Both times I visited Yhonnie Scarce’s survey exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), I entered the wrong way. I couldn’t make it past gallery one, that “massive hangar”, as the artist describes it, into which she has placed three ominous but insistently beckoning sheds, receding in a row into the vast space.
The zinc sheds are found objects—fossicked from a scrap yard—that have been painted with bitumen, lending their black and gold exteriors an oily stickiness. Slightly tacky, slightly oozing, they may well be diseased. And yet the compulsion to open the first shed’s door and go inside persists. That experience—of standing inside that small, dark, grievous, luminous space—powerfully resists language. It is so expressive, so affective as a sculptural statement, that attempting to put it into words for a review like this feels like a fool’s errand. But maybe that’s the point. That resistance to language matters and may be an ethical and political position, as well as an artistic one.
Tara McDowell is Associate Professor and Director of Curatorial Practice at Monash University.
Yhonnie Scarce: Missile Park is curated by Max Delany, Liz Nowell and Lisa Waup. It travels to the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane later this year.
