The Installation
One of the Gallery’s oldest and grandest rooms is transformed into an historic abandoned reception room. Here, Rone expands upon the themes of beauty and decay, the enduring and the obsolete, and the permanent and the ephemeral. He gives material form to darkness and light in portraits painted on opposite walls. The same female subject in one rendition is bathed in luminosity: in the other she emerges from darkness.
Rone’s portraits are youthful representations that adhere to, but quietly critique, concepts of feminine beauty. Meanwhile, deterioration is wrought throughout the room itself, abandoned with just a few signs of its former glory, and only suggestions of what might have brought about its dereliction. Music filters through the space in a melancholic, haunting strain, recalling absences and things lost to time.
A unique aspect of the installation is the inclusion of reproductions of works from the Gallery’s collection. For this project, Rone researched and mined the Gallery’s holdings, connecting with decorative arts, painted portraits, watercolour landscapes, and the first major work acquired by the Gallery in 1900—Frederick McCubbin’s A bush burial (1890).