Time, Space, Journey, Description: Justy Phillips’ fifteen years
JESUS IS THE REASON FOR THE SEASON; LEAVERS’ DANCE; INDIANA JONES - Mary Anderson ponders Justy Phillp's enigmatic work at the Carnegie Gallery, Hobart.
I am sitting silently in the Gallery Carnegie, an upstairs room located in one of the heavy, historic Edwardian structures that populate and define the Hobart City Centre. The ceilings are high. The air is cool but thick with age. I have traced my hand along a mammoth wooden railing that led me up a set of stairs wide enough for me and a modest phalanx of bodies to march at once. Now safely past the timber and glass of the gallery door, I am inside a curious corpse. For just beyond the entryway podium of show cards and visitor‘s comments, Justy Phillips has illuminated the room with a set of light boxes that cast a familiar glow, made unfamiliar inside this time capsule of a space. They are familiar because we know them in their outside form: outside churches, in front of school campuses, overhead of movie theatres. They are the light boxes from which those older forms of text messages hung: JESUS IS THE REASON FOR THE SEASON; LEAVERS’ DANCE; INDIANA JONES. Made unfamiliar here because they radiate a low fluoro glow that we are only accustomed to seeing when we are witness to an x-ray in a medical examination room or looking at a television set depicting a crime scene investigation lab. Here in Gallery Carnegie, it is a clever and potent queering of the space. A little bit laboratory. A little bit library.
Installation view, Carnegie Gallery, Hobart
Within the work and, consequently, within the space, a second degree of defamiliarization is introduced with the content of the text that Phillips has placed on the light boxes. From box to box, a single story unfolds, relating the melancholy memories of an anonymous storyteller accounting for the fifteen year relationship between the narrator’s family and their gardener. Such utterly sensitive and personal details displayed in this intersection between the private and public spheres of a library laboratory, and yet we, sitting in the gallery, have no empirical confirmation as to the factual or fictive nature of the details. We are reliant on the bold black capital case text and the authority of the fluoro light hitting us at eye-level to match our intuitive reckoning of its verity. Such a sensitive, sad story must be true.
And then I recall the reason I even turned up to the gallery in the first place, the thing that sent me up the flight of stairs that have me seated in the space. A soft foggy hillside scene. Trees right. Paddock left. A few sheep grazing. A ring of fence bounding private properties. Someplace a gardener would have tended?
What does Justy Phillips want from us? What should we take away? Should I write down the words as they’ve been projected to me as an anecdote? A fable? A warning? A cure? As I turn to exit out the door from which I entered, she’s left a little shelf with cards bearing the text printed in miniature, relatively speaking. please take a card she writes on the wall just right of the shelf. Her gift economy set up and doubled on itself, I observe the preciousness of the cards, contemplate the politics of receipt, and despite some slight anxiety about the moral implications, I take four. And a stack of show cards. And now feel compelled to let everyone know about Justy Phillips’ quirky puzzle of a show.
Mary Elizabeth Anderson is a writer and performer based in Hobart, currently completing her PhD thesis as a Fulbright Scholar in the School of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Tasmania.