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