Courtesy: the artist and ARC ONE Gallery, Melbourne.

“There is no there there.”
– Gertrude Stein

Some places have a skeleton but no skin.

Artworks in this exhibition depict locations that are more like concepts than a point on a map. Although each artist has a very different place in mind, in the words of Gertrude Stein, none are quite there there.

KNOW ONE PLACE presents five artists who have conjured places-which-are-not-landscapes. Despite the variety of their visions, several important touchstones emerge across their work. Peter Daverington sets the tone with a deceptively tranquil portrait of a tree. Utterly perfect in every way, the scene is almost like a Victorian illustration. Titled Gondwana, this impossible site depicts the 510-million-year-old super continent, and Daverington sends us reeling back through time towards an unreal Eden. John Young paints golden zones between Western and Eastern image conventions. For Young places us in a weightless “mediated reality”, where different figures, cultures and zeitgeists are zipped together in an exquisite worldpicture. Pat Brassington invents places wherein the body tingles. Brassington has long courted the landscape of dreams, and we are drawn into her night logic.

Murray Fredericks reveals an opera in every dry lake, the universe inside every mirror. While Marina Rolfe creates places that don’t exist—“new places”, she calls them. There is not a rock, bush, hill or cloud in these works, yet each form whispers: “rock, bush, hill, cloud”.

KNOW ONE PLACE contains many worlds, but they’re not somewhere you can get to, or places that you might find. Like corridors and stairwells, they are spaces you enter to get somewhere else.