An often-repeated claim is that swimming pools are democratic spaces of inclusion in Australia, and that a summer here just wouldn’t be summer without a dunk in one of the cool blue oases dotted throughout our towns and suburbs.
But in Penrith – which on one day in January 2020 was officially the hottest place on the planet – access to water is a loaded subject. The Pool Show takes a deep dive into the local swimming pool in our art and in our psyches – not just as spaces of leisure, and relaxation, but also as sites where the politics of our time play out; where your race, postcode, gender or sexuality can determine who swims and who doesn’t, and how they are treated in the pool.
Responding to cultural, climatic and social cues from our local context, The Pool Show brings together a selection of new and existing artworks that consider the Australian preoccupation with swimming pools in all their various, glorious guises. The concreted, chlorinated embrace of countless municipal aquatic centres; the soothing, pellucid depths of rivers and bushland swimming holes; the invigorating, salty turbulence of pools carved into coastal rockshelves.
From the iconic imagery created by Harold Cazneaux, David Hockney, Ian Fairweather, Max Dupain and others to the powerful iconoclasm of artists such as Robert Campbell Jnr, Tracey Moffatt and Dennis Golding, The Pool Show will help us rethink the mythology and iconography of the pool in the Australian imagination, to visualise new definitions of swimability in the hottest part of Australia’s biggest city.
The Pool Show is presented in collaboration with the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and with the generous support of TLE Electricals.
