Around the Block
Jon Riethmuller
Melbourne, 2007 / Looking Again, 2026
Melbourne, 2007 / Looking Again, 2026
Around the Block was created in 2007 while Jon Riethmuller was an undergraduate student in Fine Art at RMIT University School of Art.
The project brought together six students—Jon Riethmuller, Kristina Sundstrom, Annelise Scott, Sara Jane Sadaka, Pam Jackson and Evie Zib Aitken-Valtenbergs—each responding independently to the same Melbourne CBD block, bounded by Swanston, Franklin, Stewart and A’Beckett Streets. Their individual responses were produced as six artist’s books and presented together in a limited edition of forty-two sets.
This online exhibition revisits Riethmuller’s contribution to that collaborative undergraduate project almost twenty years after it was made.
Working photographically, Riethmuller moved around the block collecting fragments of the built environment: windows, doors, brickwork, stairs, laneways, bicycles, architectural details and glimpses of interior spaces. Rather than attempting to describe the block comprehensively, the photographs concentrate upon things encountered in passing—ordinary details isolated through the act of looking.
Within the artist’s book these observations were brought together as pairs. A window sits beside a street; a chain beside a barred opening; architectural surfaces, entrances and passages are placed into visual conversation. The city is consequently experienced not as a continuous panorama but as a sequence of fragments and relationships.
Revisited in 2026, Around the Block offers an opportunity to look again at an early work from the perspective of a practice developed over the intervening years. Recurring attention to objects, fragments, interiors and exteriors, and the bringing together of otherwise separate observations can now be recognised as threads that continue through Riethmuller’s work.
The exhibition preserves the sequence and physical character of the original artist’s book while allowing it to be encountered in another form: an object made in 2007, preserved within the collection of the State Library of Victoria, and returned to view through its photographic documentation.
The Work
Looking Again, 2026
Looking again at Around the Block almost twenty years after making it is an unusual experience. I recognise the photographs, but I also encounter them differently because I am no longer the undergraduate student who made them.
At the time, I was responding to a relatively simple proposition: to walk around a particular Melbourne city block, observe it and make an artist’s book from what I encountered. I don’t recall consciously setting out to establish a vocabulary of doors, windows, stairs, passages, surfaces and architectural fragments. Yet, looking at the work now, their recurrence is difficult to miss.
What interests me particularly is the process of selection. The camera allowed me to remove small observations from the continuous experience of walking through the city. Making the book involved another process of selection, followed by the pairing of photographs that had existed separately in the world. Through their juxtaposition, new relationships emerged.
I am reluctant to impose my current thinking upon a work made by an earlier version of myself. Around the Block was not made as an exploration of the ideas that occupy my practice today. Yet looking backwards makes certain continuities visible.
I recognise an enduring interest in the overlooked object and the fragment; in the relationship between interior and exterior; in collecting through photography; and in bringing apparently unrelated things together so that one image might alter the way another is seen.
Perhaps this is what looking again allows. The meaning of an artwork is not necessarily fixed at the moment it is made. Time changes both the work and the person returning to it. What was once an undergraduate project has become, almost twenty years later, another object within a much larger collection of images, books, objects and memories.
Around the Block remains a work made in 2007. But encountering it again in 2026 allows me to recognise something I could not have known then: some of the ways I look now were already beginning to appear.
Project
Around the Block — Jon Riethmuller, 2007
Originally produced as part of an undergraduate Fine Art project at RMIT University School of Art.
Lecturer: Julia Silvester.
Six individual artist’s books by Jon Riethmuller, Kristina Sundstrom, Annelise Scott, Sara Jane Sadaka, Pam Jackson and Evie Zib Aitken-Valtenbergs were issued together in a limited edition of 42 numbered sets.
Artist’s books: approximately 11 cm.
ISBN 978-0-9804046-0-9 (set).
A complete set is held in the collection of the State Library of Victoria.
State Library of Victoria catalogue record: Around the block (2007), Record ID 9924889193607636.
Photography/digital documentation reproduced in this online exhibition derives from the State Library of Victoria documentation of the collection object.