Media - ross mcleod

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Melbourne Interiors Badges
Croft Institute, Melbourne
Melbourne Interiors
Roger Kemp
The Croft Institute, a small bar located at the end of one of Melbourne’s network
of laneways, was the late night venue at the Sensoria Festival for an exhibition of
projected video images, produced by RMIT Interior Design undergraduate students,
which captured the shifting qualities of particular interior spaces in Melbourne.
Static video footage projected onto screens located in the bar presented what at
first seemed like a still image; however on further observation they gave a more
temporal representation of these spaces. Changes in lighting conditions and the
presence of occupants moving in and out of the frame gave these images a quality
of surveillance. The spaces documented included Melbourne City Watch House,
Windsor Station Café, Parliament House, the State Library of Victoria, the stage set
of television drama series ‘Stingers’ and the hairdressing salon Doctor Follicles and
thirty different living rooms in Melbourne.
The occupation and inhabitation of space was a central concern for these works.
Interior spaces are so often in a state of flux – ever changing, mutating and
transforming. Their significance is not based on static monumentalism but rather
on a lived and remembered presence. In this sense the event itself was seen as an
addition to the accretion of memories associated with the Croft Institute and the
images encountered on the night were reproduced as badges which visitors could
souvenir as part of the experience.
This event was one of a series of exhibitions of images and texts which have been
held in spaces around Melbourne over the past three years. This work sits under the
title of ‘Melbourne Interiors’, an ongoing research project conducted by students of
the Interior Design program at RMIT University.
The project seeks to select, collect and document interior spaces of Melbourne.
The nature of this collection reveals and develops new imaginings and
understandings of interior space, interior spaces that may be living, lived,
remembered or perhaps lost.