The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan was flooded when I walked through due to a storm the night before. The floor was muddy and the building smelt like wet dog and cigarettes. The Prada employees looked visibly distressed. The sophisticated mosaic floor and high glass ceilings of Galleria Vittorio aid the shopping experience, encourages you to drop a few G’s on something. Mosaic floors or harlequin (checkered) patterns fill most grandiose buildings. Churches, cathedrals, palaces. Connected to Roman Renaissance architecture, floor patterns began to filter down into public spaces as a way to signify status and luxury. There’s significant research on the floor and its impact on our body, just like ceilings and wall colours. The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) often incorporates an aggressive mix of all three in their exhibition design that you can never really get used to.

I’m thankful my parents discouraged my sisters and I from picking moody colours when we repainted our bedrooms. I had already discovered Lana Del Rey and hated sharing a room with my sister, so I was already a bit temperamental. It was noted that the colour in ACCA’s gallery one was a dark purple, not black. If you spend too much time in dark spaces you might feel depressed. Darker colours shrink a space. The walls feel closer. High ceilings are lush. They encourage ideas of freedom, more opportunity, feelings of hope, and supposedly more creativity. Which is why the dark purple paint on eight metre high walls in ACCA’s largest gallery is so funny. Intimately hopeful.

Joan Meyers-Levy in Context Effects from Bodily Sensations: Examining Bodily Sensations Induced by Flooring and the Moderating Role of Product Viewing Distance says we feel a lot more comfortable on carpeted floor; it’s like a cozy, good vibe. But we sort of become judgemental assholes on carpet. You’re likely to be more skeptical of a product if you’re viewing it up close on carpet, even if the carpet makes you feel homey.¹ But, at a distance, a product can regain some sense of authenticity. While Meyers-Levy’s observations about carpet are made in the context of marketing and consumer habits, its role in exhibition design does make me wonder if there’s no audience at galleries, just customers.

Corporate is so in. Office siren chic and job security. Almost like a return of normcore, but as an aesthetic not a protest. There is grey carpet, Leg over leg (2024), covering the entire space of Alexandra Peters’ work, exhibited in Future Remains: The 2024 Macfarlane Commissions. I’ve been dreaming of a nine to five. A sit-stand desk. A cup of tea, even though I don’t drink it. It’s interesting to think about Meyers-Levy’s idea of authenticity and distance when thinking about carpet in Peters' installation. Peters’ objects are almost all vinyl, a material that wishes it was anything but. As you walk towards the bright room with intensely white walls, Peters’ pipes appear real. As you walk towards the bright room with intensely white walls, Peters’ wall works appear like paintings. But then you get there, and it’s like what Meyers-Levy suggested. As you step onto the carpet there is a sense of fabrication, something made-up, assembled, or placed together to cleverly trick us. Peters’ large scale abstract paintings are screen prints. The vinyl pipes lead nowhere.

There must have been some sort of mass hysteria that caused us all to start putting carpet everywhere. As a kid, this was as good as it could get. Carpeted floors in some way communicated class or some sense of above and below, like mosaic or harlequin tiles. But maybe this feeling arose because most of my friends lived in townhouses, or freshly renovated houses with brand new carpet. Peters' body of work Breakneck (2024) is corporate and reads commercial and impersonal, which would be a read if Peters’ wasn’t thinking about value structures and hierarchies in the making and presentation of artwork. The Western painting lineage is now very corporate in a way. There was a certain emphasis on material and the hand-made, and a sneer at the easily reproduced. But like checkered floor tiles, paintings seem to have lost the intense luxury they once had. Tiles can now be easily printed and stuck on. If someone had marble tiled floors in their house, I’d probably be super nonchalant about it.

ACCA probably has a similar effect as Galleria Vittorio Emanuele. The high ceilings and polished floors speak of grandeur and are all encompassing. Quite romantic really. Peters’ utilitarian grey carpet and vinyl saturation of both the wall works and pipes offer a familiar relief from the spectacle of the larger space. An office, a townhouse, school portables, libraries, waiting rooms. A common area for those of us who haven’t been to Milan, even if it is unusual to long for carpeted floors.