Robert Hawkins

5 December - 15 January      I don't understand what you're saying- that's  because you are not listening    

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Robert Hawkins’s abstract paintings look like something lifted from the 1920’s.

They speak to the works of Piet Mondrian, Kashmir Malevich, Fritz Glarner and Sophie Taeuber-Arp who along with others invented the idea of geometric abstraction as a kind of Modernism. That is, the art wittily referred to as the isms – stretching from Impressionism to Post Impressionism, to pointillism, Cubism, Constructivism, Futurism, Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism, and on to Conceptualism. It was an era when people expected to find confronting new art styles in galleries of MODERN art. But it’s different now; we expect to find confronting new art technologies in museums of CONTEMPORARY art.

In our contemporary world Robert Hawkins’s paintings offer something that his celebrated and historic antecedents didn’t – humor. It’s playfulness. It’s wonder, partially, why a collection of neatly rendered rectangles, triangles and lines might leave us smiling, even grinning at his glorious abstraction of sheer delight.

It might have something to do with the frames that Robert uses. While his impeccably rendered high art pictures are rigorously consistent, his frames are not, they are chipped low art discards that are incongruously pretensions.

Looking over my notes made as I listened to Robert speak about his paintings, one statement is repeated- “the frame comes first”. This is the reverse of the usual order, where an artwork is finished then a value adding frame is attached. 

In Robert’s case “35 years ago got the idea of making art while playing with framing offcuts - frames come from Reverse Garbage – the frames come first – they are a metaphor - frames because I like being scared of the outside – everything is done with the frame coming first – the frame is the home the work sits in – THE FRAME COMES FIRST – I don’t see it in a kitschy way.”

It is clear that the frame proposes the artwork to Robert. I wonder if our frames of reference leftover from Modernity propose the idea of art in this world that is contemporary with our being? Robert articulates this slightly cynical question by reversing the idea of value adding. In Robert’s art it is the painting that lends value to the frame, or to our outmoded frames of reference with such lucid simplicity that we are left delighting – even chuckling a little as his gently concise works are considered.

Tony Twigg

Jack Frawley

27 October - 5 December      Pandemic    

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Jack Frawley’s work Pandemic is on the money.  It fortuitously marks the resumption of SLOT’s exhibition program, which was suspended in response to the recent Covid lock down. Jack’s work was devised as a satire of “buzzwords”, invented to describe the paralysing catastrophe that is Covid-19. Words that have become clichés in our over popularised mass media. By identifying these “catch phrases” with jockeys’ racing silks on the eve of Melbourne Cup, the race, as the cliché has it, that ‘stops a nation’; Jack has poetically observed our Prime Minister’s much parodied assertion that Covid-19 vaccination is not a race.

It is probably cynical to wonder at our exiting lockdown just in time for the Spring Racing Carnival. Or, that international travel will recommence immediately prior to Christmas. But it isn’t cynical to identify our media’s normalisation of confronting situations by over familiarising us with the words, expressions and images used to describe them. They are rendered as clichés where meaning is leached through overuse, leaving us with only an appreciation of the expression's articulation as its content. This is the essence of news as entertainment.

The behemoth of our materialist culture rolled on throughout lockdown. We ate, drank and net-flixed our way through it. Now we are being coaxed from isolation and back into a “robust” consumerism, not through an eradication of the virus, not by the sudden and jubilant partying portrayed on television, but through an easy acceptance of what was once portrayed as perilous. This is the work of clichés, those so artfully identified by Jack Fawley that permit us to face the future of the pandemic “armed” only with a vaccine, the so called “jab”. 

Tony Twigg

The Kama Sutra कामसूत्र

26 September - 28 October    

The Kama Sutra entry in Wikipedia begins… “The text acknowledges the Hindu concept of Purusharthas, and lists desire, sexuality, and emotional fulfilment as one of the proper goals of life”. It discusses “methods for courtship, training in the arts to be socially engaging, finding a partner, flirting, maintaining power in a married life, when and how to commit adultery, sexual positions, and other topics.” 

Wikipedia also notes that the first European edition, self-published by Richard Burton in 1883 did not reflect the Sutra accurately because he revised it to suit 19th-century Victorian tastes. Similarly we might assume that any contemporary translation would recount the poetic passages of this religious text with reference to the rubric of our time. Conveniently for the present this millennium old religious code divides people into four genders, male, female, males who dress as females and females who dress as males. Accommodatingly, gender as self-realisation is counted among the goals that we might seek in life with virtue.

Here the Kama Sutra seems to question our idea of the sacred. Is the function of a religious code to identify conduct that has been sanctioned by a divinity for humanity? Or does religion codify humanity in a form that will be sanctioned by a divinity? It may or may not be a complex theological question but it is self evident that our existence is a function of an ancestor’s sexual desire. 

Irrespective of the moral limitations we may be imposed on desire, the images that accompany the Kama Sutra bring a vision of devotional calm to its articulation of desire. A vision that contrasts equally with the sexual code of 19th Century Britain and the sexual rubric that our society is currently struggling with.

Tony Twigg

Taring Padi

22 August - 3 October      Solidaritas

Link to the Collective

SLOT shares Taring Padi’s ethos. Like them our venue is the street. Our audience is the people who pass us there. And we share their ambition, to hijack your eyes and twist your brain.

Taring Padi is a loose collective of artists who formed during the late 1990’s in the highly politicised contemporary art world of Yogyakarta, the traditional heartland of Javanese culture. Central to their project is a strident opposition to the idea of art for art’s sake that they codified in their “5 evils of culture”. Here they identified the absurdity of government funded and therefore sanctioned, socially progressive art forms that purport to be critical of social norms. In contrast, the views of Taring Padi embrace the struggle of the worker in their artfully expressive political posters, made as un-editioned and unsigned woodblock prints that range in size from the modest examples exhibited here to billboard size. The artist is of no consequence here – the message is the single issue. Rather than lift a context free translation of these works from Google translate, SLOT offers a photograph of work with similar sensibility that is pasted on the building across the road. The struggle for social equity is universal, although given different names in different places. In these works by Taring Padi social evil is defined as the patriarchy.  It robs both men and women of their freedom, their labour and their sexuality. These Taring Padi prints were made in the first few years of this century. And in them I can't help noticing the plumes of smoke billowing from chimney-stacks. They seem to offer a sub-text to the various subjects of the works. Should those plumes be read as an expression of industrial modernity as they might have been in the 19th century or a cruel 21st century legacy of the patriarchy? Industrialists guilty of their workers rape first and our environment simultaneously. Tony Twigg

Jordan Stokes

4 July - 1 August      Changing Skins 

Link to artist's website

The latest Covid 19 lockdown prevented Jordan Stokes from visiting SLOT. His work arrived almost anonymously by courier. From his emails I can tell you that he “was relocated to Canberra for work recently” but little more. He wrote that by Changing Skins he means the  “endless processes of change underway in large cities…a component of their nature and success…a process that is never ending.” His idea supersedes the need for a beginning, an end and, perhaps, any celebrated high points along the way. Reason here is in the passage from one thing to the next. Sold to us these days on catch phrases like - new, technologically responsive, environmentally self-sufficient, and politically correct.

Looking at his work I notice the pediment of a building across the road. It’s a fine building, long ago the balcony was removed but all the while the paint kept peeling, as it has done while I’ve watched the Plane Tree grow in front of it. Skins, like most things around here are waiting, waiting for the developers and accountants to signal GO.

Jordan’s suite of photographs feels like a journey across town, a window, the new facade on the TNT Towers, a pedestrian crossing and a stairwell, too elegant for Kings Cross but the single fluro light is about right. There is nostalgia here that leaves the Joan Baez song, Diamonds and rust in my head, “Now your smiling out the window of that crummy hotel over Washington Square, our breath comes out in white clouds and mingles in the air, speaking strictly for me, we both could have died then and there.” 

But I don’t think Jordan has a journey in mind. There is no nostalgia here for him and no sequence to his images. It is all the same time. He comments,  “The atmospheric shift of twilight is a key moment in the city’s relentless change, when urban life adapts and people venture out to play and explore. Nightfall casts the city in shadow, when familiar views become disguised.” In the endless passage of the present moment there is only now for Jordan.

I can’t help thinking of the new Crown Casino at Barangaroo, that used to be the Hungry Mile and before that something like Barangaroo. When the time comes for the casino to make way for the next, will people cheer or seek the intervention of the National Trust?

Tony Twigg

                                                                                                   

Julie Green

6 June - 4 July     Two drawings 2018/2019  

Julie Green is not big. If you were to meet her you would likely think of her as a petite woman. Who’s eyes begin to sparkle as she describes a life that is anything but small.

From high school in the eastern suburbs to art school with time off in New York to study tap dancing and textile design. The bands, the galleries, on to Europe back to Sydney, finish art school to find a job working for Ray Hughes in his art gallery that simultaneously celebrated artistic endeavor and defied categorization. She went on to work in a bookstore before travelling across Canada’s subarctic tundra with Louis Nowra and Vincent Ward researching Ward’s epic film Map of the Human Heart. Back in Sydney she opened her own gallery, which for her became a meditation on verbal and nonverbal expression. There was an M.A. in art therapy and then in 2000 study at Charlie Sheard’s studio school that “made the bottom fall out of my taste bucket”. Since then she has been working in community art and of course painting and drawing.

Standing in front of Julie’s two drawings, it’s their size and the scale of her marks that is arresting. It’s big and Julie explains, “after 20 years of sero-negative arthritis a new biological drug treatment Humira gave me back my body”. That was a couple of years ago when Trump was in power and Sydney gasped under a blanket of smoke. Julie’s “fucked-up American flag” and heroically defiant tree are swathed in a celebration of mark making that revels in her new found freedom. She explained that she lay on the paper sheets first stretching toe to finger to mark her scale on the drawing. It follows that the arc of her drawn line is the arc of her reach. In this way Julie observes the idea that expressionist art is the physical measure of the artist while a reading of it’s subject is a measure of the observer’s intellect.

It might be a long bow to draw but in an art work there is a marriage between the artist and the viewer. Each arriving at roughly the same spot from different directions. For a moment caught in a single image before departing on divergent paths, each carrying perhaps, for a while at least some echo of their shared meditation. And so it is with Julie’s drawings.

Tony Twigg

Joe Frost

9 May - 5 June      Miss Universe 2011

Link to artist's website

Joe Frost's work; Miss Universe 2011 is offered as a compliment to his concurrent exhibition, Riders and Terrains, May 27 – June 19 at Liverpool St Gallery, 243A Liverpool Street, Darlinghurst.

This work, which possibly offers some historical context to Joe’s current show, could more exactly be titled Miss Universal. With her clear hand, her third eye and lumbering breasts she is more mother than candidate in a Miss Universe beauty pageant curated by the likes of Clive Palmer.

A T-shirt dropped on a chair salutes the masterfully painted figure. It’s the painter’s shirt - left as a parting gesture?  Perhaps as a kind of flourish, like a signature indicating that the act of painting was concluded and that the painting is now finished? Joe commented that he could see something cosmic in a blue smear on the right hand side of the shirt hinting that it may indeed be the universe that gave rise to his loosely assembled “mother”.

With that simple gesture Joe proposes a dichotomy. The apparent spontaneity of his painting belies its deliberate consideration. The fact that his freshly brushed marks hang together with poise and calibration is no accident. It’s the product of long and deliberate manipulation, which sits in stark contrast to the paint-splattered shirt, which is accidental. There is a truth in the accidental application of paint that the painter attempts to emulate. It is free, expressed without inhibition or pretence. The paint is, as they say, permitted to be paint and sit, with our reference to illusion on the surface of the work. This is more than truth, this is the Modernist credo that Joe’s painting ardently aspires to and in my opinion achieves admirably.

The dichotomy Joe indicates can be stretched to the myth of an all-knowing figure born of a Cosmos that is blindly random, as blindly random as the markings on a painter's work shirt. It could be Botticelli’s clam shell giving birth to Joe’s Venus but it isn’t. It’s an artist schooled in the traditions of European religious art making a connection across centuries between the flat iconography of pre-Renaissance painting and the modernist iconography of now.  And to know if this has any bearing on Joe’s current work you would need to visit his show at Liverpool St Gallery, 243A Liverpool Street, Darlinghurst, 27 May – 19 June.

Tony Twigg

Juni Salvador

11 April - 8 May    "Sit still and enjoy the view ... after Whistler"

Link to artist's website

Juni Salvador is a Filipino artist living in Australia. He came here with his family when his wife took up the offer of a teaching post in 2007. Since then he has “shuttled” between his family in Sydney and his colleagues in Manila, a coterie of artists who were taught and influenced by the highly regarded Filipino conceptualist, instillation artist and teacher, Roberto Chabet. 

All was well, then Covid 19 hit. Juni was in Manila and on his way to the airport when Australia’s international border was closed. His flight was cancelled. Then Manila went into lock-down. He was marooned in the small apartment he and his wife maintain. Roadblocks were set up between city sectors to control the spread of the virus. Juni waited it out, for months until an Australian repatriation flight landed him in Sydney, which is where he sat as 3 three meals a day came and went for 2 weeks of quarantine.  He had brought notebooks and pencils to make an in-quarantine art. However his life in quarantine became one of silence, of reflection and meditation on his predicament, isolation, in an immediate sense and more generally in both Australia and the Philippines.  

In Sydney Juni has made a number of installations for SLOT. Mostly they have celebrated his delight in Op Shops. Half charity, half bargain stores they recycle the discarded possessions of the “middle class” deemed “too good to throw away”.  As they say, “it’s a first world problem”. For Juni these shops offer a portrait of Australia spelt out in objects so valued that they are sold twice. Never would he remove the vital price tag that precisely quantifies the value of each item. In Juni’s hands these items become the landscape or as in this piece, the room-scape where the meditative consideration of his predicament takes place. It's where he sat, gazing across the carpet at an ever-growing pagoda of take-away food containers.

Juni drew my attention to the picture at the centre of his installation, oil on canvas by I.Martinoc (?) of a European landscape, value - $20.00. “Of course it’s kitsch” he said “but I like something about it”. And true, it’s hard not to be caught gazing at a far distant mountain almost obscured by the vastness of pictorial space. In the glorious isolation that this insignificant picture offers it’s easy to think that Juni found Australia as he gazed out of his quarantine hotel room. And as we follow his gaze into this distant mirror of our place we might wonder, will we catch a reflection or not of the observer, Juni Salvador?

Tony Twigg

Freya Jobbins

7 March – 9 April 2021      Firewall No. 1

Link to artist's website

Freya Jobbins is quick to point out that her work Firewall No 1 is part of a series. Each piece engaged with the “firewalls'' that people set up in public spaces to isolate themselves from community engagements. She is thinking of noise reducing headphones and the habit people have of scanning their phones that for Freya, says ‘do not approach me’ and now possibly also helps to maintain effectivesocial distancing. Her overriding interest is the mask, constructed from surrealistically disassembled body parts harvested from dolls. These works simultaneously conceal and reveal.

Freya was born in Johannesburg. Her parents migrated there from Germany and in 1974 they moved on to Australia, which handed Freya a life in the western suburbs ofSydney. After high school in Campbelltown she joined the police force becoming the first female weapons instructor in 1988. A brutal car accident brought her a second marriage, 2 more children and after they started going to school, the opportunity to make art. Now 55 and engaged in a vigorous and successful art practice in Picton at Sydney’s western edge, she commented, “I don’t make art to sell, I make it as commentary, to use my voice”.  

It is impossible to avoid the obvious connection between Freya’s mask and the Covid-19 mask that has replaced sunglasses as the mask of choice on Sydney public transport. Like the Niqab it 

hints at exoticism by focusing our attention on the unusually naked eyes of the people we encounter and offers mystery by concealing their age. Or as Saima Islam commented in a facebook post, “I love my freedom that burka and niqab has provided me. I love the way it give me courage to stand among all the other individual and be confident toward the journey of life.” Above all the Covid-19 mask provides a safe position from which to observe the world and the people encountered there. As opposed for example to the Venetian carnival mask that obscures the eyes in a manner that permits an evening of aberrant behavior. But as I consider Freya’s mask I can’t help finding an uncanny resemblance to Hannibal Lectors mask worn on this occasion by a young woman of clear and unmasked beauty. It’s a chilling dichotomy that focuses my attention on the events and concerns that are reconditioning Australia’s gender politics.

Tony Twigg

Jayanto Tan

07 February - 06 March      Mantra, I'm a ghost in my own home

Link to artist's website

Jayanto Tan’s installation, Mantra, I’m a ghost in my own home is SLOT's offering in celebration of Chinese New Year.

For Jayanto New Year is an opportunity for celebration. Indeed the Chinese character, Double Happiness that is both the subject and form of his installation is a celebration of marriage. In this case, perhaps it articulates remnant marriages and marriages yet to be forged between Jayanto and his many homes.

Jayanto is Chinese, although he was born in Indonesia, which casts him as a part of many sub-groups including the Peranakan culture. That is the culture of Chinese immigrants who assimilated the Malay culture and in the process established a uniquely hybrid culture expressed in dress, cuisine and architecture. Now Jayanto is also an Australian, a condition that he has wittily summarised with the invention of the Pandan Lamington, pandan being a Malay food additive that turns everything an optimistic green color. Here in the wide brown land a green lamington offers double happiness for sure. One can be found on the left in Jayanto’s finely sculptured ceramic, albeit rendered in monochromatic white.

Here it has been married with other delicacies into a wreath, a European symbol that simultaneously celebrates birth and death as the unity of eternal life.

In response, the Mantra, I'm a ghost in my own home has been deeply considered. As Jayanto observes “the thousands text of ‘Double Happiness’ could read as my mantra for future happiness…Perhaps there is no future!”

Tony Twigg

Adam Laerkesen

03 January - 06 February     Drunk on the Moon

 Link to artist's website

Adam Laerkesen’s arresting installation reads like a still life. It is set out in a clear theatrical manner that seems to me, allegorical. And Adam agrees, inviting the obvious question – so what’s the allegory?  To which he replies, “I like to leave that a bit open-ended.”

“There’s a drunken figure on the left,” he explains - I can see it sprawled across a lectern, drunk on prayer and wine,  “and a female voice, among the woods under a full moon” he continues. And yes there is a malevolence lurking for me in the form of a classically draped ironing board she-wolf, tensed and ready to pounce. Ridden by a cloven-footed tree ladder I wonder?  “No” advises Adam, “it’s just a hoof that I carved at the end of a piece of wood as a conclusion”. 

After a while our conversation turned to the mythological figures Bob Dylan refers to in his songs. Which left me wondering, when later that night I found myself listening to “Isis” on Dylan’s, Desire album.

“I married Isis on the fifth day of May – but could not hold on to her very long – so I cut off my hair and rode straight away – for the wild unknown country where I could not go wrong…Isis, oh Isis, you mystical child – what drives me to you is what drives me insane – I still can remember the way that you smiled - on the fifth day of May in the drizzling rain.”

Google the song’s meaning and you will read – “Isis is a mystery, and the story makes no real sense – it is just a set of irrational images without the sequence that we so crave. And that’s why it works. It tempts you to think there is a meaningful sequence, but as you try to grab it, it walks away.”

Or as a friend of mine pointed out recently, the trick to meaning-fullness is in the gaps you leave between things for the viewer’s mind to fill in later. It keeps the work alive and assures its relevance to an audience. As a method it took Dylan from speed freak rock star to Nobel Laureate and it seems to work for Adam Laerkesen as well. 

Tony Twigg