Sean Rafferty
Projection: Bleach
Kings ARI, level 1/171 King St, Melbourne 3000
Wed - Fri 3pm-6pm, Sat 12pm-6pm

The spaces we inhabit, their form, functionality and presence are examined in ‘Projection: Bleach’, the latest of Sydney artist Sean Rafferty’s ‘Projection’ series, at Kings ARI. This large-scale installation of cardboard and timber artworks, resembling a suburban home in construction, ethereally implies an absence of presence. The cardboard panels feature images of unfinished brick-veneer homes; faint pictures of confined spaces now empty, yet soon to be filled with sentiment, all stenciled onto the boards by a process of sun bleaching. These very images exist as a by-product of the sunrays’ absence from their contours, an extended musing upon the thought of a new intangible form that comes with nonappearance, much like the eerie qualities of a ghost-town. Vacated Home Theatre presents the viewer with an empty cardboard room, its walls embedded with indistinct shadows of what would most commonly feature in a domestic ‘television room’: a couch and lampshade. These shadows represent a symbolic trace of the television’s ‘projection’ upon the space in which it resides. Sean Rafferty’s ‘Projection: Bleach’ is a thought-provoking investigation of space, place and the environments of the everyday.