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