Complex Simplicity

The Room Without a Roof
Interactive Space

A room filled only with potential, and white gallery furniture, plinths and blank wood painting panels. Given a packet of colourful stickers in random shapes what would you do? 

This question is being answered daily during the Complex Simplicity exhibition at Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery. Visitors are making their own artistic mark and adding to a growing number of stickers adorning the walls, gallery furniture and walls. Some add them randomly in surprising places, others combine the shapes to create pictures. A pipe smoking hand, a clown, several faces and a truck have all been spied so far. However these may not remain, as future visitors add their own ideas to what is already there.

Building on Yayoi Kusama’s Obliteration Room, Allsopp has explored what a gallery space might be like if the visitors were let loose creatively. The stickers are larger than Kusama’s and participants get to see greater evidence of their contribution to transforming the room. Colours and shapes from Allsopp’s paintings were used to design the stickers and as we apply our share, I wonder if we are being asked to replicate Allsopp’s work, or create our own? The variety of visible answers to that question showing in the room reinstate our faith in the power of individual creativity.

Images below show the evolution of the space during the exhibition 22/01/2022 - 28/05/2022, latest at the bottom.