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