Simon Pericich

Born 1980, Geraldton, Western Australia

Simon Pericich is engaged with proving truth through lack of ability, by making something so ordinary it must be real. If only you could see how much I need you (2002) made in collaboration with artist Thea Costantino, is a life–size caravan fitted out with the casual objects generic to ordinary Australians on holiday. It is made completely from cardboard, held together with tape and painted to match a scuzzy reality, including shiny Mission Brown woodwork. Though ambitious in its scale and detail, the artwork is not ingenious but poignant.

Some of the objects shown, the willow pattern crockery, the Golden Circle can of tinned fruit, hark back to earlier decades but even in today's cosmopolitan Australia these home items remain pretty much the same. It is timely, in a global sense, that it is poverty – a fairly uncommon topic for art – that is referenced most strongly in this work, for it is poverty that 'lives' rather than 'stays' in a caravan, and it is homeless people who use cardboard to make shelter.

Stephanie Radokfrom her Samstag catalogue essay, The Point of Knowing
 
2003 Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship
2003 Graduate Diploma in Fine Art, The Slade School of Fine Art, London, UK 
2001 Bachelor of Fine Arts, Curtin University of Technology, Perth 
1999 Advanced Certificate of Art and Design, Central West College of TAFE, Perth

Artist's website
http://simonpericich.blogspot.com.au/