PERTH.- For the first time, acclaimed street artist Rone will exhibit at The Art Gallery of Western Australia in the historical Centenary Galleries in a fully immersive ticketed public exhibition.

TIME • RONE is an immersive art exhibition that breathes life into a lost era of Australian history.

Hot on the heels of Rone’s sold out and highly successful TIME installation at Flinders Street Station, Melbourne, Rone brings his signature haunting murals to Perth and AGWA’s historical Centenary Galleries, with new installations exclusively for Perth audiences.

AGWA Director Colin Walker said, “This is the first time the Centenary Galleries will feature an immersive experience and the first time they’ve been fully opened in nearly 20 years.

“TIME will be an unmissable experience of 2024 and the hot ticket for winter in Perth,” he said.

AGWA will take the experience to an entirely new level when TIME opens to the public on 1 July 2024 for a 3-month season.

The exhibition will take over 12 rooms, on both floors, of the historic Centenary Galleries building, each hosting immersive installations with visuals supported by a soundscape, created by composer Nick Batterham.

Part immersive art installation and sensory engagement, TIME will also include immersive dinners, a RONE store and a fully designed RONE-inspired bar space where visitors can linger amongst the art and dive into the RONE experience through several imaginative offerings.

“TIME broke all expectations with more than 100,000 visitors to the space for a limited season event in Melbourne. This is Rone’s only exhibition in 2024 and we know it will be an absolute hit,” said Colin Walker.

A multi-sensory installation excavating meaning from the everyday, TIME projects onto a grand scale the lifelong search for beauty in decay. Experience the historic Centenary Galleries like never before, as you walk, breathe, and live among remnants of mid-century Australia.

“TIME is an open-ended narrative – there’s no right or wrong way to experience the space, just trails that I hope visitors will pick up. People make their own story, and every person will experience it differently,” said Rone.

Rone said he has been captivated by AGWA’s Centenary Galleries for years.

“As a building it is a perfect setting. It allows me to blur the lines between my artwork and the building so you can’t tell where the art stops and the building starts,” said Rone.

“Just to know there is a hidden space that no one has seen for years is so exciting.”

TIME has taken more than three years to create, and several months to be installed at the Gallery. AGWA will partner with Tourism WA to deliver this truly unforgettable experience.

Minister for Tourism, Rita Saffioti said, “TIME will increase vibrancy in the community and provide entertainment to be enjoyed by locals and visitors alike, providing economic impact for local industry and jobs creation.”

The exhibition is expected to project AGWA into the international market.

Minister for the Arts and Culture, David Templeman said, “It is great to see acclaimed artist Rone bring this popular immersive exhibition to Perth, and this is a wonderful opportunity to utilise and showcase state owned infrastructure, The Art Gallery of Western Australia.”

Like all things, TIME is impermanent. But for a season, it invites you to exist in the same moment.

The exhibition will be made up of 12 rooms in the Historic Centenary Galleries, with expanded staging and a new room, exclusive to Perth. This is the first time the Centenary Galleries will feature an immersive experience and the first time the Galleries have been fully opened in nearly 20 years. The rooms will host immersive installations with visual and sound scapes. The visitor will be lead through the rooms using a storyline to take them on a journey.

Rone's work is a testament to the power of transformation, breathing new life into forgotten spaces and engaging audiences in a multi-sensory journey. With each installation, he pushes the boundaries of artistic expression, inspiring viewers to question their perceptions and embrace the beauty of impermanence.

The exhibition invites you to consider time and how it has worn away so much, with dust settling over the detritus. But through the peeling paint and cracked ceilings, life persists. Faces search out for something, for all of eternity. Ghostly illusions from the past meld with mirrors into the future. For now, they're all here with us, frozen in time.

From the mind of the ingenious and awarded multi-disciplinary artist Rone, in collaboration with stylist, Carly Spooner and composer Nick Batterham, the exhibition blends soundscape, mural, and installation to ask questions about what we leave behind and honours the otherwise forgotten.

Over the past two decades, Melbourne-based artist Tyrone ‘Rone’ Wright has established an international reputation for his distinctive large-scale portraits and hauntingly atmospheric multimedia installations – which, since 2016, have pursued an increasingly ambitious scale.

Through his sensitive, detailed transformations of derelict and forgotten spaces, Rone invites audiences to engage in richly sensory experiences that present intriguing fictional histories and explore the divergent themes of beauty and decay, materiality and loss.

His ground-breaking projects Empire (2019), The Omega Project (2017), and Empty (2016) have drawn broad audiences and gained international media attention, cementing his role as a genre-pushing innovator. Most recently, the site-specific Rone in Geelong (2021) installation saw the artist explore his signature style at Geelong Gallery in regional Victoria, developing a narrative that responded to the gallery’s collection and the architecture and history of the building. The exhibition also presented the first significant survey of Rone’s career thus far, charting his early stencil works and street art alongside photographs documenting his major installations.

Together with his collaborators, Rone orchestrates the construction of these immersive installations, reminiscent of movie sets. Every aspect, from designing the furniture to meticulously placing cobwebs and dust, is executed with unparalleled attention to detail. The result is an enchanting fusion of sight, sound, and atmosphere, as carefully crafted soundscapes intertwine with dynamic lighting sequences.

Breaking free from the confines of the traditional gallery model, Rone has embraced a path less travelled, affording him the flexibility to explore new artistic horizons.

Rone’s work is held in permanent collections at the National Gallery of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria. He is co-founder of Everfresh Studio, an artist collective based in Collingwood, Australia.