by Max Vickery and Erin Russell.

‘The womens sewing room was my grandmother’s workplace. Made me cry.’

‘I feel both uneasy and comforted. It’s a vivid reminder of the one fact all humans have in common—death and decay.’

‘Hey Pete, I can go into my shed and see this shit.’

‘Loved the sticky floor. Total immersion.’

‘“Achoo”’

These are just a few selections one might find leafing through the guest book as they exit TIME • RONE. Public response has so far been overwhelmingly positive, and it’s easy to see why. Rone borrows from a variety of internet/pop culture codes and aesthetics, working with both real and imagined histories as the raw material for his show’s evocations. The conventions of urbex, dark academia, liminal spaces, and a certain brand of post-apocalypticism undergird the nostalgia which the exhibition provokes. TIME • RONE isn’t just a lamentation for the past, it is also an elegy for the present. It’s a trite, common-sense (but effective!) message delivered as a spectacle: ‘For everything there is a season…’ As we traipse from room to room across dingy, sticky floors and through dim, intermittent lighting, we are reminded that luxuries decay, social relations shift, and economies atrophy. We know we aren’t living in the post-war boom any more, but how do we feel about it, and how does Rone feel about it?
        The exhibition is clearly concerned with women’s labour and industrial production in the post-war era. The natural course through TIME • RONE’s Perth iteration leads the viewer through these spaces of women’s labour first; the Workroom in the downstairs area and the Switch Board Room in the upstairs area. While the Workroom is somewhat spatially isolated, the Switch Board Room is the entry point for a kind of pentatych. After a short detour into the Mail Room and a stroll through the Waiting Room, one enters the Typing Pool. This space is littered with the traces of dreams and desires: a draft of a love-letter, a plan for the second chapter of a novel, an open recipe book. There are also signs of conflict, some latent and some less so, including a notice of poor performance lying across one of the desks, and a sign advertising an upcoming promotion. These documents are among the show’s most compelling moments. One exits this part of the exhibition through the Head Office, a choice which gesticulates towards a vague sense of gender and class politics in a quite satisfying way. The newspapers which fill the glass cabinets in the hallway outside, reproductions of the pages of 1950s issues of West Australia’s Sunday Times, are a welcome curiosity.
        At the other end of the hall from the Head Office are the paired spaces of the Pharmacy and Clock Room, and, opposite them, the Art Room. The Pharmacy and Clock Room together indicate a turn from production to consumption. The Pharmacy features brightly coloured magazines, newspapers, and a few scattered vials, while the walls of the Clock Room are filled with boxes of goods stamped with vintage logos. These are perhaps the least interesting areas of the exhibition. The titular clock in the Clock Room is more than a little heavy-handed, the player piano tucked in behind the commercial shelving would probably have been a sufficient reminder that the exhibition is about the passage of time. For a more exhilarating and quirky experience of mid- to late-twentieth century medical technology these reviewers would recommend a visit to the WA Medical Museum near King Edward Maternity Hospital in Subiaco. (See if you can spot the Asthma Cigarettes!)
        The Art Room is one of the more complex spaces of the exhibition, and the only one in which Rone’s signature looming portraiture feels at all relevant. The room features several easels displaying a series of incomplete amateur sketches indicating that a life-drawing class has taken place. Here, women’s bodies are both consumed and produced. On a filing cabinet to the left of the entryway, under an artful quantity of dust, is a short article on Mary Magdalene. Above the blanketed dais at the center of the back wall is a portrait of Teresa Oman, Rone’s self-described muse, her hands clasped in holy benediction. She is obviously intended to resemble the Christian Mary, and this is obviously meant to stand in contrast with Mary Magdalene, but the contrast comes across as nothing more than a cheeky wink to critics of Rone’s unoriginal mural portraiture.
        It’s worth discussing the looming sad girl portraits. We didn’t want to, but it can’t be helped. The critique of this type of art is so old that it feels cliché to repeat it, but: this kind of portraiture reduces women to passive objects acted upon by men. This was articulated perfectly by John Berger in Ways of Seeing back in 1972: ‘men act, women are acted upon’. Leslie Thompson’s clumsy article a few months ago in Dispatch Review, in which she suggested that Rone’s portraits somehow transcend this critique, does nothing less than reinforce the importance of making that argument. These streaky visages, resembling the tragic DeviantArt offerings of the 2000s and 2010s, are the most unremarkable and uninteresting aspect of the work, and unfortunately it is this aspect that has been plastered all over billboards and buses.
        Frankly, these faces add little to nothing to the exhibition, as evidenced by the fact that they were rarely mentioned in the pages of the exhibition guest book we perused. One comment on the portraits immediately divigates:

‘Whose the same girl in the pictures drawn?

Is it his muse?

Should have more detailed information about the thoughts behind the rooms!’

Another:

‘Eerie. Haunting. Who is the girl and why is she there?’

Reading a few interviews with Rone clarifies just how shallow his approach is. In a 2023 interview with STIRworld he remarked on it quite transparently:

‘There's no particular story, and it's not a literal character portrait of Teresa Oman. She's more there in an emotional sense that draws stories out of people. I have created a total work of fiction... When people establish this emotional connection with the muse… they start to tell their own stories.’

And in a particularly banal interview with Julia Baird he described his goal as a ‘non-aggressive, non-sexual, beautiful image of an unknown woman’—at worst a completely anonymous, unthreatening, and passive receptacle for the dreams, desires, and memories of others, and at best a soothing feminine presence without a person behind it. Neither are particularly good options, and neither seem to have set alarm bells ringing among Australia’s docile literati.
        This serious shortcoming is difficult to reconcile with the exhibition’s successes. Is the Rone who treats women as window-dressing the same Rone who offers us intriguing and contradictory visions of their psyches through the show’s set-pieces? It isn’t clear on the face of the exhibition, dominated as it is by Rone branding, but TIME • RONE was brought to life by a team of 120 people. All of the period furniture, pressed metal, newspapers, and magazines had to be fabricated or sourced, a massive endeavour that took more than a year. Lead set designer Carly Spooner, speaking to Broadsheet, explained the process:

‘He’ll provide a creative brief and I’ll interpret it through objects and furnishings… With Time, I gathered lots of references for furniture from the 1950s. I chose the materials and how they needed to be painted, other collaborators built and painted a variety of objects… It’s a lot of collaborating with the team and then actually dressing the set.’

Set builder Callum Preston points out a similar process happening during the actual build, saying that ‘[w]e all have our own artistic practices on the side too… and all those skills come in handy working on a Rone project… Every aspect of the work is up for debate and everyone in the build team has a voice.’ Rone, the set design team, fabricators, and set builders succeed in peopling the fictive history of TIME • RONE with an aura of human presence, something which is only achievable by drawing on the wide range of experiences and ideas of a diverse and invested group of artists. The lived-in feel is the part of the show which is so beloved by its audience, and it is something that could only have been produced collectively.
        Not all of these collaborative elements are equally successful. While the set dressing excels, the same cannot be said for the score. Each work is accompanied by a bland post-minimalist, neo-romantic composition—an unfortunate genre of classical music kept artificially ventilated by its use in the film industry (think the tawdry strains of Max Richter’s ‘On the Nature of Daylight’). Nick Batterham’s underdeveloped and meandering pieces underestimate their audience, even if they were admirably performed by the Budapest Art Orchestra. The unusual use of surround sound (one speaker is embedded in a typewriter!) broke up the otherwise monotonous aural experience. The reliance of the lighting on musical cues led to much awkward squinting, though the overall effect was suitably moody, warm, and evocative.
        The final rooms, Backstage and The Library, are the most undercooked, both in terms of their density and thematic content. These are clear motions towards public spaces rather than workplaces or ateliers, but the works end up feeling like throwaway pieces addressed to thin notions: the romance of dimly lit jazz clubs and the opulence of old world libraries. The effect of the whole, however, remained undiminished by these elements.
        There is something interesting happening in the reception of TIME • RONE that has been smothered by its own pretensions, and by the Rone brand itself. In spite of this, the audience has been able to find its way to the elements of the exhibition which really matter—its magical, transportive effect, using the nostalgia it evokes as a bridge between generations rather than a shallow glorification of decay. During our visit we saw many families pass through the rooms, pointing out familiar or unfamiliar objects, laughing together, and connecting with each other. There is clearly a mass audience for this kind of immersive work that is at once approachable and artful, melancholy muses notwithstanding, in contrast to the endless parade of immersive multi-screen Van Gogh and Picasso exhibitions.
        Audiences are also drawing their own interesting conclusions from these works. One entry in the TIME • RONE guest book reads ‘It felt like a post-apocalyptic world and I had returned as a survivor to a world that is a snapshot in time’, another ‘Fallout vibes everywhere’, and another, perhaps most incisively, simply wrote ‘Made me think of war’. The cyclical dimming of lights in the different rooms evoked, for one of these reviewers, the power cuts in the lead up to aerial bombardments. For both of us the ubiquitous cobwebbing and dust in each of the rooms begged the question: where did all these people go? The Doomsday Clock, a project by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that measures the threat level of nuclear catastrophe, currently reads 90 seconds to midnight—closer to midnight than it was at the height of the Cold War. There’s a war in Ukraine, and heightened geopolitical tensions in the Middle East due to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Global expenditure on military technologies is at an historic high, and arms manufacturers are raking in massive profits. Now, with the election of Donald Trump, and his proposed cabinet of warhawks and christofascists, it is clear that things are only going to get worse.
        It comes as no surprise, then, that audiences have picked up on this theme, even if unconsciously. What might surprise many of those strolling through these retro-dystopian scenes is that AGWA has hosted at least one event, an evening affair for the US Consulate, sponsored by Bechtel, Boeing, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, L3 Harris, and Northrup Grumman—the very weapons companies that threaten to bring about the world that this exhibition evokes.



TIME • RONE, The Art Gallery of Western Australia, 1 July 2024 – 2 February 2025.

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Artworks by Rone. Images courtesy of the Art Gallery of Western Australia.