situation responsive intervention in the Grenda’s Bus Depot, Dandenong scheduled for demolition
in collaboration with Campbell Drake
one week
“Carey and Drake inhabit the world of design as well as being artists, but they were friends first. For the Depot, ‘Safety comes first’, they tell me and smile as they paint. They have marked out a series of 10 stripes, each 50 cm wide in ‘safety yellow’. Moving from the main site entry this work, 10 Lines, East West Trajectory 2008 gestures towards the new Grendas bus depot across the railway line, as well as indicating the position of the bridge that dissect the site once the depot has been demolished.
The diffuse edges of these early lines are not nearly as solid as the older yellow lines on the asphalt, which mark out pedestrian access paths from the gates to various entry points. Nor as solid as the bold yellow stripes that Carey and Drake are painting vertically up the building, over brick, glass and aluminium. The building is being dressed and ‘cut’ by ten yellow stripes, sometimes they run over surfaces at other times they seem to dissolve or dissect them, in the first floor offices it is as if a wayward bus has cut a swathe through the partitions and desks.
In urban planning and architecture there is much drawing upon notional landscapes here, lines are drawn and painted directly onto, and into, the landscape. There is a fascinating feedback loop between the artist’s interests, working-history, plans and approach on the one hand and the site itself on the other. It seems to me that Carey and Drake are not so interested in inscribing their views, or one reading, upon the work, but in allowing for multiplicities. A rich and ambiguous complication of meaning is set in specific tension, and relation, to an apparently simple gesture.”
Geraldine Barlow
