Christopher Hodges

09 December - 12 January      I'm Dreaming
Link to artist's website

Christopher Hodges is a Renaissance man, neighbor, raconteur, tourist, connoisseur, motorcyclist, art dealer, loving husband of Helen and artist.

As an artist, he celebrates modernity with an alertness that embraces sensuality and wit. Modernism casts a long shadow in Waterloo, here the tall grey apartment blocks reiterate Le Corbusier’s fabled “machine for living”. Beside them Christopher Hodges’ graphic sculpture speaks directly with an understanding of history and an innate experience of now.

This exactly scaled work ascends and descends through a perfectly calibrated scale connecting a square with a rectangle that incidentally might be a slot before returning it to a square. It also conceals a light in a delightfully inadequate manner. By day a string or two of pearls are glimpsed, as tasteful as the white on white minimalism of the work itself. Across the evening and into the night it’s a different story. The work dips into the blackness of an apparent bacchanalian abandon to blazing red and green.

Forget about stop and go it’s Christmas, it’s go go go – go the Bunnies, and if you didn’t get it there are a couple of rabbits lurking about to make sure you do, “let’s dance”, and dance, dance, dance the night into light, the morning’s clarity and then the reason of the day.

This work doesn’t waste a second of its 24-hour cycle as it shuttles us from mood to mood. Sure it’s a perfect work but it avoids the singularity of perfection. And that is why Christopher is more a Renaissance man than a Modernist.

- Tony Twigg

Glenn Locklee

04 November - 08 December      Commute
Link to artist's website

Glenn Locklee is a mysterious artist. His conversations, like his urgently painted pictures are littered with insights and confidences that avoid facts. His pictures, like his urgently delivered conversations craft “snap shots” into deliberate looking abstractions. The mystery of course is how the artist weaves life into art and then weaves art back into life.

These pictures seem to begin with a photograph, a snap shot of an image caught on the run between one place and another that is rendered with the sureness and brevity of reality. The rest of the painting recasts that “snap shot” as a bit player in a formal rendering of the painting as an abstract composition. One section of the picture may be a detail of the “snap shot” another may be a meditation on a surface texture drawn from the detail while another is simply an area of paint applied to the surface of the picture. But the subject of the painting might not be the “snap shot”; it might be the passage of thought from one place to another place that is literally in the painting. This would be the fictional journey from an allusion of reality to a concrete fact, as truthful as the painting is real.

The passage of fact shifting through time is a device in popular culture. Simplistically it’s Post Modern Theory and in art history it is Cubism. This is the idea that a real-truthful-factual picture of something is an amalgamation of various views of it. Modern artists in Paris came up with this portentous idea a century ago. And in a physical and a meta-physical way it accommodates the “bumpy” nature of our universe where light travels, not in straight lines, but in board arching curves that invite the observer to simultaneously observe the observation.

In that sense, these graphically arresting pictures are a bit like comics that are parables of fact.

-Tony Twigg

Juni Salvador

30 September - 03 November      Fairy Lights and Fairy Fails
Link to artist's website

Juni Salvador tells a migrants' tale. Not of riches won or of disgruntlement but of a man who has not found a home. It is the observer’s tale.

He came with his family to a good and steady life in Australia, job, car, a town house and weekends in his artist’s studio at a corner of the dining room table. In Juni’s hometown, Makati a city in Metro Manila, his collage works are exhibited with a cohort of artists who are engaged in a protracted dialogue about art and anti-art.   Here the same work seems out of context. In response Juni has adopted the new role of observer, a position he has explored across an open-ended series of installations made for SLOT.

These works have their materials in common, second hand art prints sourced from thrift shops in the northern suburbs of Sydney. Re-exhibited as ready-made art, usually with the price tag intact Juni points out that our visual culture is what we hang on our walls. Like the artist himself his materials hover in a provisional space between belonging and not belonging. Discarded by their owners they wait for someone with less discriminating requirements and a comparatively smaller budget to claim them. For Juni this charity collapses the province of poverty and opulence into fiction.

Here the handsomely framed print, value $15, which by the way is attributed to Goya on the back has become the provisional context for a photograph. The image is of a homeless person’s washing hung out to dry on the wire fence of a parking lot. It’s a common sight in Manila where it is a function of necessity. Here draped in fairy lights Juni weaves it into his migrants tale, be that from the province to Manila or from the third world to the first world, it is of moths drawn to those flashy lights and the migrants' loss to their allure.

-Tony Twigg