Bec Gallo

This work was presented at Cementa 19, a biannual festival of contemporary art in the post-industrial town of Kandos, in mid-West NSW, Australia. ‘Back of House: Museum Maintenance’ was produced on-site at the Kandos Museum, a volunteer-run museum dedicated to local and industrial history. The materials used in this work are a combination of museum discards and collection items.

As collective history made visible, local museum collections form the narratives through which a town might shape its sense of identity. When an object is no longer useful - when it has been superseded by a newer model, or replaced by updated technology, or choked with rust - how do we decide whether it heads to the charity shop, the tip or the museum collection? What decisions and value systems determine which objects go on to shape a town’s identity? Sometimes it can feel like a hair’s breadth, or a shift in perception, that separates junk from legacy.

This work was co-commissioned by Cementa and Parramatta Artists’ Studios.

View exhibition catalogue

1. Walking

Suburban streets are not designed for walkers. The pavements are irregular or uneven—a concrete track turns into a thin nature strip, and the walker must decide whether to continue along the band of grass or move to the edge of the road. A solitary walker garners attention because walking along a suburban street in the middle of the day, or the late afternoon, seems like a suspicious thing to do. Why walk when you can drive? Why walk along a back street instead of the main drag? Why walk on your own? This kind of walker is particularly suspicious because this walker seems to meander and to take slow hesitant steps. This walker looks lost, but not quite, and bends down to inspect the grass. This walker appears to be carrying junk.

For her solo exhibition Lifted, Rebecca Gallo has undertaken a series of walks using the location of Peacock Gallery and the Auburn Botanic Gardens as her starting point. She has walked and re-walked routes along Chisholm Road, Elm Road, Carnegie Street and Edgar Street; she has passed the Joy of Life Christian Church and the Auburn Tennis and Recreation Club, tracked the route of the Duck River, the outline of the Webbs Avenue Playing Fields, and the perimeter of the council depot. During each of these walks Gallo has found, and picked up, various items that have caught her attention (a set of broken keys, a shuttlecock, a button)—items that have been discarded, lost, left as refuse, or buried.

Suburbia exists in our imaginary as the quarter acre block, the hills hoist and the red brick house; as the site of middle-class aspiration and consumerism; as the settler nation’s thumb print (never-ending sprawl working to cover up and occupy land that was never ceded). In Blue Velvet (1986), David Lynch places a severed ear next to a rose bush and a picket fence, forever associating the white picket fence of suburbia with concealed horror and decay. It is also the place where most of us live and call home.

But Gallo is not placing objects down, she is picking them up. It is an action that is less about exposing the seamy underbelly of a suburb (how terracotta tiles and manicured lawns repress our desires) and more about attention and care to the particularities of place. In searching for materials that have been deliberately dropped or misplaced, Gallo must focus her eyes downward—zooming in on the cracks in the pavements, the edges of the gutters, or the blades of glass. She is performing the act of gleaning: finding value in what appears, on the surface, to have no worth.

2. Balancing

Having collected this vast array of objects, Gallo spreads out her finds in the studio. It’s this process of taking and moving objects from their original site that allows such objects to shake off their original meaning and intention. (This is all the more apparent in the pieces that have been broken or split or torn). That is to say, in the studio, objects are ascribed a new set of values—reappropriated as aesthetic objects, their use and place in the world can begin anew. They are no longer refuse, but the components of Gallo’s hanging mobile sculptures.

In reweighting and balancing these objects next to one another, Gallo is also gesturing to our personal relationship with ‘things’: how easily we assume an object doesn’t exist, just because it has disappeared from view; how uneasy it makes us when we realise such objects have a lifetime longer than our own.

Gallo approaches sculpture in the same way she approaches walking. Much like her tour of Auburn, she must show care and restraint towards her things, taking the time to match weight against weight, level against level, in order to keep everything in check. And when I look at Gallo’s mobiles, I think of the way they imply collective rather than individual action—how each object is only able to float suspended because it is tied to another, and another. It is a type of structural arrangement that runs counter to the idea of suburbia. It sits against the aggressive pursuit of a yard with a fence; it sits against closed curtains and throw-away culture; it suggests how the fragile shard of an object becomes stronger when bonded with something else.

Because what is a mobile if not the balancing of disparate individual parts, whose stable existence relies on the careful assemblage of other such parts—an offering of lives lived in tandem, rather than in opposition.

— Naomi Riddle, 2019

The title of this ongoing series of walking works is borrowed from a footnote in Rebecca Solnit’s ‘Wanderlust’, where Gary Snider describes bushwalking as ‘an irregular dancing - always shifting - step of walk on slabs and scree’. For Gallo, the irregular dancing of her walking is at once the navigation on foot of urban, suburban and industrial areas (often designed for vehicular traffic, and hostile to pedestrians), and the awkward dance of the intermittent bend-down to retrieve objects from the roadside. 

Gallo’s work is a kind of archaeology of the present: an examination of the materiality and cycles of use of everyday objects. She collects fragments that appear to have reached obsolescence, and slips them back into circulation within a new, aesthetic value system. Her mobiles are a weighing-up of these objects, both literally and metaphorically: a proposition of equivalences between discarded and forgotten things. 

Limber and Way Down were exhibited in the Churchie National Emerging Art Award finalists’ exhibition at QUT Art Museum in September 2018. Documentation by Carl Warner and Rebecca Gallo.

Small wins is an ongoing series of sculptures that combine deconstructed trophies with found and cast objects. Stripped of the engraving that announces an achievement, trophies lose their original value and purpose. Once-useful, discarded objects tell stories of the hands that held and used them and more general stories of consumption and decay. Small wins combines denuded trophies and found objects in celebration of minor, anonymous achievements; the stuff we overlook, forget or underrate.

Small wins 5-8 were exhibited at Sydney Contemporary Art Fair, Carriageworks in September 2018 with the National Art School stand.

From Here to There: Australian art and walking curated by Jane Denison and Sharne Wolff at Lismore Regional Gallery, July-August 2018. Featuring Nell, Lauren Brincat, Dean Brown, Daniel Crooks, Nici Cumpston, Rebecca Gallo, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Alex Karaconji, Noel McKenna, Sarah Mosca, Liam O’Brien and Sarah Rodigari. This work was made during a residency at the Binns Artist Studio, Lismore Regional Gallery. A catalogue was published to accompany the exhibition, featuring essays by Vanessa Berry and Andrew Frost.

More information:
Lismore Regional Gallery
Museums & Galleries NSW
Byron Arts Magazine
Vanessa Berry

A solo presentation at Parramatta Artists Studios, May 2018.

For two weeks in the lead up to Movers and Makers 2018, Rebecca Gallo shifted her practice from the studio into the gallery, constructing new suspended sculptures from offcuts and cast-offs requested from the other PAS 2018 artists. In Balancing out, residues of the diverse material practices of each studio artist are folded into Gallo’s own work – a reflection on the complex flow of influences between artists who work in close proximity.

Photos by Document Photography.

A group exhibition at Casula Powerhouse, October 2017, curated by Brittany D’Chong. Cover image by Cara Lopez.

A group exhibition curated by Chloé Wolifson at Darren Knight Gallery, January - February 2017. Featuring Connie Anthes, Rebecca Gallo, Eloïse Kirk, Michelle Nikou, Lisa Sammut, Lotte Schwerdtfeger, Yasmin Smith, & Louise Weaver.

Cover image: photography by Simon Hewson

A series of found object assemblages, each comprising objects collected during a single walk departing from and returning to home. Exhibited in Written In Time curated by Catherine Benz at Delmar Gallery, Ashfield, January-February 2016.

Cover image: photography by Silversalt

A video and sculptural installation and a series of paste-ups for ANIMAL/MINERAL/PHYSICAL/SPIRITUAL, a group show curated by Chloé Wolifson at The Bearded Tit in August 2015. Featuring Rebecca Gallo, Sarah Goffman, Lisa Sammut, Louise Meuwissen + Lotte Schwerdtfeger.

A series of sculptural propositions made with items sourced on-site at historic house Juniper Hall. Exhibited for The Many at Juniper Hall, September 2015. Curated by UNSW Art & Design Creative and Cultural Leadership students studying under Dr Julie Louise Bacon.

What does it mean to engage in a practice of collecting outside of an urban environment, and on Aboriginal land? These works were created on residency at Fowlers Gap Research Station, on Wilyakali land in far-western New South Wales in 2015. In Give and Take, a video depicts the lifting of quartz rocks from a small patch of earth, and those rocks are placed atop the video.

Installation view at Hidden: Rookwood Cemetery Sculpture Walk, September – October 2014.

Exhibited in Will to Keep at 107 Projects, Redfern, May 2014. Featuring Jack Condon, Dan Connell, Pat Cremin, Saskia Doherty, Rebecca Gallo, Teelah George, David Greenhalgh & Katrina Stamatopoulos, Sarah Kukathas, James Nguyen, Lisa Sammut and Jack Stahel.