WFAC Engagement Coordinator and artist Shannon Lyons turns her attention to the overlooked systems and spaces surrounding cultural life in her major mid-career survey at PICA.
In her artistic practice, Shannon Lyons looks beyond what is presented as central and towards the surrounding structures – physical, social and institutional. She sees the same impulse in her work as Engagement Coordinator at Walyalup Fremantle Arts Centre.
At WFAC, Lyons develops public programs around exhibitions, often finding her entry point at their periphery rather than through their most prominent pieces or obvious themes.
“I always look around the corners or the edges,” she says. “I’m kind of predisposed to looking at things that other people might miss, disregard or find uninteresting. It’s funny that my career has run in parallel to that impulse – I’m working with the stuff on the side.”
That impulse is also at the centre of Café coming soon, Lyons’ major mid-career survey opening at PICA this October. The survey spans two decades of her site-responsive practice.
Lyons’ earliest works focused on the back rooms of galleries and studios: storerooms, workshops and places where artworks were packed or produced. As she spent more time working in galleries and installation teams, her attention shifted into the exhibition space. She remained focused, however, on what audiences were not expected to notice: architecture, functional fittings, maintenance work and institutional systems designed to recede behind the art.
“It’s not a contrarian impulse,” she says. “It is just about saying, ‘Have you noticed this? Because I’ve noticed this. Isn’t that strange or interesting?’”
While the materials and forms in Lyons’ work have not changed dramatically, the ideas surrounding them have accumulated. She compares this development to the Japanese game Katamari, in which a character rolls a small object through the world, gathering material until it becomes enormous.
“My practice has developed, but my work still begins at the same kernel,” she says. “It has become this bigger thing, which is full of all these different impulses and ideas swirling around. But at its core, it has always been the same.”
In Café coming soon, those ideas extend to hospitality, service, labour and the increasingly managed experience of visiting a gallery. Lyons draws on the familiar language of cafés, kitchens and showrooms: environments that offer comfort while also directing how people move, behave and engage.
One installation will be functional: two IKEA kitchenettes equipped with urns, instant coffee, sugar, milk and small fridges. Visitors can make coffee and carry it through the exhibition. Lyons calls it an “institutionalised offering”, recalling the self-service coffee found in hospitals, mechanics’ waiting rooms and other spaces where hospitality has been standardised.
Yet her environments never settle into seamless replicas. Things are slightly misaligned, impractical or unexpectedly strange. Small failures and absurd details interrupt their polished surfaces, exposing the labour and systems beneath them.
The works will also be installed closely together, so no installation can be viewed or photographed without another entering the frame. Lyons describes this as “photobombing”, disrupting the clean, isolated view audiences might expect.
Like Lyons’ work at WFAC, the exhibition begins with what appears peripheral, asking what exists around the edges of a cultural experience and what becomes visible when a familiar system stops functioning as expected.
Café coming soon opens at PICA on Saturday 17 October.
