The Samstag Alumni

The 2003 Anne & Gordon Samstag
International Visual Arts Scholarships

Rebecca Ann Hobbs | Anke Kindle | Maria Kontis | John Meade | Callum Morton | Simon Pericich | Samantha Small |

Simon Pericich is engaged with proving truth through lack of ability, by making something so ordinary it must be real. If only you could see how much I need you (2002) made in collaboration with artist Thea Costantino, is a life-size caravan fitted out with the casual objects generic to ordinary Australians on holiday. It is made completely from cardboard, held together with tape and painted to match a scuzzy reality, including shiny Mission Brown woodwork. Though ambitious in its scale and detail, the artwork is not ingenious but poignant.

Some of the objects shown, the willow pattern crockery, the Golden Circle can of tinned fruit, hark back to earlier decades but even in today's cosmopolitan Australia these home items remain pretty much the same. It is timely, in a global sense, that it is poverty - a fairly uncommon topic for art - that is referenced most strongly in this work, for it is poverty that 'lives' rather than 'stays' in a caravan, and it is homeless people who use cardboard to make shelter.

Stephanie Radok
from her Samstag catalogue essay;
The Point of Knowing

• The Samstag Alumni

If only you could see how much I need you 2002
collaboration with Thea Costantino
cardboard, tape, paint
400 x 200 x 210 cm
© the artist

If only you could see how much I need you (detail) 2002
collaboration with Thea Costantino
cardboard, tape, paint
400 x 200 x 210 cm
© the artist