A half-forgotten story, a fiction of history, an illusion of our permanence in an uncertain world. Parlour Parlëur, by the ArtHitects, Gary Carsley and Renjie Teoh, is an immersive world where ideas of synchronicity, proximity and loss are imagined.
The parlour, a place within the home to receive guests, was the most public of a home’s interior spaces. This site, once a private home, is now a public gallery – its domestic origins still very much part of the fabric here. The architecture of these histories and the shared connections we experience from one moment to another, are core to the artists creative practice, a collusion between art and architecture where circumstance and coincidence merge in a visually beguiling tableau.
Parlëur, the French verb that means to talk is enacted as a call and response between objects, imagery, and forms, while the ruination and loss of the image across the gallery is at once a reminder of the violence of loss, as it is a call for change and renewal.
Sarah Wentworth, in the form of a bust from Vaucluse House in Sydney’s east, assumes lead character. Placed here at the western edge of Sydney, her presence brings forth a time when her husband and colonist William Charles Wentworth set off from Emu Plains across the Blue Mountains in 1813. This moment, like a fracture across the landscape is made visible in the room. An image of rupture and disruption in the name of human endeavour.
By borrowing furniture and objects from the Gallery’s collection and lace pieces from the OWLS (Outer Western Lacemakers Sydney), and setting them against a fictional parlour scene, the ArtHitects engage in a relentless process of what they refer to as ‘worlding’ where nature, culture, subject and object are not seen as separate stories but as each other’s context in which all are constantly developing with each other.
A Greek myth enacting a ritual of love and loss is visualised in large compositions, while natural and cultural treasures from the local area are embedded into the architecture. Like time travel the ArtHitects lay out stories from the past and entangle them with images and ideas from the present.
These moments are impressions. Circumstantial occurrences that all share a similar texture – a fabric of life that has rippled to come together to create a new architectural reality. The evidence of the artist’s own labour in building this world, is seen in the form of pencilled grid marks used to lay the foundations of laying the four thousand A4 paper sheets to create this richly entangled narrative.
Moving through this space we might consider ourselves characters in a place of fiction, walking between many worlds simultaneously. Witnessing its disappearance, while imagining the many possibilities for its renewal.
After their widely celebrated installation The Regency Made Me Blind (2018), a site-specific print work composed of more than 7,000 overlapping A4 photocopies commissioned by the National Gallery of Singapore and realised with Jeremy Chu, artist Gary Carsley (1957) and architect Ren Jie Teoh (1983) established the ArtHitects. Working out of both Sydney and Singapore they have chosen to sublimate their separate identities as artist and architect and to synthesise their different cultural backgrounds and generational outlooks. the ArtHitects are committing to evolving a transcultural visual language to express the lived experiences of contemporary Australia’s increasingly blended communities. And to linking local histories to those of our region rather than those of the North.
They have an interest in the arcane, the specific and the manual as strategies for pushing back against uniformities and generalisations produced by globalisation. Their large-scale artworks, developed through a dialogue with community groups, curators and public collections, are experienced as resonant, activated social spaces. In these immersive, richly visual, dimensionally beguiling environments audiences can come together to form new networks; reflecting and celebrating the things they have in common.
