Through sculptural installation, photography and sound, Tarry invites us to experience how technology and material alter perception.

Jon Tarry’s practice is grounded in the convergence of art and architecture in relation to the environment.

He creates art as a way of testing ideas, delivering innovative projects in drawing, film, sculpture, sound and architecture across the globe.

Tarry holds a Bachelor of Fine Art, a Masters and PhD in architecture and has undertaken innumerable public and private commissions while presenting 38 solo exhibitions across Australia, North America, Europe and the Middle East.

For more than a decade, he has sought to create new understanding, sharing his knowledge in China and America as a visiting professor and as an associate professor in the School of Design and Arts at University of WA, lecturing in art history, art in the environment, future making, drawing, art practice and design and research in geopolitical art practice.

Tarry now devotes his time to his arts practice, creating artworks from prosaic materials and structures - elevating them to conceptual, performance and sound works that blur the line between music and visual art.

Tran-sitations explores transitions and transit through space, time, movement - searching for connection in the external world. With extant, adapted and new works, the exhibition contrasts materials and methods, investigating how perception and viewpoints are altered by technology in a world that is constantly changing.

From rail to sky, Osaka and Copenhagen to Midland, his sculptures, photographs and sonic art explore ways of seeing, hearing, knowing and unknowing.

The exhibition is composed of several groups of works which operate in different ways; photographic records juxtapose mediums and perception, sculptural installation reference transitions, baggage, movement and mobility, an immersive soundscape takes viewers on a journey, and sculptural maps offer a point of connection to the world.

‘Eight minutes to Osaka’ and the complementary work ‘Eight minutes in Midland’, not only compare observations and experience of transit in different places but also juxtapose digital and analogue techniques to investigate how the associated experience is perceived.

‘Eight minutes to Osaka’ presents the urban landscape from a high-speed train using digital photography with full frame distortion. Compared to ‘Eight minutes in Midland’ which observes the Midland rail line from a fixed point using the analogue or ‘Jurassic’ pinhole camera and film.

While both methods record a moment or delay in time.

“The camera sees things differently. Digital is often presented like scans or data, but can still get it wrong sometimes. Analogue has a quality and character that digital doesn’t have, [but] digital is as fallible as the pinhole camera,” Tarry said.

“Just as photography didn’t make painting redundant…artists keep old technologies alive by finding creative possibilities in things that have been superseded, like Pinhole technology. One medium is no better than the other, they simply present a different point of view or interpretation.”

Tarry is well known for his combination of traditional mediums with new technologies.

His ‘Sonic Pen’ performances combine drawing with a high level of music complexity to forge connections between visual art and sound.

Performed all over the world, often in collaboration with musicians such as Dom Mariani, Joel Quartermain and Jon Stockman, a continuous loop responds to the nuance of each performer.

Tarry’s investigation into shifting points of view and connection is also present in his sculptural work, for example, his airport aerial views and ground markings are a form of land art, the runway acting as a physical point of connection to the world.

Through experimentation in technologies, mediums and techniques, this is something Tarry continues to do. Each group of works in Tran-sitations compare, contrast and blend technologies to challenge traditional ways of creating, seeing and hearing, revealing shared points of connection and that the journey is part of life’s continuous momentum.

Tran-sitations will be open and free to the public from Sunday, February 22 to Sunday, April 1 in the West Gallery at MJAC.