Rone is a street artist from Australia, specifically Geelong which about an hour from my hometown of Melbourne.
Time is a exhibition that he has created that is part street art, part installation, part immersive experience in Flinders Street station, it lives over multiple rooms it will be in multiple posts here.
Each will explain on the elements mentioned above.
Let's start with Time - Rone himself explains it as follows: Time is a nostalgic love letter to mid-century Melbourne and a tribute to one of the city’s great icons. It was explained to me by a curator as 'it focuses on those lost jobs and industries that generally done by females. It was inspired by his own grandmother who was a seamstress in nearby Flinders Lane.
So this inspires the first room, Although the building itself is interesting and has been abandoned for almost 40 years all of it's content is bought in, it is part of the exhibition, so it's a mix of murals (all of females) and machines of their labour.
Everything is placed to look like everyone got up many years ago and simply walked out.
Room two is 'mail sorting' for the made up 'Australian Transport company' with the first mural on the mail lockers (note the Victorian Rail hat in the basket and the clock - all clocks are set to 10 to 2 in the classic style.
And a very cool octagonal 'sorting into sacks' section and again a realistic 'Sands and McDougall' book of addresses
and behind the mail sorting boxes is the switchboard, complete with blinking lights and etheral music coming from somewhere inside it.
I can over state the layers of detail in this exhibition, the murals are stunning, as Rone's work always is, but the real shock is the environment in which it's in, ever tiny detail is right from the names of the workers on the call sheet on the wall to the fashion left behind to the addresses on the envelopes, You could spend hours in here (you are actually only allowed an hour and it's limited numbers so it never feels crowded)