Margaret Roberts Everyone can be a site-specific artist (43 Junior Street) 2018 (pins. string, wall, location) in FERRET 2, Articulate project space, 497 Parramatta Road, Leichhardt, 2040, open Fri - Sun 11am -5pm, 2 - 11 February 2018.

Everyone can be a site-specific artist aims to connect the forms of self-expression that people show in the front of their dwellings with the artwork that artists usually show in galleries, through the simple process of documenting selections from the former in the latter in close physical proximity to each other. It addresses concerns such as the cocooning of artwork in gallery spaces away from the lived world, by focusing on more equal relationships between the two—proposing art exhibition spaces as lived space, much like suburbs are seen, and the frontages of dwellings as spaces of exhibition, much in the way galleries are used. It does this to give each space value in its own right and exhibit their differences in the light rather than the shadow of the other.

Everyone can be a site-specific artist (43 Junior Street) is the first work in this project. It reproduces the front fence of a house about 150 metres from Articulate where the reproduction is shown. Excursions to visit the nearby fence are offered to visitors while the drawing is on exhibition. The residents of 43 Junior Street have also been invited to visit the drawing of their fence in Articulate.

The short walk between Articulate and 43 Junior Street is offered to compare and contrast the fence on the street and the wall drawing in Articulate. They are the same size and shape, and both have a physicality because of their materials and scale. The fence also has a slight art-like, representational quality as its painted steel suggests a modular fence made as a likeness of the more traditional constructed and painted wood fence.  The wall drawing also has a physical presence because of its life-sized scale, and the shadows made by its tacks and taut white string.

Yet they are also very different. The wall drawing gets its main strength from its ambiguity, mainly because it is decontextualised from the environment of street, plants and houses. Despite being an exact replica of the fence in size and shape, it also looks like a musical instrument, or even a type of repeating-error, or just something unrecognisable. The fence at 43 Junior Street on the other hand gets its strength from the unquestioned normalcy of things in the literal world that invite little reflection (despite such fences also signalling ownership, respectability and so on).

While Everyone can be a site-specific artist is a new project, it also resembles past projects that focus on relationships between things in the lived world and their art-likenesses by incorporating comparisons invited by physical proximity. These include Saving Space 2015, Polygon Landscape 2013 and NO BIG COAL 2012.