CROSS SECTION

29th of July, 2023

first peepshow write up done by our icon Lili Ward here . It’s effervescent.

Peep Show’s ig story said next to the Myer music bowl (why is it called Sydney when its in Melbourne?? I refuse to look that up I really don’t care).

The next image. Parks Victoria people with sheriff badges on their camel shirts. Lmao. Another picture:

ITS STILL ON.  

???????

I tried to reverse engineer in my brain the angle it was taken from so I could figure out where any of us were (I’m not memorising coordinates fuck off). I think I replayed it a dozen times. 

I get nothing; but the heavy air creeps up my neck where its craned over my phone and I’m brought out of it by the paranoia of not paying attention to the people around me. 

So I walked the perimeter of the amphitheatre. It’s constructed like a big sloping den, thick wire cables forming the scaffold. It’s a huge funnel that looks like it really works. Walking so close to it gave me the feeling that it was a carcass. i followed the beams in a circle and they followed me back.

I tried to suss whether the people I passed could possibly know where it was. Did they look like a friend of a friend of a friend? Some did, but I didn’t ask them. I don’t think I could explain what I was looking for. 

I rounded the last bend and saw a couple, the guy turned to me a said 

“excuse me sister, do you sometimes think humanity has lost their sense of the soul?”

I looked at his girl, blanked, and kept walking. 

Ok. I needed (directional) help. 

The kids were in a circle on the roots of a big tree and in the middle, a pile of peroni? Heineken?

The facade lays face up. It was three metres long, once tall. They briefly stood it vertical but were told off by the rangers that any attachment to the trees was violating their ‘assets’. Now it clung to the ground like a mat, funny little wooden stepping stones marking a path to the house. The rooms now inhabit some hypothetical space in the ground. Fake flowers were planted. A fence was put up, marking vague corners of a picketed perimeter. 

Love heart fingers. A sleeping boy. The Home Stretch.

Darcy’s work has an attitude I can’t completely articulate. It’s not exactly irreverence, although it’s funny and self-aware. But there’s a sincerity in his practice that brushes up with the irony. I remember back to last year (or maybe the year before?) to a previous work of his. He had cut leaves into perfect squares and nailed them into the wall in a grid. Next to it, was an iPhone playing pseudo-music into the pickups of an electric guitar. I can’t remember the song, but it played on repeat from an amp.

There was a consideration of replication, ephemerality. The futile effort of a stupid task, and the earnest drive to keep completing it. Effort not equating outcome. Now, the house lays flat despite their efforts to raise it, the fence protects nothing and the flowers will never decompose like they should.

But here we were again, in the leaves and music like before. He’d brought us back. I felt stupid and earnest and young and old.

I think it’s a shrine? But I’m nostalgic for things that haven’t even ended yet.

I get up to take a photo of me flipping off the installation (re: coordinates???), and nearly step on the body of a dead possum. Its little hands are pulled into its body; fur dimpled with decomposition. 

My feet stop short, thank fuck. 

image credit: Darcy Guttridge, The Home Stretch, 2023, installation view.