We stumbled across White Rabbit Gallery in Sydney’s Inner West a couple of weeks ago and decided to challenge ourselves with a viewing. Just to let you know the art in this gallery is very rarely accessible to the casual audience. Conceptual art is all about the idea and for a lot of people that is just too difficult to be bothered with. I find that I’m ok with little immersions into this genre but hefty dunks leave me yawning with fatigue. Maybe it’s laziness on my part. Maybe it’s the shortened attention span we’ve all developed since scrolling became the ideal pastime. Personally it’s not the latter for me. I just find it overwhelming to try and decipher the artists intention. Honestly it’s pretty much like the challenge of a cryptic crossword.
It was with trepidation we joined the throng of people in the foyer loitering around the ridiculously placed shop (yes right at the entrance). Think Covid, think unmasked, think only having to isolate for seven days after testing positive to Covid. Yes I’m a worry wart but I also detest being ill. So masked up we made our way up the stairs to the installation by Lin Yan. You can’t beat an installation to amuse the ignorant (insert smiley face here). So we entered a maze of dangling strips of white material that led to a viewing area that framed the large crumpled ink stained blobs of paper suspended in the gallery. I immediately thought of diseased lungs and if memory serves me correctly this was the artists intention. We’ve all seen those images of China on tele of masked up citizens protecting themselves from the plumes of pollutants inhabiting their cities. So these monumental paper structures were diseased lungs. And the white material dangling from the ceiling? Well in my opinion that’s the filtered oxygen roaming around the body once the lungs have taken out all the toxins. All one needs is a lung replacement to maintain health and vigour. Or perhaps the white strips are the hope that one day this planet will be pollution free. Personally I think that’s a pipe dream but one can only hope.
So if you get a chance maybe it will be worthwhile ducking in to White Rabbit depending on your opinion on conceptual art. For me it’s worth the challenge even if I’m just creating my own story along the way.
Newcastle's Casual Reviewer of Art 