Desert Bus Stop

Alice Springs / London / Vienna 2009-2010 / Public intervention / Paper sculpture (image©faksimile-digital)

 

Bus stop (Essay extract)

Bus stops are the places where we get on, offering a point for delivery and a place of surety. Michael Wegerer encountered a bus stop within a desert community in the north of Australia, a transit station; a space that embodied waiting.
Wegerer wrapped the bus stop in plastic cling film and using black marker pens carefully traced all lines within the structure, including graffiti.
The tracing became a pattern for the reconstruction of the bus stop, a shelter made in paper as a life size model, a fragile residue and a proposition.
Wegerer’s impulse in making this work appears to be centered on incongruity, the impossibility of a bus shelter standing alone in the northern Australian desert, capturing the parallelisms and convergences between land, shelter, ownership and reality. He recognizes that all visitors to this bus stop will see it differently and that the various visions associated with this work filtered through the Australian perspective are as complex as any language.
This delicate paper work is not a permanent construction and will cease to exist after a time. Wegerer’s bus stop is a momentary and residual echo, and a thoughtful ghost.

Peter Westwood
(Peter Westwood is an artist, writer and curator based in Melbourne.)

 

Related Material:

>> Essay (in full) "Bus stop" by Peter Westwood (pdf)
>> "Bus stop - the Story" origin and process (pdf)
>> Essay "The Matter of Change" by Michael Wegerer (section artist's writing)

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Exhibited at "Multiple Matters", Künstlerhaus Vienna 2010

>> "Multiple Matters" >online exhibtion catalogue(©faksimile-digital) / go to page 98/99
>> "Multiplizierbarkeit der Argumente"; Presseartikel, derStandard, 20. Mai 2010 (pdf)

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Alice Springs, Public Intervention, 2009