CV Jon Tarry

CV – Dr Jonathan Tarry
Education
2013 PhD, Architecture, RMIT, Melbourne
2001 Masters of Architecture, RMIT, Melbourne
1987 Post Graduate Study, Akademie fur Kunste Munich (GER). Professor Eduardo Paolozzi.
1980 Bachelor Fine Art, Curtin University of Technology, Perth 1978 Diploma Fine Art, Claremont School of Art, Perth
Professional Appointments
Commenced 1991 acted as Chair of Visual Arts, 2011 till 2014, Associate Professor, in the School of Design Arts University of Western Australia. Teaching in Bachelor of Fine Arts, Honors and MFA programme, Specific lecturing in History Theory and Practice of Drawing, Level one and two, Art in the Environment, Future Making, Art Practice and Design Studio. Research in geopolitical art practice.

2010 – Visiting Professor Chinese University of Hong Kong. At the Invitation of Li Shiquao now Professor of Chinese History at University of Virginia, I develop a programme with Professor Li, for the masters of Architecture students. We wrote the programme and I spent time at the university the programme was around the old Kia Tak Airport in Hing Kong Harbour. I returned to assess the students and have maintained an ongoing dialogue with the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

2005/6 – Visiting Professors, The University of Arizona (USA) 1996 Visiting Professor, The University of Arizona (USA)

Practice

My practice expands the field of visual art in relation to the environment. This leads to innovative projects in drawing, film, sculpture and architecture. The artworks resonate with Complex systems of making and expand how things work and fit together on multiple platforms, form the prosaic of material and structure to the cultural, poetic and uncanny.
I have completed over 40 commissions in Australia USA an Near East and 38 solo shows in Australia, Los Angeles, London and Amman Jordan. Exhibitions include, Markers, Artist and Poets the Venice Biennale of Art 2001 and Venice Biennale of Architecture 2008.
I have been published widely including, essay and photo essay on Prix d Amour, Boomtown 2050 UWA Press 2009. Twenty- Six Runways, images and Text Melbourne 2012. Current
and past academic positions include; Associate Professor, BA Fine Art from CUT, MA Architecture RMIT, Faculty of Architecture Landscape and Visual Art, University of Western Australia Perth, Western Australia, Visiting Professor to The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Associate Professor at UWA, PHD Architecture by Project at RMIT. 2013.

Publications:
I have included the publications as they share more than a formal relationship. Each publication is an examination of geopolitical space. Twentysix Runways offers a global coding through the modern ground markings as distinguished Deakin University academic Paul Carter says, The place – ‘the other place of democracy’ – is not a place at all in any static sense, but the setting of a mass mobility made sociable; and the art of inscription proper to its well-being is one alive to placing. (McQuire & Papastergiadis 2005).
The publication Twentysix Runways is part of the Review of Practice, part formalised sketch project and part record of the journey through of a PhD project. Operating at the different end of the spectrum, Prix d’Amour, the demolition of a house in a wealthy suburb of Perth, contains a story of a city with elements of success and excess and the subsequent expression of this excess in a gratuitous display of individual power and privilege. Within the demolition documentation is the critique of this excess placed against a backdrop of fictive realities. The text Life on the Strip reveals a social displacement through position of dis empowerment of an individual. While representing stories originating at opposite socioeconomic ends, each has the commonality of being a debate about people and displacement.
From Prix d’Amour there was feedback and a wide distribution, which had open trans- disciplinary aspects in my practice. Though the final result was much more, The Prix d’Amour text was a singular concept in photograph and film of a suburban ruin, existing as a means of unofficial recording of history. As contemporary Australian Architect Geoff Warn discusses in a review published in Architecture Australia, January 2010: Artist Jon Tarry’s short video “No Rose No More” is a stark portrayal of this practice. The stills and accompanying commentary parody a Hollywood-style small town epic starring socialite Rose Porteous, her then mining magnate husband Lang Hancock and their supersized mansion Prix d’Amour, played out through the demolition of Perth’s most well- known piece of domestic architecture, and leaving behind the hollow illusions that can stalk material excess and a yearning for celebrity status. A grand, broken down palace pulverized to landfill after only ten years in the limelight.
Significantly, most formal discussion of this publication reviewed the Prix d’Amour project positively, highlighting the potential of the broad survey as an agent to reflect and generate a dialogue about change. Life on the Strip reveals a concern for displacement and resistance that has been central in my practice. This article also gives an account of social history, through an attempt to give a voice to a story of life in the displacement zone. In this sense, the article resonates with the practice of recording, re-telling and observing from within sites which are associated with resistance.
A Printed Thing:
A Printed Thing, includes an essay on drawing in relation to three projects that formed part of the PhD research, it is in graphic form, drawings, photo collage overlay and text, discussing the dialogue between myself and PhD candidate Riet Eeckhout. In the essay we discuss drawing through a process of collapsing structures and drawing as a means of dialogue across distance. Drawing as a way of thinking and recording without specific outcomes in mind. The essay Drawing Out Collapse, pg. It is part of a publication by Architecture Project, Jon Tarry and Riet Eeckhout (AP Partner), published a chapter titled, ‘Drawing Collapse’, in ‘A Printed Thing’, which reveal an approach to various projects which explore the currency of drawing and photography as a means of record of process of change. The drawing photos and thinking through the text includes the demolition of a recent (1970) concrete gateway entrance to the City of Valletta, the capital of Malta. Jon and Riet through Architecture Project worked with Renzo Piano and the plans of the de-restoration to make way for the historical bastions of the city to be revealed after centuries of obstruction. This will form part of City to make space for the new Parliament Building.
Architecture Project (AP) has produced a book entitled A Printed Thing to commemorate their twenty-first anniversary. “When an architecture practice undertakes to commit itself to print, what is the result? Here is one, an architecture practice attempting to lay itself bare – open submissions, a project defined by its content. This then is the result. A ‘book’ of comment, theories, illustrations, photography, prose. An act of definition through experiment. A printed thing.” A Printed Thing is the attempt of an architectural firm to express itself and to describe its vision without using conventional architects’ tools of communication such as plans, drawings and models etc. The book consists of a collection of essays by colleagues and friends of AP, whose work “wraps itself round the work of centuries”. Tackling varying facets of architecture, tracing trajectories that are derived from specific discipline or vision, be it that of the architect, the critic, the educator, the artist, the writer or the anthropologist. http://www.bruil.info/book-a-printed-thing
Konrad Buhagiar, editor, A Printed Thing, 2012, Progress Press, Malta. Edition of 1000
In My Beginning Is My End:
The catalogue accompanies, and exhibition titled, In My Beginning is My End, at the Australian Urban Design Research Centre, (AUDRC), Perth, 2012. The exhibition was at the invitation of Professor Richard Weller the Director of AUDRC. The premise of the show was to place the design ideas for the new Perth Arena by Architects, Ashton Raggatt McDougal, (ARM) and the documentation of the destruction of the old Perth Entertainment Centre, the tow building located on adjacent sites. The catalogue to the exhibition features the contents of these two working methods. The catalogue is a durable account of this moment in this place.
Extract from the catalogue for In My Beginning is My End. 2012
Infinite Ruins.
Perth City oscillates between forces that are static and those that move rapidly and simultaneously. Creating a place that is culturally stable and sustainable requires an acknowledgement of the enduring existence of others within our social and ecological interconnection with place over time. The Perth Entertainment Centre (PEC) occupied a site for just over 38 years and given the average lifespan of 20 to 25 years for buildings in this City, that’s is a long time. The PEC was the primary live performance venue that was built in 1974 and demolished in 2011. For the last 10 years of its life, the venue was unoccupied with the exception of a live-in caretaker who maintained the indoor plants, cleaned the carpets and curtains and ensured all the technical facilities were in pristine condition in uncertain expectation.
Ask people in the street about the PEC and many will have a story to tell about their first concerts, the bands that influenced them and dates that marked their lives. Many people went to see artists perform and, along with preachers and beauty queens, the spectacles make an impressive roll call of the world’s finest and most unusual. These events were supported by an all star cast of skilled technicians, lighting and sound crews, confectionary and merchandise sellers as well the roll call of support bands who played and either vanished or went on to greatness. Perth has an uneasy relationship with its history and local popular culture is victim of this denial. For many, the performances required standing in long lines or sleeping over at the entrance for the best tickets: the mark of a true fan. The memories remain vivid and, for some, profound. As the author Julian Barnes says, “History is that uncertainty produced at the point where imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation” (Barnes J. 2011, A Sense of an Ending, Cape, London, pg. 17). It was during 2011 that this recording in photos and text occurred and I returned to the site sometimes three times a week to record the PEC being taken down.
Initially I wanted to work with the shell of the building with the idea of creating an ambitious and fitting finale: an experiential event that incorporated the phenomena that the building
exuded when alive. Specifically, I wanted to use sound, light and modifications to the built form including peeling, folding, cuts, insertions, and extensions. However, these ideas soon met a wall. As a culture we seem struggle with notions of entropy through which everything breaks down. I decided on the path of resistance and to do what artists do and get on and do the work with what we have. This doesn’t mean to just make-do but to be inventive, work with the default and find ways to enable a subject to ‘tell the story only it can tell’, (acknowledgments to William Yang). Subsequently, the recording of the building’s last days found form and expression in similarly obsolete technologies: stills and moving images were made with a wooden pinhole camera loaded with both black and white and colour films as well as an early digital stills camera and a video-tape camera. Contrary to these superseded technologies a community web project, titled ‘the final curtain PEC’, offered an on-line forum for the community to share recollections, recordings, questions and images of memorabilia. The response was overwhelming with over 120,000 views and comments within a period of six months. During this time, the public shared memories of the sleepovers for tickets, first concerts, performances and meetings that shaped their lives.
This exhibition, ‘In My Beginning is My End’, at the AUDRC, explores this in-between space of creation and destruction, of new media and old, of denial and acknowledgment and of official and unofficial histories. Coincidently, the building being demolished (PEC) and the one replacing it (the Perth Arena) are located on adjacent sites. At some stages the processes of making and unmaking seem blurred. This exhibition explores the contradictions of people, associations and memories that are embedded in this public space. In 1979, the stage of the Miss Universe event collapsed, the crown(ed) went down but the shows went on and on, each time reinventing the ‘spectacle’. This artwork presents a record, a partial text; a passing of the baton in an important and proactive cultural relay. Jon Tarry introduction to catalogue In My Beginning Is My End.
Jon Tarry, Howard Raggatt, Richard Weller, Paul Carter, Geoffrey London, In My Beginning Is My End, 2012, The University of Western Australia, Perth.
Twentysix Runways:
A hand printed hand bound hand drawn artist book edition of 70 was produced as part of the Pin up Project Space residency Arrival Departure, 2012. The book catalogues through drawings or airport runways and shirt fragmented texts a sketchbook record of the Airport runway project. It appears in this research catalogue printed in full.
Jon Tarry, Twenty-six Runways, 2012, Artist Book, Pin up Projects, edition of 70.

Abbreviated Exhibition History
31 Major Exhibitions selected recent shows:
2012 TULLA Los Angeles Centre for Digital Art.
2012 Arrival Departure Pin up Architecture design project space
2011 Reconnaissance LWAG
2010 Demarcation Project Karaki Istanbul Turkey
2010 Remember Project Dar Alanda Gallery Amman Jordan
2010 Migration of Ideas Dar Alanda Gallery Amman Jordan
2008 Smashed Two Goddard de Fiddes Perth
2008 Durations Lawrence Asher Gallery Los Angeles
2007 Smashed Goddard de Fiddes Perth
2006 Crossings Lawrence Asher Gallery Los Angeles
2006 Poll House Perth with Architect Gary Marinko
2005 Three Stations with Stuart Bailey !8 th street Arts Centre LA
2005 Walk Through LA Bert Green Fine Art Los Angeles
2004 Outstation Five OZCO 18 th Street Arts Centre Santa Monica
2004 One on One Goddard de Fiddes Contemporary Art
2003 Liminal Blues Icon Deakin University
1999 Open Space IASKA Kellerberrin with Geoff Warn
Public Commissions selected works:

2017 Convergence Optus Stadium

2017 Yagan Square Perth

2016 Elevacion – SJOG

2015 Bessie – Elizabeth Quay

2013 Fire Fighters Memorial Grove
2012 Screens St Marks, Finbar.
2012 Clouds City Link Perth.
2011 Sky Shard Canberra National Capital
2011 Naturescape Kings Park Masterplan and Entrance.
2011 Balancer Abu Dhabi
2011 Flight Paths Pretty Pool Port Hedland
2006 Horizona Horizon Hotel Palm Springs
2006 C Air Hilarys
2005 Marginale Fusina Sculpture Park Venice, Italy2005
Selected Projects Installations Residencies:
2012 Summer Residency Pin up Project Space Melbourne
2008 ‘Crossing a Greater Divide’, Helen Lempiere Invitational Werribee Park Victoria. 2005 LA Walk Through, 6 mth Installation, Bert Green Fine Art, Gallery Row Los Angeles 2004/5 Australia Council International Studio Residency Los Angles California.