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SLOT20

 

Junyee

Separate reality   12 March – 15 April

Later this year SLOT will have been exhibiting continuously for 20 years. A monumental achievement that is being celebrated by the Delmar Gallery, 144 Victoria Street, Ashfield with an exhibition SLOT20, 25 March – 30 April. A collection of 20 windows previously exhibited in SLOT that opens on Sunday 26 March 2.00 – 4.00pm. You, our public are warmly invited.

This work, Separate reality by Junyee, is one of SLOT's earliest shows. First exhibited in 2004, it is SLOT’s contribution to our anniversary exhibition and features on the cover of the Delmar Gallery catalogue to the exhibition.

Junyee is thought of as the grandfather of Filipino installation art. He is celebrated as the artist who brought indigenous materials to art making in the Philippines. Art as an idea arrived in the Philippines with Spanish colonisation is 1565. 500 years later Junyee began his work. I once asked him if he felt that there was a nationalist thread to his work, as it seemed to bridge the vast period of colonisation? He replied with a thoughtful silence, several years later he said “Tony I’m not a nationalist, I am a patriot – I love my country.”

I think Junyee’s love of his country is at the heart of Separate reality, which considers the idea of skins. In the two photographs of the model Jade, a typically graceful Filipina

alternately dressed in the global uniform of jeans and a T-shirt, and naked, Junyee presents 2 skins equally true that speak of distinctly separate Filipino identities.

Unlike Australia the Philippines has a long and layered history of colonialisation. Before the Spanish there were the Chinese, then the empire of the Sultan of Borneo. The English took it from Spain for a while, they took it back then sold it to the USA, Japan took it from them, the USA reclaimed it before handing the country to Hollywood. Some Filipinos say there is no post-colonial era; rather, the identity of the colonial power becomes increasingly abstract. They are found amongst the “skins” that Junyee is referring to where he also finds a country that he loves. An idea caught in the manner of people, the look of a landscape, its smell, the materials on offer there and the spirit that such materials present when crafted as art.

Central to this is the fact- that which separates us is that which binds us together as variations of the same thing.

Tony Twigg

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 No. 4

Marie McMahon
Toxic Blooms

The Plague, a scourge that ravaged Europe during the middle ages arrived here as part of a global pandemic in January 1900. Rats from ships docked in Sydney Cove/Warrane brought it ashore where the authorities rushed to counter the contagion by cleansing The Rocks of rats. More than a century later, Marie McMahon has rendered the Plague bacterium, as it would be microscopically examined in a petri dish. She celebrates the scientist’s view and offers a historic counterpoint to the efforts of todays cruise ships, berthed at the docks of the same cove to contain the 21st century pandemic, Covid 19.

8 March - 4 April

Slot Projects

Slot Projects

 

SLOT Annex 2023

 

SLOT Annex is a 3 x 3 metre wall between 44-45 Botany Road that has been commandeered as an exhibition space dedicated to the consideration and celebration of the referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. The first  work, Yes yes yes by Pia Larsen has been installed and now the space is open to all artists who wish to contribute.

contactslotlog@gmail.com

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 No. 3

 

Celestial Rocks

Sandra Winkworth

Sandra Winkworth's work, Celestial Rocks, is a direct response to this place. During the haphazard early morning walks around The Rocks / Tallowoladah Sandra has gathered evidence of local domesticity, wildlife and of travellers of the day and of the night.  In her studio, your litter is fashioned into opalescent celebration of the vernacular.  It is the archaeology of now - of our being.

February 9 – March 8

 

Emidio Puglielli

Halves     5 February – 11 March

more on the artist

Emidio Puglielli’s work Halves is an examination of forgetting. It is an answer he says to the question, “what does forgetting look like”. And it’s a quest that began in his adult years with the discovery that he had forgotten the people and events of his childhood as recorded in a box of family photos. As much as prompting artmaking, that moment of pause proposed an academic inquiry. Begun at RMIT in Melbourne, because he needed to understand his making process, it has since become a PhD.

This quietly poetic work, Halves, speaks, without mediation, of a mood that defies articulation. It is simultaneously known and unknown, as Emidio says “the physical presence of an absence.” His art begins in anonymous photographs found in junk shops that have a single common quality- they were made in the late 1960’s and early 70’s, the years of Emidio’s childhood. They are scanned and reprinted before what we would immediately think of as the subject is surgically removed. Remarkably, rather than cancelling the mood of the photograph it seems to be amplified.  Assembled as a narrative that mood is maintained in a kind of cinematic panorama. In this language of images, mood is triggered by a multitude of known and lived experiences dominated by a nameless presence.

For Emidio this adult dance of half memory is a counterpoint to his adolescent years when as the child of Italian immigrants to Melbourne he yearned of forgetting. It would be an unburdening that would  permit  Emidio the outsider to take on the mantle of an Australian everyman.  

Returning to Italy as an adult he described the experience of many migrants who in returning “home” discover they are again the outsider because “home” like everywhere else has moved on. They are the prisoner of a memory that like the wisps of familiarity clustered at the edges of Emidio’s work Halves is all that remains of the past.

Standing alone looking at Emidio’s seemingly familiar work, I wonder, is this a lament for memories lost, reconciliation with what remains of the past; or, a celebration of language and mood encapsulated in a narrative of our time?

Tony Twigg

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 No. 2

GOMEROI ATTACKING MAJOR MITCHELL AND HIS NATIVE COMPANION 2014 - 2022

SUZY EVANS

As Surveyor-General of New South Wales, Thomas Livingstone Mitchell mapped his explorations of eastern Australia. In a style that reflects both Aboriginal forms of painting and western art, Suzy Evans represents Mitchell's encounter with her people, the Gomeroi, on their land in 1831. This meeting saw two of Mitchell’s party killed and forced him to return to Sydney.

January 11 – February 8

Chris Casali

Blue Note    1 January – 4 February 2023

 More on the artist

This isn’t what Chris Casali intended to show in SLOT.

She broke the news gently in an email – “I was in two minds…what to show …. I have been developing new work alongside my watercolours and thought to show a painting …Like most of my work it's abstract with hints to the land…Is it a problem…I've never shown work like this before… Hmmmm just not sure that's all and thought to write.”

Not being sure might be the prevailing state of mind for an artist. If so, becoming sure would be their aim and working out what they can be sure of would be what they do. In conversation Chris described it as her process, that is how she goes about making a painting. “It’s a slow revelation of detail that causes the work to be always giving and not predictable” is how she put it.

There are romantic edges to Chris’s process. She described travelling with friends through the Australian desert, of making paintings on the ground and drying them in the branches of trees. But mainly it happens for Chris in her studio. A room, like most other studios, more or less empty and away from most other things where a kind of meditation begins. One thing leads to another, which often enough seems to be an act of desperation. Because like a caged animal, artists will try anything, take any risk to realise their work, in a bid for freedom that remains nothing more than a half-glimpsed possibility.

And so it might be with Chris’s painting. A single sweeping gesture poured over a deftly crafted canvas that hints at details drawn in the landscape. Is this a rock pool with a crest of foam left as the tide recedes?  Or a kind of Xray of the desert she recently visited? A landscape perversely sculpted by water – driven by the same gravity that dictates the flows and splashes of Chris’s paint, applied in hope of realising sureness. It is however, whatever you see it as.

But how does Chris see it? – exactly as you see it here. Not the step before, or the step after that she might have taken next – it is this step that she is sure of. The watercolour on paper that became an acrylic painting on canvas that replaced her planed exhibit in a process, where possibilities are examined without predigest, is of course exactly what Chris Casali intended to show in SLOT. This is the summation of her process.

Tony Twigg