Shaun Tan Somewhere Nowhere: Memories of Imagined Places 19

back cover front cover Shaun Tan Somewhere Nowhere: Memories of imagined places 19 November 2016 – 5 February 2017 Warrnambool Art Gallery 2 Somewhere Nowhere As good a name as any for this place, we there, somewhere in the haze of a far future fences, lawnmowers and language in the think to ourselves as look around for a horizon, a most unlikely thing: the lounge- sharp light of day, with one known thing — Shaun Tan light switch, hands spidering along the rooms and driveways of home, alien, bright pushed up neatly against another, all of wallpapers of childhood. Actually, never with electricity. Passing birds look down that softens again in the evening and the mind the switch – let our eyes adjust to the knowingly. knots of meaning will easily come loose if pre-dawn grey. Look at how objects and we let them. The outlines of our world are Look at those bulldozers busy making nice masses delineate, bright and dark shapes not so hard after all, look at how they don’t rectangles, concrete canvases that are either draw into focus, separate out, asking to really separate one object from another dull and mediocre or rich with imaginative be named as they are born into existence: but instead run like threads or capillaries, possibility. Just keep walking and you’ll table, floor, chair, door, window, house, sewing all things together, oxygenating the see, just keep your mind as open as your home. It all so quickly cures and hardens landscape. The colour of the sky is the same eyes, look for the interstices, the unplanned into familiar meanings. We move outside, as a bird’s belly as it settles gently along gaps, the unwritten moments. A huge hoping to prolong the pleasant ambiguity rooftops and a tree is little more than an buffalo of some sort lives in the shadow Endgame 1995 Cat 1 of those few bits left unresolved, a fuzzy earthbound cloud, rooted, slowed down, — down by the pumping station. Listen to world we once enjoyed as toddlers. swaying to its brethren. The texture of a it breathing as we pass, it knows things. bedsheet is the texture of the beach and the But here it also delineates too soon as a It knows that if you dig far enough into density of a wall is the density of a shadow, thread of all-too-familiar constellations: the sandy loam of building site, you’ll hit no more or less. It all shifts and moves tree, post box, telephone pole, barking dog, the rooftop of some other forgotten house. like paint on canvas, where everything is clouds that so reliably never stand still yet If you wrap the tips of TV aerials of with only ever made up of pieces of every other so doggedly are always called clouds, a line aluminium foil, you can hear faint signals thing – lines, shapes, textures, colours – of washing that may have been forgotten of the most inarticulate heart, you will so long as the eye stops nagging to know in the night or else conscientiously left notice that the faces of your neighbours otherwise. For as long as it stays like this, to catch the rising sun in east-facing are not their real faces. The cracks in the it can be whatever we care to imagine, backyards. No, maybe it’s not a line of asphalt are, as you always suspected, a somewhere, nowhere, and any place in washing but the spine of some strange scripture we can neither read nor forget; between. Let’s keeping walking and see. basking iguana. We feel the heat prickling a team of immigrant grandmothers along our necks as cool blue shadows in orange overalls have meticulously — contract much sooner than expected. filled them in with tar, emboldening the October 2016 Cicadas cry out to the faint woosh of message under a pretense of ‘roadworks’. freeway traffic – or some other breathing And no, that’s not a busted a car window thing we can’t see – rising over tessellated in the carpark, those are real diamonds, roof-tiles, a prehistoric morning prayer spilt from a fugitive’s briefcase. If only telling us to knuckle down and suck the people looked more carefully, if only they sap of the earth. Do they, any more than us, knew! We keep on walking, our sneakers know where they really are? taped back up as the heat bears down, the glare atomic, and we count the days Tree, post box, telephone poll, barking before the holidays are over like an ever- dog, all of it held in place by the most diminishing stash. powerful of elementary suburban forces: gravity and habit. We feel them working When we reach our destination, it’s just on our sneakers, the cheap rubber soles as we suspected, an edge that simply goes already flapping at the front where the no further, but bends back upon itself duct tape has come loose. The streets wind like some kind of endless mobius strip. up and around, bend this way and that, the We are back where we started. But the names change, but the constellations, the symmetry is pleasing and comforting, even overall constellations remain the same, we beautiful, to use a word we almost never will never outwalk them. Maybe we are like invoke for anywhere so walkable. No need those sailors in the years before longitude, to feel trapped or lost at sea after all. No looking up at familiar stars and wondering need to worry about how we belong to this if they have strayed too far from their home landscape, if we belong. Maybe the very country or, having been so comfortably act of searching, playing and wondering long at sea, are right in the middle of it? aloud answers well enough this question, Somewhere and nowhere, moving and not as much as it can ever be answered. moving. Perhaps those sailors were lost in The world turns and things are returning such thoughts as their boughs ran aground to darkness again, but let’s avoid the light on this hard shoreline, breaking their switch for a little while longer, leave our reverie with a tough vista of sand and wind eyes adjusted to the moment. All of that and disappointingly spiky vegetation, and ordinariness, so hard-set by edges, curbs, 3 4 5 Footpath, Fifth Avenue, Mount Lawley 2004 — Cat 7 Backyard, Mount Lawley 2005 — Cat 8 6 from The pipe 1997 — Cat 2 7 Alert but not Alarmed 2007 — Cat 11 from The playground 1998 — Cat 3 7 Morning Religion 2015 — Cat 26 — detail opposite 8 9 10 11 While you sleep 2015 — Cat 31 The new world 2015 — Cat 27 Pelican thinking 2001 — Cat 5 12 We will be here when you go 2015 — Cat 30 Kingdom 2015 — Cat 24 13 Night train, Mount Lawley 1999 — Cat 4 15 The death of a bird 2015 — Cat 21 Empire 2015 — Cat 22 14 16 Dugong 2006 — Cat 9 Dugong shadow 2006 — Cat 10 Dormitory suburb 2002 — Cat 6 17 Kids drawing on a beach, Rabbit Island, NZ 2010 — Cat 16 18 New suburb, Bescancon 2012 — Cat 19 Cloud Street, Brunswick West 2010 — Cat 15 — (detail) 19 21 Jacaranda 2015 — Cat 23 — (detail opposite) Styx 2015 — Cat 29 20 22 23 The world without us 2015 — Cat 32 Small industrial estate on the back of a sparrow 2015 — Cat 28 25 Night Spirit 2016 — Cat 34 Yellow tree on a windy day, Parkville 2016 — Cat 35 24 26 Memories of imagined places Geographies are not only physical: they symbolically darker. I cite this example Australia. However, the terrain his artwork can also be historical, psychological and because it is indicative of the way Tan’s explores is simultaneously physical and — Paul Venzo cultural. That is, there are terrains both artwork connects different parts of a psychological: it is both a space for memory real and imagined, and these spaces often national storyline, forming a kind of and imagination, object and story. In lead from one to the other. Paintings, prints historical geography that reimagines and essence he provides a map of suburbia in and drawings can, in this fashion, function updates important aspects of collective which memories float about in a space that like small islands of representation into experience and imagination. is at once physical, real and at the same time which the viewer is invited to wander. They imagined, mythical, perhaps even magical. In this exhibition, many of the images connect us to different times, places, events, represent everyday, suburban life familiar Like any good cartographer Tan provides us characters, stories and environments: to many of us: a Californian bungalow, with a key or legend to help us navigate this mirroring both what we know and a washing line, a streetscape. What is creative topos. There are recurring motifs stretching us beyond the borders of our unique about this collection, however, is (the paper cut-out birds, pieces of bizarre everyday world. the way in which it calls attention to the industrial technology, hybrid animal Vey occasionally an artist who is both alien and uncanny nature of this kind of figures, clouds that sometimes cumulate wrriter and illustrator comes along, environment, by infusing it with surreal blithely and sometimes menace) and a engaging in this important work. Think elements that blur distinctions between cast of human characters that consistently of William Blake and his Songs of Inno- the real and imagined. In an interview embody and evoke feelings of loss, solitude, cence and of Experience (1794): Blake’s book with Karen Haber in Locus magazine in alienation, curiosity and hope.

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