SLOT Projects

SLOT ON THE ROCKS

Placemaking N.S.W. has commissioned SLOT to present a series of five windows under the title – Curated Windows - in the window of 23 Nurses Walk, The Rocks / Tallowoladah.

December 2022 – April 2023

Window #1

BEARING WITNESS

ANNELIES JAHN & JANE BURTON TAYLOR

Bearing Witness quotes Paul Keating’s 1992 Redfern speech. Written with Don Watson 30 years ago, the speech recognised the significant damage done to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples by colonisation. The Rocks/Tallowoladah is ground zero of First Contact. In this short quote from the speech, amplified as a neon light, the artists have created a personal expression of the hope for unity in the truth-telling that is happening now and is still to come. They, like us, are Bearing Witness.

December 7 – January 9

Photograph by Adam Scarf @adamscarfphotography

                                                                                        Photograph by Adam Scarf                                                                              

                                       

                                                           Photograph by Adam Scarf

Photograph by Adam Scarf

    Photograph by Adam Scarf

Anie Nheu

27 November - 29 December      Passing Through

Link to artist's website

Anie Nheu’s piece Passing Through is both an appreciation of nature and a consideration of the appreciation of nature in art.

It began during a holiday on a farm at East Gresford beside Allyn River in the upper Hunter. Anie was struck by the beauty of the landscape and the trees she saw. So much so that she began drawing them, on this occasion a casuarina on the left and a eucalypt on the right. Back in her Sydney studio and faced with the proposition of making something out of her time away for SLOT, Anie focused on her drawing.

In a pile of some-one-else’s thrown-out junk she noticed an exquisite Art Nouveau frame, a style that celebrated organic form, in particular trees. It seems to have set the tone of Anie’s piece. Lovingly restored, it embellishes the rawness of the Australian bush with an orientalist elegance.

Like a giant piece of ikebana, a tree branch cut and re-assembled for the window space offers a counterpoint to the stylised representation of bamboo that frames Anie’s drawing of native trees - incidentally it is drawn in charcoal, the burnt fragments of trees, and is pointing out that the paper is pulped and processed timber taking the metaphor too far? Standing looking at the finished work I found myself thinking how many ways can you say tree in art? Anie commented that she saw it as commodification. She felt that the process of art is to make a commodity out of an experience. In this case the reverie found in nature. Sure, it’s not such a big thing, but in the hands of an artist it becomes that.

This then is a meditation on our function in nature as much as it is a meditation on a couple of trees in nature. We commodify as Anie points out, we transform, process, consume and combust. It is our art. Our agency is vast and sweeping. We approach it with such urgency that few have a moment for pause as Anie does, to think widely while gazing at a couple of trees in a paddock on a farm up the Hunter.

Tony Twigg

 

Jan Fieldsend

23 October - 26 November     Flower Painting  

Jan hesitated to give Flower Painting as the title of her show. But she was quick to declare – “Imagine a world without flowers”. Her joyous description of flowers took her back to a childhood in rural New Zealand to memories of cut lawns, buttercups and harvest festival floral arrangements set up in her father’s church. Then she confided, precisely these flowers are weeds, collected – set up in a vase – as the starting point for paintings that celebrate the lightness of marks offered spontaneously in praise of accidents. She feels that her paintings reveal themselves slowly as they progress to a certain “rightness” that would be the perfect accident.

These “accidents” are only the beginning of Jan’s work. Her paintings are set within an architecture of paper that billows to the floor in a seeming reference to Chinese scroll painting. This complex tradition enshrines a spontaneous mark at one with the natural world in a structure that is more book than picture frame. Such pictures are temporal; they are to be appreciated from time to time, like a movie as opposed to being a permanent decoration on a wall as a painting might be.

Half-jokingly I asked if Jan had given us The Holy Trinity, the father the son and the holy ghost - but yes, this is the Church of the Holy Trinity and an observation of the Ellerslie Presbyterian Church of Jan’s childhood in New Zealand. An austere church where elaborate decoration is rejected in favour of a spiritual insight held in  the mind, by nothing more than the plainness of a vase of flowers? Jan went on to describe our aesthetic as a kind of religion and wondered if religion 

might be a copy of that aesthetic.

For Jan there is a truth in the materials of her painting and the accidents of their creation. It touches the imagined architecture of faith with nothing more than a vase of weeds. An offering that passes - that, delightfully can be thrown out when it has died while her works linger with a spirituality that is as light as it is profound.

Tony Twigg

Kathryn Cowen & Gareth Jenkins

18 September - 22 October  Future Nature

Link to Kathryn Cowen's website                          

Link to Gareth Jenkins' website

In 2017 Kathryn Cowan put up a show in SLOT titled #otherworlds. In her eerie sci-fi landscape, bathed in UV light, a gentleman calls on a young woman - a fairytale - where they both are wearing the fish bowl style space helmets of comic-book astronauts. It’s a tale, like all good sci-fi tales that begins in whimsy and ends with the bite of reality – a fairytale no more.

For Kathryn that painting was a door. It opened to possibilities leading to, as she put it “away from the element of taste”. She began making assemblage works in styrofoam, bent wire, plastic tubing - the simple materials that become the stuff of wonder in the hands of a prop maker working on a B grade sci-fi movie. On that score Kathryn’s inventiveness doesn’t disappoint. Her inventions appear organic, possibly from the ocean's depths? No, they are “Biomorphs- hybrid organisms made with a combination of organic and synthetic materials” she insists.

These assemblages are a sci-fi speculation on Future Nature where an artificial intelligence has reconfigured the idea of a plant to more precisely cater to the needs of a post human world. Some #otherworld - where gentle-he-bots call on young-she-bots in a never ending cycle kicked off by Elon Musk when he launched his first colonisation of Mars - perhaps.

Gareth and Kathryn began working together when she asked him to provide a sound work in response to her piece, #otherworld2. Now Gareth has provided a sound track that can be accessed by scanning the QR code with a mobile phone (with this post, click on the QR code to access the sound). Seemingly already science fiction, Gareth’s poetry has evolved into sound at his site, Apothecary Archive where he describes the watery landscape of Future Nature.

Of course it’s a fantasy - but it stands uncomfortably on a few toes as we watch yet another flood wash through, this time down the Namoi to Gunnedah and wonder at Pakistan where “floods were caused by heavier than usual monsoon rains and melting glaciers that followed a severe heat wave, all of which are linked to climate change. It is the world's deadliest flood since the 2017 South Asian floods and described as the worst in the country's history. On 25 August, Pakistan declared a state of emergency because of the flooding. By 29 August, Pakistan's minister of climate change said around "one-third" of the country was under water, affecting 33 million people'' Wikipedia.

Tony Twigg

Thomas Kuss & Bahman Kermany

14 August - 17 September      Two Paintings   

More on Thomas Kuss   More on Bahman Kermany 

The first question for Thomas and Bahman is why show together? The answer is simple, “we're friends, we like talking to each other about ourselves” and “yes, we’ve been friends for a long time.”  Inadvertently their show is a consideration of Islam in Australia.

Bahman’s Iranian mother grew up in an English boarding school. She married his father in Iran and when Bahman was 14 moved on to join her brother in Australia. Bahman’s father wasn’t interested in travelling, which has obliged Bahman to live a life of duality, shuttling between parents  and cultures. He describes Iranian culture and Islam through ancient poetry surviving across the ever-changing political landscape of Persia his preferred name for Iran, which he identifies as a colonial construction. His painting, the smaller of the two presents the image of Zahak, an autocrat drawn from the Shah Name - The book of Kings. An ancient mythological text that tells of the tyrant, a reflection he says of Islamic State’s contemporary brutalisation of Iranian culture.

Thomas’ Chinese mother married his mixed German/Vanuatuan heritage father in Sydney where he was born. He came to Islam through his marriage to Basma, a Sudanese, 3 months ago on the first day of Eid.  Her parents live in the United Arab Emirates within the oasis of Al Ain where his wedding took place, which is the subject of his painting. He is not religious person but went with his father-in-law and the other men of the family to the Mosque where he joined their ritual of prayer. And while praying he described the unusual sensation of his deceased father visiting him to share the joy of his wedding. Perhaps suggesting that in each religion there is an undeclared universality.

Against the clear certainty of Thomas’s journey from Sydney to marry to Basma, for Bahman the key to his journey from Iran to Sydney is doubt. In Iran there is no doubt. For him doubt is the key to free thought. Inadvertently their two paintings encapsulate the polarities of a religious understanding - the idea of maintaining ancient ritual and lore while assimilating it into a modern life. What is without doubt is the sincerity of each artists experience of Islam.

Tony Twigg

Suzy Evans

10 July - 13 August      Bengerang    

More on the artist

Suzy Evans is a descendant of the Gomeroi Nation through her maternal grandparents who lived at Bengerang a place near Moree to the north west of Sydney. She describes the dancing figures in her paintings as the representation of “the all of the Gomeroi people”. And her exhibition is SLOT’S belated offering to the celebration of NADOC WEEK, 2022, which we are proud to support.

Suzy is also a neighbour. She lives a few streets away in Waterloo. Coincidently her terraced house is part of a row identified as a heritage item by the City of Sydney Council in their recent rezoning of our area. Inadvertently they point to the fact that an Australia heritage is a faceted condition. Irrespective of our ancestry, indigenous, settler or migrant, in Australia we are part of our countries heritage, described in the Uluru Statement from the Heart of 2017 as stretching “from the creation, according to common law from ”time immemorial”, and according to science more than 60,000 years ago.” Concurrently as Australians we are responsible for and to our heritage that stretches from the beginning to the present and into the future.

In 1967, perhaps belatedly the people of the Commonwealth of Australia voted at a referendum to include Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islanders in their settler society. Soon there will be a corresponding referendum prompted by the Uluru Statement from the Heart that is an invitation from the Indigenous people of Australia to join them in what will become our country.

We must accept this profound invitation. It has proposed a referendum that will recognise the indigenous people of Australia in the constitution and give voice to their heritage in parliament. It behoves us to ask, what does this mean?  And the point is that we don’t know what it means yet. The point is that we have to invent what it means and what it means as Suzy Evans might say - to become the all of the Australian people - to stand at the next beginning of our culture.

Tony Twigg

George Alexander

11 June - 9 July      Naked Lunch    

More on the artist

George Alexander’s piece, Naked Lunch is an artefact of Covid 19. It is an exercise in idleness, in diversion and perhaps futility - a hiatus engendered by the obliquity two-week quarantine that temporally isolated Australia from the pandemic.

George and his son Blaze had returned from Europe, lucky to have found the flight that landed them in suite L2U6 of a Haymarket hotel where their day had 3 important highlights, the delivery of breakfast, lunch and dinner. All presented in plain paper bags left anonymously outside their door. The artist in George began sketching images on them lifted from the films he was watching on his phone. He would freeze a frame, render it on a bag, and then, presumably recommence his wait for the next meal. I’m not sure if it was a pre-meditated work of art or one that casually evolved but now each bag is identified – “Quarantine series George Alexander paper bag 32 x 30 cm” - it’s become a sort of haphazard diary and a work that contemplates the process of waiting.

Waiting, across the casual accumulation of time through the disconnected moments of forgotten considerations. We all know this, we have all waited for a bus in an outer suburb and know the interminable passage of idle thoughts, ever vigilant for a bus, lest it be missed. It is realised here in George’s work. Stretched out across the floor. Opened up as segmented and disconnected units where the “meat” for living has been replaced  with  the   thoughts of “existing”. 

And we have all known the pleasure of idleness. The suspension of need and responsibility in a careless void where dancing images flash behind our eyelids while our thoughts slide across the past and an imagined future with equal ease. Here is a record for that euphoria - drawn by George Alexander while he waited to take on again the burdensome mantle of self-responsibility.  It’s hard to think of another moment when so many people were given the opportunity to ponder metaphysics in such comfortable circumstances. And while it is rare to come across visual art made in these circumstances for obvious reasons I wonder what pottery and prose was generated during those various and many two weeks. They, along with George’s drawing are the artefacts of a glorious, luxurious, meditative moment in our collective rather than personal history.   

Tony Twigg

 

Annelies Jahn + Jane Burton Taylor

14 May - 11 June 2022     Bearing Witness

Annelies Jahn

Jane Burton-Taylor 

SLOT is proud to present this work, by Annelies Jahn and Jane Burton Taylor as our contribution to Reconciliation Week, 27 May - 3 June 2022. The work celebrates Paul Keating’s Redfern Speech delivered on the 10th of December 1992 in Redfern Park, only a short walk from here. 

The speech was a courageous expression of reconciliation with Australia’s First Nations people. It stands among others: The Yirrkala bark petitions of 1963, the referendum of 1967 that repealed section 127 of our constitution, which stipulated “aboriginal natives shall not be counted (in the Australian census)”, the Gurindji strike of 1966 that lead to Gough Whitlam symbolically recognising land rights in 1975, The “Mabo decision” of the High Court that overturned the legal doctrine of Terra Nullis (‘nobody’s land') paving the way for Native Title in 1993 and Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generation on behalf of the Australian Parliament in 2008. Courageous and humane as all these steps towards equality have been, it cannot be denied that they were slow in coming, shamefully slow in coming.

In discussing the Aboriginal contribution to modern Australia through agriculture, exploration, commerce, sport, literature, music and art, Keating declared, “In all these things they (the First Nations people) have shaped our knowledge of this continent and of ourselves. They have shaped our identity.” It is a point observed by Jahn and Burton Taylor with a lament also drawn from Keating’s speech,  “how much we have lost by living so apart”.  Here it is offered in the maternal voice of “Mother Country” as opposed to the nationalistic voice of “Father Land”. For here it is not a question of what we might harvest from our land but how we might nurture our land as a people lead by our land’s first inhabitants.

It is accidental that this exhibition also coincides with the 2022 Federal election where The Aboriginal Voice to Parliament is at issue. It is the next in the list of courageous steps that Australia must take towards nationhood, a step that Anthony Albanese has promised to take as a referendum held in the first term of his government. The voice was born as an idea in the 2017, Uluru Statement from the Heart. It is a hand held out by Aboriginal Australia to the settlers as a map of reconciliation. It identifies a shared future where we might comment - how much we have gained by living together. 

Tony Twigg

Kate Coyne

27 March - 30 April      Calm before the storm 

More about the artist

Kate Coyne is currently enrolled in the Master of Arts program at the National Art School in Darlinghurst. It is but a step in an education that began decades ago at the Sydney College of the Arts where she was as a graphic arts student. Along the way she mentioned a trip to New York where she came across an exhibition by Robert Morris that introduced her to the possibilities of art.

Robert Morris is one of the luminaries of the New York School of Modernism. A group of artists collectively described as “Minimalist” working in the U.S.A. at the moment of its ascendancy during the mid-20th century. The shared idea behind their often geometrically spare art lay in the rigorous beauty of works that approached a kind of spiritualism devoid of religiosity. These artists dealt in facts not illusions. The material of their art was nothing more than that  - their pictures told no story, they simply existed.

In that context Kate Coyne presents an installation of apparently organic forms of similar proportions clustered across the wall leaving deep troughs  between the elements of the work that some how seem more appealing than the elements them selves. Hooded and overlapping there is a sensuality in these forms that leads us away from the “minimalist” ideal - because these organic forms throw up associations with a natural world that exist out side the art object.

To my eye this work revels in those natural associations that are best perceived at close range. I find it appealing to be enveloped in these forms and the sensuality they imply. In that sense this is a work to be read rather than conceived of as a whole. It is a sum of parts that we might experience as we pass by its elusive presence. 

This work exists in the present - a present of imminent climatic upheaval. A moment when the by-products of our quest for a material nirvana threaten the natural order that made such a quest possible. Unlike Robert Morris, Kate Coyne is living through the fading hegemony of the U.S.A where the ideals of the material aesthete have 

been replaced by a kind of lament, from the academic poetics of post modernism to Donald Trump’s feeble call to “make America great again”. In this context Kate Coyne’s white on white construction of sheeting stretched across wire frames seems, decedent. Because it hints at an organic order devoid of the apparently doomed human construct, materialism?Tony Twigg