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series: beyond the Pink Poodle looking for a heartbeat Vacant rooms, cement towers, fluorescent lights of every colour and long shadows across the beach. Close your eyes and all you can hear is the gusty rumble of busy traffic along the convoluted network of bitumen roads: small eddies washing between the high rises that stretch ever-closer towards the heavens. Welcome to the Gold Coast beyond the Pink Poodle, where the latest edition to this jungle of glass, steel and cement is the highest of the high rises, a glistening tower named Soul. Cal MacKinnon is a Lismore based photographer who spent her childhood living on the Gold Coast. During her late teens, however, she left the coastal city, only to return in recent years to a dramatically different place. Now in her late thirties, the high rises of her youth have been taken over by newer, taller, shinier towers and the old 1950s two-story motels, which once dominated the landscape and accommodation industry, are quickly becoming a thing of the past, lost in the wake of recent developments. MacKinnon’s exhibition at the Lismore Regional Gallery, Beyond the Pink Poodle, is a homage to these small motels. Away from dizzy heights, MacKinnon brings us back to ground level, and through her large format prints takes us through a number of soon to be, or already, demolished motels, such as the Red Lion, Silver Sands and El Rancho. The exhibition’s title references the infamous Pink Poodle Motel, which once stood proudly beside the highway with its pink fluorescent poodle sign and retro architecture, but was demolished prior to MacKinnon beginning her documentation project three years ago. In many respects MacKinnon’s photographs can be read as straight visual documents of these small motels. Captured in their last living moments, here we can see the mix and match décor or the almost empty rooms of motels so close to demolition, their owners are no longer trying to keep up appearances. Some of the MacKinnon’s titles would also suggest a detached, almost scientific approach to her documentation strategy. In A Room With No Soap, MacKinnon shows us through the door of a strikingly bare bathroom and in A View From the Road, she has stepped back to photograph the exterior of the building at night, highlighting the different coloured fluorescent lights that illuminate the entrance to each room. Other works, however, quickly undermine such a removed reading - rather suggesting a highly personal and emotive journey through these rooms. When speaking about her photographs, MacKinnon notes that they are not only documents of the architectures and decors of these motels but also records of the nights she stayed under their roofs. There are clues to her presence in the carelessly mislaid shoe in Sleeping Alone and the love heart drawn on the glass window in Waking in the Pool Room. In images such as Midnight Picnic, where she has laid out an orange peel and empty plastic food container on the garish pink motel sheets, and in Departure Time, where we see her sheets ruffled from the previous night’s sleep, we also gain a glimpse into the her private activities. While these traces of MacKinnon’s presence are scattered throughout these photographs, her own image always eludes us. In fact, we see no one in these pictures. In Departure Time, where MacKinnon’s room has the most incredible number of mirrors (they stream down the walls), she has even successfully managed to remove herself here. In her photographs that capture the exteriors of the motels, McKinnon has also made sure no bodies enter the frame. In this way, these images leave us feeling as if we’ve arrived at the moment after the fact: suspended in time after the presence of human touch. Of course, this is true. These buildings will disappear before long and what will remain are the towers in the sky. On the Gold Coast, we might ask, where has the heartbeat gone? Is it to be found in the glistening tower of Soul? Will it be lost forever when these transient rooms of yesteryear collapse into the ground? Or can we hear it here? MacKinnon’s photographs, with their lingering touch, capture the spaces and collective memories found in these old motels, and I believe, carry on the life of these places for now and the future.
Sally Brand |
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