through an orchestra pit; the audio-spatial experience in there. Then we've worked with a lighting designer to programme the light so they come on in syncs so the more lights that are on, the more you know voices you can hear. You have this sense of you see the typing pool that says workforce, but as you kind of go in, you'll start to discover they all have their own individual voices. We play on that with the set dressing too; adding in all these little personal details that people discover on each of the desks. And it's all kind of been spawned from that idea of playing on the sound and the power that can give and it really creates a presence, and wht is not there; that you feel that that there was this character or person that's missing. Now the emotion still sits there in the room through the audio.

VNTNR: How many people are involved in putting together this sort of exhibition, end-to-end?

RONE: The amount of people that work on these projects: I think we had 120 work on the last project. I think there's 12 musicians. There's a composer, maybe four or five sound engineers. There's a build team of - it fluctuates - between three and six people. Then there's scenic artists, and then there's set dressers. There's people doing a lot of the admin and making the products and merchandise and catalogue and design and signage. It's a lot of people and thousands and thousands of tiny things and even outsourcing things. One example I just put up on a reel on my Instagram today where I wanted boxes. I wanted old style shoe boxes and it took me weeks to find a manufacturer and they made two and half thousand blank boxes for me, but then I had to get a team of like three or four people to staple them together and that took them maybe 10 days of staple guns to put all the boxes together and it's just these tiny, tiny little things. And then we had to put like different labels on every single one. The amount of work that's unseen beforehand; it really takes an army.

VNTNR: What’s your intention for the audience as they experience 'TIME'?

RONE: The final step of the exhibition is really when the doors open and people walk in, and that's the moment when I lose all control. As you can probably tell by my artwork, I am a control freak. So to let it all go is quite a scary moment. And then to start to hear the stories that come back from people, good or bad, it's always amazing to see the different reactions. For me, I really love that and I try and capture that. And so at each of these exhibitions, we've even had these guest books and people will write like little notes of thank you or even if they criticise it. But then sometimes you’ll get these beautiful stories of how it reminds them of their mother, who worked in a sewing factory and how it brought up these memories and how it really will connect with someone in their own story.

DR3 Cabernet Sauvignon 2021
DR3
Year 3
Cabernet Sauvignon
2021

VNTNR: Winemakers speak in a similar way, where they construct a liquid over a long period of time and then ultimately it's up to people to taste it and responded in any way they like; it brings up memories, events and feelings – sometimes polarising, too. What happens when the exhibition is over, when the wine is all finished and you need to pack up? Is this impermanence difficult to swallow?

RONE: I'll often have people ask me, ‘how do you deal with your work being packed up or destroyed after it's presented?’ For me that's been my entire career as a street artist; you paint something and you don't know if it's there the next day, and that's what's kind of exciting about it. And that's what kind of builds that you must see it now for a lot of street art and graffiti. And if it, if there's no documentation of it, you know, it doesn't exist. That's kind of where I started creating these works and just documenting them and I've been lucky enough to be offered spaces on a more permanent level to create these installations. Now I've made this work that is modular and I can pack it up and move it, but the chances of me finding another space for this very unique exhibition is quite small.

VNTNR: The ultimate ephemerality is life and ourselves. Do you ever consider your own impermanence in your art practise?

RONE: The work's definitely touching on mortality and maybe the life cycle and what we might lose or have lost, and this notion of impermanence - and I think helping people realise that we ourselves are impermanent. What I've discovered in these kind of explorations of abandoned spaces, it's not so much these objects that are left behind, but it's the people that are no longer there; that's what we long for. It's the stories from these people. What were their lives? Why did they leave? And maybe the emotions that are left in these rooms. And I think that loss is where a lot of this inspiration kind of comes from, and I hope people kind of realise that it's not the objects that are important, it's the people that are around you and that's what's really to be cherished.


Shop the VNTNR x AGWA wine collection to win one of five RONE merchandise packs, valued at approx. $280.

Title photography: Tony Mott. Image courtesy of The Art Gallery of Western Australia.

Learn more about RONE's exhibition at The Art Gallery of Western Australia here.

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