With its doors shut, Art Collective WA utilised its Stockroom to still get art out to the public

Formed seven years ago when the global financial crisis caused many local galleries to close, Art Collective WA has now found a solution of sorts to another challenge. While the city gallery is closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the collective of 29 top WA artists has expanded and relaunched its Stockroom online site. Gallery director Felicity Johnston said the shutdown of galleries around the State had left many artists concerned about their ability to have their work seen or purchased. “No-one is seeing art, and the artists don’t have any sort of income stream or audiences so things are pretty dire right now,” she said. But while galleries are temporarily shut, Johnson said there was still a push for art aficionados to be able to glimpse artworks from the comfort of home. “We redeveloped our website about a year ago now and part of that redesign was a Stockroom and as we had been using it and populating it, we came up with easier ways for people to view it,” she said. “Artworks that perhaps never exhibited or were never in the show but that we think are worthy of being shown or seen are put on there, and we have also wanted to make the Stockroom easier for people to search and have more information about each of the artists and works as well.” With the gallery working as a not-for-profit organisation, Johnson said one of its main aims was to get the artist’s work seen by as many people as possible. “We want to raise the artist’s profiles and to raise their presence, and the only way for people to do that is to see their artwork…whether that is online or physically coming into the gallery,” she said. The gallery was formed nearly seven years ago after several of the significant long term galleries in Perth closed down at once within a 12 month period. “We suddenly had artists with long careers all of a sudden with no-where to show their work,” Johnson said. “A group of the artists got together and decided to come up with a way that they could do their artist run and gallery hybrid that would fill that gap for artists who had no other way on getting their art out there.” With 32 artist members, including Andre Lipscombe, Joanna Lamb and Tony Windberg, the gallery occupies a space in Cathedral Square in the CBD. During each exhibition, the featured artist is also interviewed about their topics of their work or their methodology to give audiences a deeper insight into their practices. “The interviews are quite interesting in that they are specific in the exhibition on the wall and aren’t talking about their entire career and are targeted on specific aspects of an artist’s work- a topic or their method of work…it is an archive of artistic practice in WA,” she said. Visit https://artcollectivewa.com.au/