House

Overview

House, which is a collaboration between Robyn Stacey and The Historic Houses Trust, is an interesting kind of a show in that it has a foot firmly in the fine art camp and another in the museum exhibit territory. A sequence of ornate still-lives painstakingly composed of objects selected from the collections of Vaucluse House, Elizabeth Bay House, Rouse Hill House and Farm, the Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection and period-appropriate fruit and vegetables and flowers sourced from HHT and other heritage gardens, Stacey's photos work both as symbolic aesthetic creations in their own right and as evocations of the time and place from which they are drawn.

There is something in the meticulous labelling of exhibits at a good museum that speaks to my soul — the orderly means by which the same kinds and amount of information is provided for each item on display is immensely comforting. The Museum of Sydney always does particularly well at this, and there is a lushness of detail in House. The video account of the project, narrated by Stacey, the accounts of the houses, the captioning of the objects and the enumerations of the contents of each photograph all speak the of the historicity of the project as much as the works and objects within it.