Perth’s Time: Rone exhibition serves up a delectable experience

Boundary-pushing street artist Rone has worked leading Melbourne chef Guy Grossi to create an exclusive dining experience like no other.

Fleur Bainger

2 min read

October 11, 2024 - 11:19AM

Lifestyle

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I’m having one of those awkward movie moments, where a character stumbles onto a stage, realising too late they’re in the spotlight. It’s jarring, all the more because this trickery is entirely intentional. The dark stage, its 1950s silver microphone and the fan shell foot lighting are just like a film set: hyperreal yet entirely fictional. Achingly slowly, details emerge. Vintage lamps fade up, revealing a red-tinted jazz club of round tables strewn with mid-century gloves, handbags and beer glasses. Empty seats and a haunting soundscape convey an eerie time-capsule vibe that I long to linger in. Until February I can.

Time, the atmospheric installation created by the boundary-pushing street artist known as Rone, is a world coated in cobwebs (made using glue guns), a thick layer of dust (from tile grout) and peeling, wall-sized portraits (painted on rice paper).

Melburnians will know it from his takeover of the abandoned Flinders Street Station Ballroom. In an unexpected move – even to the artist himself – Rone (Tyrone Wright) has taken his work across the Nullarbor. Its new home is in the Art Gallery of WA’s Centenary Galleries, breathing still life into 12 rooms that had been shuttered for the past two decades.

“I’m trying to create emotion in a space, a longing for what’s lost,” Rone says. “Everything is made from scratch, but we’ve made it look like it’s been there for 80 years and continued to decay.”

He has added a few new experiences as Perth exclusives. The theatre stage I’m on is one. There’s also a micro restaurant and Prohibition bar, both created in collaboration with leading Melbourne chef Guy Grossi.

Time: Rone is a world coated in cobwebs, a thick layer of dust and peeling, wall-sized portraits. Picture: Supplied.

“It’s unusual for galleries to build different elements like this into an exhibition; usually we do education programs,” AGWA director Colin Walker says. “We wanted to make this more adult. There is nowhere in Australia where you can sit and dine among art quite like this.”

Since early September, a Gatsby-style dining room has hosted 16 people at a long table for twice-nightly sittings.

“Instead of people just witnessing the space, they get to interact within it,” Rone says. “It’s a bit like the VIP wing, hoarded away from the masses.”

Since early September, a Gatsby-style dining room has hosted 16 people at a long table for twice-nightly sittings. Picture: Supplied.

The four-course menu is designed to mirror the nostalgia on the walls.

“We’re doing things with a sense of time, and a handcrafted feel,” Grossi says. “Like the vitello tonnato. It came into my life through my childhood, taught to me by my father. There’s opulence, nostalgia, and love that goes into things that take a long time to make, which, if you look at the exhibition, you can tell the effort and the time that goes into it.”

The WA showing is likely the last chance art lovers will get to experience Time. “There are no plans for it to go anywhere else,” Rone says. “This may be the last time it’s ever seen.”

The exhibition’s new home is in the Art Gallery of WA’s Centenary Galleries, breathing still life into 12 rooms that had been shuttered for the past two decades. Picture: Supplied.

Aside from Time: Rone, what other art experiences should I see in Perth?

Perth has curated street murals via its Forgotten Spaces program; spot the gecko in Wolf Lane, the mirror off William Street and the Gooloogoolup mural off Hay Street Mall.