Contemporary Art Daily
Now, a flow of Australians consistently arrive to the US every year with this new work visa, which is renewable, indefinitely. This wave of border crossers has brought with it one particularly interesting niche: Australian café culture. For Penal Café, George Egerton-Warburton has created a mise en scène café. The installation consists of colonies of chairs and tables; spaces of retrenchment and self-surveillance, where precarious laborers pay to work for themselves.
Part of the set includes two paintings that are inspired by scenes in history: the Lindt Café siege, and Degas’ Scene of war in the Middle Ages (1865). The café “tables” are like penal machines; sort of self-censoring weapons of war, replacements for men, or sex machines, that move kinetically and constantly. As if manifesting from the complicated cocktail of shame, pathos, and pride that makes up Australia’s convict-settler history, the artist has wrangled chairs, stools, benches, and some sheep, appropriated from Australian cafés in New York.
- Ebony Haynes