In Dark Corners

In Dark Corners was a site-specific project, part of the Bare Rock and Backbones exhibition at Britomart. Located in the Britomart precinct, Stanbeth House is a historic building, whose most recent guise is that of a gallery space on the ground floor whose large windows face the street.

As with Bare Rock and Backbones, Cooper and Company and Rob Garrett Contemporary Fine Art commissioned the project, which enabled me to place a selection of work, including sketchbooks, dioramas and large drawings that I had been working on before, during and after the commission of my artwork for the hoardings which were located nearby. The intention was for each work located in the windows to relate, as well as add new meanings and connections to the other works situated next to it, and also to relate to the artwork on the hoardings.

Rob Garrett’s description of the installation:

‘Aleksandra Petrovic says “the drawings are an expression of ideas, anxieties and questions. They subvert that fundamental human need to place everything into a cohesive order, and are instead idiosyncratic, quirky figurative images of characters who (might) have stepped out of some fairy tale.”

The artist sees the sculptures functioning in a similarly enigmatic way. Absent of any characters the tower (reading room) and the stone water-well seem to rely on the viewer filling the gaps with their own nostalgia for childhood, dreams and fairytales.’

The sketchbooks became an integral component of this installation, since each page offered new possibilities, new links and connections of meaning with the other artworks that surrounded them. Every few weeks, pages were turned and new drawings appeared; some of which directly related to the other artworks, and others that were ideas conceived independently of the project and installation.

All images Copyright 2020, Aleksandra Petrovic