“Visitors have been really touched by the work,” says Carly Spooner. “There have been tears. The layering of the murals, the set building, the set dressing, the music and the lighting – [it] just really transports people.”
Spooner is the lead set decorator on Time, the huge new transportive exhibition by Rone, aka Melbourne street artist Tyrone Wright. Spanning much of Flinders Street Station’s long-disused third floor, Time cleverly riffs on its title by inviting the public into a secretive, multi-room exhibition that feels both intimately familiar and unsettlingly out of step with modern life.
“We’ve created all these different little stories in the rooms,” says Spooner, who is also the co-director and creative lead for The Establishment Studios, a boutique photography studio in Fitzroy. She first worked with Rone on 2017’s The Omega Project, which saw a condemned house in Alphington be reimagined with the memories of those who might’ve lived there, using nostalgic artifacts like old crockery and decaying wallpaper left wilting under the gaze of Rone’s signature paintings of beatific female faces.
“He’ll provide a creative brief and I’ll interpret it through objects and furnishings,” says Spooner of her typical involvement in Rone’s elaborate process. “With Time, I gathered lots of references for furniture from the 1950s. I chose the materials and how they needed to be painted, Other collaborators built and painted a variety of objects. It’s quite involved. It’s a lot of collaborating with the team and then actually dressing the set.”
Snaking through the building’s long passageways and dim rooms, the Time set conjures dusty evocations of suburban places receding to the edge of memory: a library, a classroom, an office, a pharmacy. Each appears forgotten and overcome, overseen only by Rone’s haunting murals of muse Teresa Oman. Ivy winds through a glasshouse. Books spill on the floor. A subtle room-by-room soundtrack by composer Nick Batterham – including via a gramophone playing in the ballroom – lends an eerie grace to each scene.
Despite production on the project beginning in 2019 and a build lasting 18 months, the team had just four months to install the mammoth project ahead of its October 2022 opening. The process involved creating each room and then dressing the set, which was then photographed to become Rone’s completed artwork. From there, each scene went through a re-setting process to ensure it was suitable and accessible for visitors.
Though the finished work is attributed to Rone, Spooner says the shape of Time’s grand narrative – and the objects used to tell it – were built by the entire team of collaborators. “Because we have control over the story, it’s not as specific as sourcing particular products for an advertising shoot,” says Spooner of creating each mise-en-scene . “A lot of it you can find at markets, country op shops and Facebook Marketplace.”
Anything that couldn’t be sourced was either built from scratch or otherwise recreated. The library, for example, was just an empty room before Rone’s team got started. “We [installed] the floors and all the shelving,” says Spooner. “The only thing you can see that’s original is the corrugated roof. We had all of the books made and then introduced some real books as well.”
The Time experience extends beyond the station location via complementary experiences presented alongside the main exhibition. Located on Flinders Street opposite Degraves Street, The Newsagency reproduces an abandoned storefront – complete with newspapers and magazines strewn about. The same space houses The Mixed Business Store, a gift shop showcasing local underground artists. And around the corner at The Arts Centre, a tableau of Rone’s 2021 Geelong piece, Without Darkness There is No Light is on public display from mid-December through February.
The end project stands as both a tribute to its makers’ vision, skill and tenacity, as well as simply a vehicle to transport viewers. “I like the idea of someone stepping into a space,” says Spooner, “and forgetting where they are.”
Time is open now and runs until April 2023. See more details and purchase tickets.
This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Rone.
