Dream Variations, Murray Art Museum Albury 2024

Dream Variations was an exhibition design project commissioned jointly by University of New South Wales and Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA) in 2024. The brief was to spatialise the exhibition ‘Dream Variations’ (curated by Haitian-American Kelly Dezart-Smith), which was a presentation of selected ‘Blak’ art works from MAMA’s permanent collection. The design was conceptualised as an open infrastructure (unlined aluminium stud walls) installed within the existing volume of ‘Joss Gallery’ on the ground floor of MAMA, a former colonial-era post-office. This design approach aimed to foreground notions of porosity and access, which are crucial in public museum settings, but often are compromised due to systematic spatial segregation—front and back of house, private and public viewing, archived and displayed collections. These dualisms of inclusion and exclusion are symptomatic of long-standing cultural tensions in Australia, where art museums are often foundered on sites of cultural dispossession, furnished with stolen artefacts and difficult to access by culturally diverse populations. I responded to these conceptual and briefing requirements by extending the principal of universal access from a DDA and regulatory stand point to a conceptual and spatial proposition. In plan the open stud frame continues across the primary gallery entrance to obscure the typical, normative entry sequence. With this entry closed, I diverted all access into the exhibition via a ramp and small, ‘secondary’ entry, meaning all visitors accessed the show via a common passage. This decision de-emphasises the steps and ‘primary’ entrance – with colonial associations – while equalising the experience of wheeled and non-wheeled visitors. Within the gallery the open walls are arranged in a rectilinear shape, creating offsets from the existing walls. This doubles the usable display area and establishes clear circulation that extend the conceptual intentions by creating multiple, overlapping and dynamic sight lines that situate audiences within the complex histories and tensions of ‘Blak’ representation in museum collection. As well as creating sight lines within the exhibition, the open walls elicit critical associations beyond the museum walls. Murray Art Museum Albury is situated on the Northern side of the Murray River and shares river crossings to Wodonga. The hyphenation ‘Albury-Wodonga’ reflects a contested 1973 federal decision to share governance and labour forces between the two river cities; negotiation of the border intersects with the dualisms aforementioned. Eliciting the river-border also highlights deeper histories and structures of land and water-borne colonisation that underly diasporas, the dispossession of first nations Australians, theft of cultural artefacts and their display within museum collections, including furnish the genesis of the ‘Albury Industrial Museum’ in 1893; this collection featured ‘a Soudan spear and shield are contributed by Captain Eattye…brought from the Soudan by Lance-Corporal Lee, who was a member of the celebrated expedition. The spear is a formidable weapon with iron head. The shield is of some heavy hide, and curiously shaped, resembling an old broad brimmed Panama hat. It bears trace of the passage of a rifle ball, which, no doubt, found its billet in the body of some Soudanese warrior.” This project had a tiny $2750 budget, so the aim was to express the core concept and utilise the visitors – as bodies within eh space to activate the work. The install was managed by the lead curator and technicians. The studs were dissembled and have been re-used for subsequent exhibitions.

This exhibition design was commissioned by Parallel Structures Sertori Lau was invited to contribute to Parallel Structures, working closely with Veronica Tello to develop a series of highly specific gallery interventions to support Parallel’s curatorial aims and the aims of the individual shows.