Jill Anderson, 2010, Melbourne, Flinders Street Station, Nicholas Building
Summary
Jill Anderson’s composite work of nine drawings has been executed in compressed charcoal on paper. The view along Melbourne’s central artery as it merges into St Kilda Road is depicted from the eighth-floor windows of the Stephen McLaughlan Gallery, in the historic Nicholas Building, on the corner of Swanston Street and Flinders Lane.
Anderson’s bird’s-eye panorama reveals the rooftop apparatus of nearby buildings – the air-conditioning units, extraction pipes, vents and the like – responsible for maintaining the activities and comforts of life in the built environment. These usually concealed and purely functional aspects and the artist’s monochromatic medium give an almost old-world look to the city, a mechanical artefact of the 19th century. Yet the fragmented view, the shifting perspectives, the off-kilter plumblines and the non-symmetrical pictorial spaces also gesture at the more complex city of the 21st century – less a coherent metropolis than a composite of historical layers, networked technologies, segmented urban ecologies and changing uses, desires and experiences.
