Surf Shack

The Surf Shack – a yellow fibro house built in 1947 – has been a base residence for the local surf community at Werri Beach since 2005. Artists George Gittoes and Hellen Rose have been given the keys to The Surf Shack, their next-door neighbour, to stage an interactive exhibition. One of the last of its kind, this unique piece of Australian architecture and culture will be demolished three days after the exhibition ends.

The exhibition will premiere Gittoes’ ‘Augustus Tower’ suite of twenty-eight paintings, which he describes as being ‘About a time when the bad guys seem to be winning – this Trump Era of strongman dictators manipulated by greed and corrupt money and protected by police and security forces’. Gittoes continues, ‘At seventy years of age I cannot see myself doing many more series as intense or as demanding as these’. After Werri Beach, the paintings will travel to a vacant building in Brisbane in conjunction with Mitchell Fine Arts, and then to the United States to be shown in a derelict building in Englewood where Gittoes and Rose recently made their ground-breaking film White Light. It will then move to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem before touring other museums in the US.

Over two weekends, ‘The Surf Shack Show’ will also premier performances by Hellen Rose of her Haunted Burqa piece. While people walk through the rooms they will see Rose at different stages of her performance and be invited into the back garage to view the premier of her new video of the same title, along with photos documenting her performance work in Australia and Afghanistan. Rose developed this epic multimedia work in her underground bomb shelter studio at the Yellow House Jalalabad. accompanying this, Hellen’s collection of blue and white burqas will be undulating in the wind as they hang from the classic Hills Hoist in the backyard.

Documentary photographs by Gittoes and William Yang , capturing the lifestyle of the surfers while they were residents of the Shack, also feature in the exhibition. The former surfer residents will be in regular attendance as they farewell the house that has been an integral part of their lives and culture. Included in the exhibition will be documentation by Gittoes of some of their surf parties and the liberal lifestyles of his much-loved neighbours. ‘It was easy to have access to document their unique and colourful lifestyle’, says Gittoes, ‘Every morning we watched the surfers running across the road to ‘check out’ the waves, and filmed  their highly imaginative parties. There is a hole in the side wall where Ned punched after losing his girlfriend to a mate. The shack is full of mojo and is as much a feature of the artwork as the paintings and performances we are installing’.

About the show, Gittoes comments, ‘Now that I can see the paintings hung, I am preferring the experience of them on the walls of this 1947 post-war fibro house to seeing them on pristine white walls in a formal gallery space. Normally art like this can only be viewed in the homes of the wealthy few, who can afford to collect art, or the sterile environments of a public gallery. In the ‘Shack’ they have a kind of surreal impact. Seen in a place where everything but art has happened for the last seventy years is the opposite of placing a found object, like Duchamp’s urinal, in a gallery. The eye can run from a painting or etching to the view of surfers riding waves outside the window or to the Hills Hoist and barbecue in the backyard.’

EXHIBTION
Surf Shack Show
3 – 11 October 2020
4 Pacific Ave, Werri Beach