As I walked into the familiar, immense main gallery space of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) I couldn’t help but notice how different it felt. There was a cosy, intimate atmosphere created by the colour that curator Shelley McSpedden had chosen to adorn the walls for Future Remains: The 2024 McFarlane Commission. The colour is called Imperator; derived from the word imperare meaning ‘to rule or to command’, yet it was the artworks that commanded attention, not the walls, and they did so with quiet assertiveness. The large scale works of Nicholas Smith, Kim Ah Sam, Teelah George, and Salote Tawale could have been vying for attention, but instead they seem nestled in amongst each other with enough room to breathe and assuredly hold their own space.

Though Nicholas Smith’s installation, a gentle hesitation between (2024) was the first I encountered in the gallery, there was something about Teelah George’s Perpetual Horizon (2024) hanging in the distance that caught my eye from the outset. From afar it looked like two painted canvases ornamented with metal hoops and large ribbons, evoking an image of aerial rings from a production of Cirque du Soleil. Moving closer, in awe of the sheer size of the work, I realised they weren’t in fact canvases, but instead weathered PVC coated curtains used on the side of trucks—also known as taughtliners—and the ribbons were, fittingly, ratchet straps. The faded curtains, replete with graffiti, dirt, oil stains and labels, brandished the marks and traces of their former life. Now in retirement, they seem to be looking back to their heyday, wanting to share their journeys. The thousands of kilometres they travelled and sights they bore witness to poised to spill forth to anyone willing to listen.

Whispers of winds howling past at breakneck speeds.
The stinging heat radiating from the sun and asphalt in the height of summer.
Of dust storms and winter gales.
Of vast, open plain vistas on long, lonely highways.
And the stars dancing brightly in the night sky, glinting and shimmering like the interloper hoops now attached to ratchet straps.

These straps, so accustomed to being pulled and tensed to breaking point, now hang relaxed and freely at the curtains’ side, only weighed down by the adornment of bronze. The precious metal that holds such an esteemed place in a Western art history canon looks completely at home dangling at the end of the worn and battered ratchet straps. An unlikely material union that seems to be the perfect odd couple, as George pairs their temporal and historical idiosyncrasies through marks that hint at their past lives.

The slightly off circular shapes hold the impression of the artist’s hand as they were formed. Squished and rolled by palms and fingers, each press leaving an imprint of the action in the malleable material, later translated into the warm but rigid bronze rings. This haptic evocation marries the invisible hands of the artist’s with those of the truck driver’s, each with muscles tensing, twisting and flexing as they bend these materials to their will. Movements that echoed back to my initial impression of the aerialist gripping the ring tightly, imprinting it with their own hands and fingers while gracefully swinging and spinning through the air. Hoops attached to the taut, straining ratchet strap ribbons, all under the faded blue PVC coated curtains of a big top tent as they journey towards a perpetual horizon.