Over the threshold

YOU could feel the anticipation. Politicians, councillors, money men, artists, academics, students, media and locals.
They all came this winter’s evening, sampling wine, talking hard, looking at art on the walls as they waited, then waited some more.
The speeches came. Many thank yous sallied forth, explanations, a credit roll as long as your arm. Then some trepidation when the reaction of the public was mooted.
What would they think about this change to the façade of La Trobe University’s Visual Art Centre?
What would they think about the images that had been chosen from this new annual public art competition?
What would your reaction be towards this giant 14 x 5 metre artwork, brazenly on show in the middle of View Street, opposite Bendigo Art Gallery?
Eventually we were ushered across the road, reportedly under the watchful eye of “Bendigo’s finest” (not sure I saw any of the promised traffic police but they were thanked regardless).
We stood in front of the Capital to watch the unveiling. Two sheets of black plastic with question marks emblazoned upon them rustled quietly in the breeze generated from passing cars.. Then “five, four, three...” and whoosh, down they came.
Then silence. Applause. And intense scrutiny.
We looked and we looked hard.
We’d been greeted by seven white luminous panels with what seemed like human bodies pressed against them.
From a distance they look like walls made from white latex with humans trapped behind, pressing to escape into the ‘outside world’. (Think Roman Polanski’s ‘Repulsion’ with Catherine Denueve, where hands grab at her through fabric walls).
A few of us ambled across the road to take a closer look.
Closer, you get to see the detail – the ‘fingerprints’ of the medium itself, like the grain of the photographic image.
And an actual giant fingerprint up high in the emulsion on one of the panels.
(Not sure whether this was a happy accident’or deliberate, but either way it’s a lovely souvenir of the people actually involved in making the work.)
Revealed was Threshold, by Sydney-based visual artist Jenny Pollak.
She won over 12 other artists the commission and a $3000 prize, judged by VAC’s Paul Northam and BAG’s Karen Quinlan.
Her inspiration was the “various stages of evolution” she’d been inspired by during an artist residency at Sydney’s Botanic Gardens. Surrounded by plants, she’d conjured this idea to show the human form as it slowly emerges from some kind of cocoon.
Out onto View Street, spawned from the gallery incubator behind them.
Her speech was lovely and funny. Wearing a bright winter turban and extremely grateful to have won the commission, she concluded: “And if you don’t like it, it’ll only be up for a year, then it’ll be taken down and there’ll be another one!”
The cool thing about Threshold is that it keeps you moving.
As soon as I went up close, I wanted to run back across the road to take another look.
There’s a kind of attraction/repulsion dynamic that affects you as soon as you lay eNo on it.
It’s very intriguing and otherwordly, evocative and fun. And just right for the façade of a contemporary art centre that has ambitions of being the “best in the region”.
Looks like the traffic police are going to have their work cut out for them if people will run across View Street to get a better look at this new façade.
Either that, or the council had better hop to it with a (mooted) new pedestrian crossing between the two galleries.
An art crossing. Over the threshold. Nice.

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