Ghost in the Room
I will confess straight away: I intend to make trouble with this show. I intend to stubbornly distance myself from the eulogy implicit in its title, its texts and its very rationale, and in its place perform a different kind of ritual: the dispelling, or laying to rest, of a ghost.
This is no easy task. Peter McLeavey is present in spectral form in at least one of the exhibition’s photographs, as the half-exposed figure in a chair in Andrew Ross’s First floor landing, 147 Cuba St (with the original sign), 20/10/2001. And he is more than a ghost too. He speaks to us from a screen showing excerpts of Jan and Luit Bieringa’s 2009 documentary The man in the hat; and he is there, more-than-real in Yvonne Todd’s 2014 portraits, both titled . The show contains his handwriting in letters and journals. It contains his fascinations and attachments, his travels, his life story. It gestures at the depths of his being. It includes his fourteenth-century figure of Christ hanging in the gallery, just as it hung over his own bed. How could McLeavey not continue to be there with us in the room?
