Perth Voice Interactive

DRAMATIC black curtains frame the entrance to PICA’s Northbridge galleries, where demonic-looking sphinxes, eyes flashing menacingly, guard the 2015 salon series, Epic Narratives.

Curators Leigh Robb and Nadia Johnson broke with traditional gallery exhibition format, to add a sense of theatre to the art, kicking off with Tarryn Gill’s “guardians” at the door.

The artist used stockings stretched around carved hunks of foam and the stitching leaves ugly scarring, adding to their threatening grandeur, as they sit atop massive raw logs.

Pass through these portals and you’ll find Clare Peake’s monolithic “stone” circle, referencing structures dating back aeons.

“Visually they open up geological and chronological time frames. There’s something Tolkien-like to them,” Johnson says.

Gazing down from the wall Vanessa Russ’ eight massive ink and water drawings, depict the wet and dry season of her Kimberley home.

The artist considers her images of waterholes, gorges and rivers as self-portraits.

“The water shapes the country and shapes who you are, water leaves a mark, like a memory,” her blurb says.

Nineteen artists were asked to create works based around storytelling and ideas of humanity and empathy and a sense of place.

But of course being artists they came up with a unique variety of ways to convey that: “As soon as you give an artist a topic they undo those ideas,” Robb says.

PICA’s three galleries create “islands”, each space a different take on the theme.

Abdul Abdullah’s self-portraits borrow from Planet of the Apes, and speak of being “the other”, with the naked multi-media artist wearing a monkey mask, and tenderly holding a young monkey. It’s both tender and confronting.

His brother Abdul-Rahman’s beautifully carved animals, a fish, snake and pigeon nestle in glazed bowls made by their Malay-born ceramicist mother Maimunah Abdullah.

The last “island” gallery, evokes nanna’s lounge, a massive wall of hot-pink, floral wall paper backdropping Pip and Pop’s micro-pop, colour-saturated universe, inspired by Japanese video game Katamari Damacy,

While another wall is a collaboration of artists Renae Coles and Anna Dunnill, a selection of colourful canvases drawn from images of protest and parades.

Other artists include Teelah George, Shannon Lyons, Penny Coss, Jacobus Capone, Kynan Tan, Gosia Wlodarcza, Hossein Valamanesh, Reko Rennie, Richard Lewer, Malaluba Gumana, Zoe Kirkwood and Caitlin Yardley.

Epic Narratives is on at PICA, James Street, Northbridge until August 16. Entry free.

by JENNY D’ANGER