David Helmers

06 December - 02 January 2021     Thin Skinned

Link to artist's website

David Helmers is a thinker. He is a philosopher and an academic whose enquiry examines the nature of our experience of objects. Some of which are art-objects and some of those are the objects that he makes. They are simultaneously rigid and diaphanous, made from porcelain fused with a synthetic material and so light that they seem to be floating up from the floor into the space of SLOT.

The idea that connects David’s philosophy to his art is “New Materialism”. This he explains is the appreciation of an object’s intrinsic qualities as opposed to those imposed by the social associations it provokes. He illustrated the idea by considering an Yves Saint Laurent spots coat, you might appreciate it because of its fine tailoring or the entry to a particular social set that it entitles.

In art history this dichotomy was reflected in the high modernism of the mid 20th century when art abandoned ideas of illusion and symbology in favour of fact. The experience of these factual art objects was restricted to an experience of their physical properties. For example, 5 square meters of canvas painted blue hung on a wall invites a physical experience. BUT most importantly I think, that physical experience is more or less the same if the piece of canvas is considered art or not art. In this way art expands our appreciation of the physical world and leads to a deeper understand of it.

Since then the nature of art has changed. The need for narrative has injected a sense of meaning-full-ness into an understanding of visual art objects. In various ways we expect to be able to read them, which I think throws up the dichotomy that David is considering. Perceptively so, as we enter a post-Covid19 world where the comparative experience of both the physical realm and the mediated realm has been starkly and broadly examined. Underlining I think, the mission of SOT – to bring a tangible art experience to the street. To offer an art such as David’s that has not been mediated.

Tony Twigg

Carlos Agamez

November 8 – 5 December      Dust to Dust

 Link to artist's website

Carlos Agamez's work Dust to Dust documents his performance work of the same name. It references the biblical passage of life; from dust to dust that draws a poetic connection between the land and our passage across it. 

He identifies as a migrant but is where he came from of any consequence? He is here now in this land of many migrants where the past falls from our shoes as we walk, dust to dust. 

This show is Slot’s offering to NAIDOC Week. It is our observation of the indigenous idea that we can never own our land, it is that the land owns us. It is a singularly simple and profoundly alert concept that dismisses the sentimental nationalism carried here like dust on the shoes of successive waves of migration. And it’s an idea that Carlos reflects with a quote: 

This we know – the Earth does not belong to man-

man belongs to the Earth. This we know-

whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the Earth.        

- Chief Seattle The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell

It’s hard to argue with Carlos’s point as the world begrudgingly moves to constrain our climate changing carbon emissions. From dust to dust as we walk from here to there, the pleasure of that passage is all we ever own – ever achieve.

-Tony Twigg

Pia Larsen: Line of Sight, Last Words, The Gordian Knot + Charlie Cooper: Lying States

25 October - 07 November   Flagging

Four years ago Charles Cooper and Pia Larsen proposed an exhibition of playful flags to coincide with the USA presidential election. When they proposed a similar show a few months ago their mood was anything but playful, it had everything to do with the Trump presidency.

In the President’s self declared era of fake news the nuanced
art of spin was replaced with narcissistic lies. A cant, dictated by Rupert Murdoch and emblazoned with Trump’s idiotic catch cry, “Make America Great Again”, begs the question, when did America last stop being great? 

Cooper with his coffin and Larsen with her banners identify the two glaring issues facing the USA at this election. An inability to remedy or manage the Covid 19 pandemic and the racial and economic inequalities identified by the Black Lives Matter protests. 

Together they ask a deeper question, are we watching the paragon of capitalism devolve into a tacit civil war? 

Tony Twigg

Michelle Le Dain

26 September - 24 October      20x20 in 2020

Link to artist's website 

Michelle Le Dain’s work 20 x 20 in 2020 is her road to here. Not symbolically but literally, she is photographing the road ahead as it spreads out in front of her. 

An exhibition, One and one is four: The Bauhaus photocollages of Josef Albers at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC) that Michelle saw in 2017 marked the beginning of this project that traces the road and the various directional marks “written” on it. She described it as “photographs of the path – of connections that have disappeared”. In part a diary, but rather than recording daily events she has articulated her passing as formal compositions. As such this collection of roads is an epoch of travel measured in a suite of graphic poems.

Michelle’s own epoch of travel began with her birth in Toronto, Canada. Her parents moved to Staten Island, the next island on from Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River. An exchange program with Sydney University in 1988 landed her in love with Australia. Eventually she moved here with her Canadian husband. Two children and a divorce left her thinking that her principal regret in life would be to not pursue creativity. She enrolled at the National Art School. With her Masters Degree complete a residency at Workspace Academy in Connecticut followed, which is when she went to MOMA to see the Albers' exhibition. 

Her own collages are produced in the medium of hertime, on a computer in photo-shop. They juxtaposes graphic elements drawn from the real world that like the works of Albers make no references beyond the compositional phenomena at play on the surface of the work.  Here beauty is a matter of poise, tension and inflection with a long history that is belied by the graphic immediacy of Michelle’s work.

Tony Twigg

Artist Statement

Michelle Le Dain is an emerging multidisciplinary artist from New York who lives and  works in Sydney. She examines the possibilities of play, spontaneity and intuition as  means of a manifold visual language across the fields of video, photography, installation  and painting. In her ongoing project Roadwork (2017-) she reconfigures the ubiquitous  signifiers of the urban landscape, such as found street markings and road signs into  abstract photographic collages. 

Michelle Le Dain graduated 2016 with a Master of Fine Art from the National Art School,  Australia. 

20 x 20 in 2020  

Le Dain’s ongoing project Roadwork originated in 2017 while in the US on an artist  residency after completing her MFA. This project evolved spontaneously through process  and sequence. She set out on a 60-day morning run challenge to record and post a daily  observation on Instagram using her Iphone. The Josef Albers exhibition One and One is  Four: The Bauhaus Photo Collages (2017) at Museum of Modern Art, New York, was a  huge influence to this body of work in its playful experimentation, perception and form.  The project crossed over many cities and countries photographing road markings  including New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Montreal, France, Japan, England Sydney,  Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth.

Covid-19 has taken this project out of its original form, confining it to Sydney. These 23  select images past and current represent the connections and memories with what we  once had and what we are hopeful for again. Le Dain uses digital collage to experiment  taking her palette directly from the road. Playing with line and colour, she uses her indoor  studio space to engage directly with the outside world. She continues to find, follow and  photograph painted road markings in and around Sydney until travel restrictions are lifted. 

Michelle Le Dain

@michelleledain

Rochelle Summerfield

30 August - 26 September      Doomed Innocent 

Link to artist's website

Rochelle Summerfield’s work, Doomed Innocent evokes images of fish suffocating in billabongs along the lower Darling River at the height of the last drought, about 18 months ago when appalling scenes of fish carnage were broadcast on TV and YouTube. Since then we have lived through bushfires, floods and a pandemic in a sequence of events worthy of Dorothea Mackellar’s love poem to our land - My Country.

“I love a sunburnt country …

Of droughts and flooding rains…

Her beauty and her terror

The wide brown land for me!”

Mackellar might be speaking to those fish of the Darling and the Menindee Lakes in her next stanza –

“A stark white ring-barked forest

All tragic to the moon”

That blistering monument of dead trees was left by the great-grand-fathers of the cotton farmers upstream on the Darling who have rendered ‘the wide brown land” - green, with irrigation, with water, monetised by government, stored in private lakes of plundered Australian treasure and fenced off from the fish swimming under - 

“Her pitiless blue sky

When sick at heart, around us

We see the cattle die –“

 

The sheer quantity of fish squandered along the Darling River underlines the fallacy of corporate agriculture, the cotton farmers of Cubbie Station for example who seek to harness the landscape into a mechanised mono-culture that ignores the bio-dynamic necessity of a diverse ecology. Or as Mackellar put it –

               “An opal-hearted country,

A wilful, lavish land

All you who have not loved her

You will not understand –“

And conversely, all you who have loved her will understand Summerfield’s painting, all too clearly.

Tony Twigg

Anya Pesce

27 July - 29 August      Rupture

Link to artist's website

Anya Pesce says her art-work, Rupture,  evokes “the uncertainty and futility we are experiencing during the Covid 19 epidemic.”

She also explains its making process in detail. Since 2015, Rudi, who owns a plastic fabrication shop in Fairfield has welcomed Anya into his factory where she uses a machine that extrudes plexiglas, on this occasion beyond its limit. When the bubble burst, in a single uncontrolled action, the brittle sheet of plexiglas became flesh, with flaying lips, enticingly enclosing an orifice. It’s sexy. Like a sports car, a cocktail bar after dark and all the shiny advertising that preys on the biology of our brains, her art is visceral, with desirability that invites a new category – Pop Abstraction.

In conversation, Anya takes this idea further by describing the way her long education in art, at Meadow Bank TAFE, Charlie Sheard Studio School and the National Art School lead her from painting through installation art to the idea of making as opposed to fabricating, works in a single gestural action. And in that sense this work, Rupture would be the epitome of Anya’s work to date.

Reconciling the idea of spontaneous sexualized exuberance with Covid 19, is of course impossible, they preclude each other. But a meditation on it throws up questions about the nature of content in art-works: The content of a novel for example has little to do with the beauty of the printed page, however appealing it might be. In contrast the content of an abstract painting does not extend beyond an appreciation of its component parts however enticing it might be to impose symbolism on it. Needless to say it is difficult to read any art-work out side of the context of its making, its time and its culture, which unquestionably includes Covid19 at the moment.

-Tony Twigg

Rupture stands as a metaphor for the uncertainty and futility we are experiencing during this COVID-19 pandemic. When words are limited, emotions challenged and uncertainty prevails, a visual expression can instantly evoke a visceral response.

As an artist I obsessively search for new ideas, reimagining forms, shapes and colours to reinvent my work, while consistently using the same material, polymethyl methacrylate - acrylic.

During this COVID-19 pandemic, I embraced the stillness imposed on me during self-isolation, and was able to reflect on my existing practice to take the opportunity and experiment with new ideas and techniques.

To date my works have been made by my hand, manipulating the material with a predictable outcome. Rupture is the outcome of a shift in my practice which involves the use of machinery to determine the work.

In this technique, the material is heated and vacuum-suctioned via a template, which is simultaneously inflated and deflated with air, altering the surface. Mimicking breath, the material is challenged to the point of explosion, resulting in the work’s fractured surface.

Rupture resembles an open wound. In stark contrast to the forms typical of my practice, which are made with an impeccable surface. Here, a gaping hole exists, framed by shards of plastic that burst forward into the viewer’s space.

A tension exists due to the randomness of the fractured material framed by the external geometrical border.

-Anya Pesce

Lisa Pang

28 June - 25 July   CROSSING 2020

Link to artist's website

Lisa Pang (Lisa Sharp)’s work Crossing 2020 is an intersection. She describes it as being “emblematic of journeys we take, back and forth between places and positions.” It’s a meditation on hiatus and diversion at the behest of the unexpected, the accidental, and the unintended, which right now is Covid19. It’s also an exclamation mark sitting, with remarkable resonance where polarities leach into each other. 

Resonant of what you ask? And of course life is the answer. Covid19 intervened, isolating Lisa in Sydney with her children and husband, Jon, the Sharp part of her name. Her arrival here from Tokyo in March for a show at STACKS projects was but a single event in a life of labyrinthine crossings that began in Jesselton the capital of the British Crown Colony of North Borneo at about the time it became Kota Kinabalu the capital of the Malaysian state, Sabah. Lisa’s father, the Pang part of her name, had arrived there from China when the British North Borneo Company ruled it. He travelled on to Australia under the Colombo Plan to study Architecture at Sydney University and returned with an 8th generation first fleeter, Lisa’s mum, Janis in 1966. At 12 Lisa was delivered to Australia as a boarding school student - the antithesis of indigenous - the product of layer upon layer of “journeys” stretching across the era of colonisation that in Northern Borneo dates back to the Castillie War of 1571, half a millennium ago. 

Three decades later Lisa was a lawyer, married with two children thinking about art. She graduated from N.A.S. in 2016 and changed her name; she says, to Lisa Pang on the 1st of January 2020, not out of frustration with parenthood or marriage but in acknowledgement of something that had surfaced in her art while living in Japan - a leaching of one layer into another by way of a Crossing? 

It’s tempting to consider that as Lisa’s birth roughly coincided with the end of the colonial era, her work Crossing 2020 roughly coincides with the end of the paper era. Across millennia the paper scrolls of China coincide with the New York Times reporting the Covid19 crisis at the moment when paper makes way for the digital scribe. When the swipe of a credit card replaces the reverently tendered bank note. Her emphatic punctuation mark resonates with change that is as permanent as the leaves on the plane trees across the road. It marks the end and it marks the beginning.

-Tony Twigg

My practice centres on materiality and processes, which provide both the forum and the form for engaging with the visual imagery of geometric abstraction. 

This work, The Crossing is an ink on paper installation of two scrolls, placed horizontally and vertically to form a cross. It reflects on a crossing as emblematic of the journeys we take, as we go back and forth between places and positions. Paper, as a material is fundamental to the sharing of ideas and information and can take on many forms. It can be anything from a single written character to globally disseminated newspaper publications. It is ink on paper, black on white, enduring and ephemeral at the same time. While elemental, the symbol of the cross is heavy with connotations from the histories of abstraction and of spirituality. Presented here as fractured imagery, small squares torn from newspapers, it is an invitation to think about human communication and the material, visual means it manifests. 

Biography:

Lisa is a Malaysian-born Australian artist currently based in Sydney and Tokyo. She works across painting, drawing, installation and performance. With an interest in materiality as a source of meaning, her work incorporates everyday things and references daily rituals in an exploration of their metaphorical potential in visual art. 

Lisa Pang

June 2020

Suzy Evans

31 May - 27 June   Open

Link for more information on the Artist

Slot is proud to present Suzy Evans show Open. It coincides first with National Reconciliation Week and secondly with the re-opening of Sydney galleries following the Covid 19 lockdown.

Ruefully Suzy pointed out that the virus demonstrated one thing – how quickly our government could move, “with the stroke of a pen” as she put it, when the issue was survival. Aboriginal Australia hasn’t been so lucky. Now, while the past should never go without acknowledgement the future offers possibilities, of which reconciliation between the first and subsequent peoples of Australia is the most hopeful.

Suzy Evans is a neighbor. The Aboriginal Art Directory notes, “Suzy Evans is an artist working predominantly in painting, sculpture and printmaking. In addition to her work as a painter she produces a range of designer homewares and stationary under the name Modernmurri.” She was born at North Sydney in 1964 and lives mainly between Moree and Sydney. Another directory notes, “She was a finalist in the 2008 Telstra Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards”. Her Heritage Country is Bengerang, NSW, Boomi Garah, NSW, Mungindi, NSW and her language group is Kamilaroi. “Suzy Evans artwork, Night Skies was translated onto banners and light boxes throughout the Sydney during NAIDOC week” and her “inspiration for this painting came from a story told to her by Aunty Rose Fernando from Lightening Ridge. The story goes that the stars in the night sky, known as ‘twinkling stars’ to non-Aboriginal people are known as ‘Laughing Stars’ by Aboriginal people.”

Is it too cheezy to observe that we all live under the same sky? Perhaps. And turning to Suzy’s exquisitely collaged feathers, what is about them that seems precisely Australian? Is it their colour? Perhaps it’s the isolation of the feathers that Suzy describes as a whirling dancers? Or a connection these works on paper seem to make with the bark paintings of northern Australia? Perhaps they hint at a shared heritage, understood more as an emotion than as a narrative, something shared in a way that nationalism isn’t. That would be a reconciliation and one of our societies great achievements.


Tony Twigg

                                               
                                           

Tony Twigg

26 April - 31 May      The Absent 5th

This work considers the proposition of playing a work of art as one might play a musical instrument.

In this case the work of art is The absent 5th, by Tony Twigg. A collection of 14 puppet-like wooden forms, similar but not identical, which found a resolution in the form that is exhibited here. 

The proposition of playing this collection of forms called for then to be shuffled, evoking the process of a card game. They became a hand from where elements could be drawn and played. 

Each arrangement adopted by this puppet-like musical instrument that sounds like a hand of cards was recorded in a photograph. A sequence repeated many times that progressed from the given form, through a shuffling that was played out to a remaining single element or nothing. 

Like a single blazing note on a saxophone or a collection of rhythms on a kalimba these hands could be assembled visually into compositions and rendered as a score. For example-

The necessary photographs, 25 in all were printed out and the composition assembled, but would the result be a work of art or would it be a rendition of a work of art? Like the voice of the violin, is this the voice of The absent 5th?

Tony Twigg

Andrew Leslie

08 March - 11 April      Mirror, number 20

Link to artist's website

Like the work of many artists, Andrew Leslie’s art can be read in the context of art history or seen as the function of a lifetime.

His life began in Geelong. Moved to New York State, Sydney and Melbourne, to Wellington, back to Melbourne. Around 1973 he moved into a share house in Carlton with some art students, completed a Science Degree then enrolled at Caulfield Teck to study printmaking. After a brief stint in Bendigo he landed a job teaching printmaking in Perth at Curtin University where he noticed that his art was to do with “transfer and repetition”. Suddenly - it is easy to imagine each part of this work as a printing plate kissing its image on to the wall in softly reflected light. Given the title Mirror, number 20 you might consider the work an elaboration of a printing process and even wonder if it's the object, its reflection or the process involved that is the subject of the art work. 

In 2002 Andrew followed his partner to Sydney where he found work, teaching printmaking at the Sydney College of the Arts and began showing with Annandale Galleries. Then in 2003 he met Billy Gruner and within the space of a conversation decided to set up a gallery, the long-running SNO – Sydney Non-objective. “Non-objective” is art historical jargon that the Tate Gallery defines as – “a type of abstract art that is usually, but not always, geometric and aims to convey a sense of simplicity and purity”, which perfectly describes Andrew Leslie's work Mirror, number 20. A definition of  “an objective view” however, “is one that focuses on the object's physical characteristics as the main source of information”, which equally describes Andrew’s work and non-objective art more generally.

Here Andrew identifies a dichotomy faced in art, as it was across the 20th century by humanity and the idea of spirituality. This art, which ruthlessly avoids being anything other than what it literally is, articulates a deep sense of spirituality, of other worldliness. This non-objective art, born in Russia immediately following the Bolshevik Revolution and again mid century in New York City at the ascendency of Modern Capitalism, was born of godless times. Yet it offers a mirror, as Andrew Leslie’s work most eloquently does to spirituality, not of religious or political codification but of the individual. The spirit here is yours, you brought it with you and you will take it away with you.

- Tony Twigg

Guy Morgan

02 February - 07 March      The Scorpion's Claw Nebula 

Link to artist's website

Guy Morgan’s painting fits the spectre of the universe into SLOT! This ghost of light is the Scorpion’s Claw Nebula, a large constellation near the center of the Milky Way between Libra and Sagittarus, reminding us that this incomprehensible large astronomic fact fits into our mythology of the zodiac.

At the age of 7 Guy Morgan “discovered he was good at art”. By 18 he was enrolled in one of the world's great art schools, London’s St. Martins School of Art where he gave up painting for graphic art. At 25 he was on a plane heading for Australia when he decided to go into advertising.  After 35 years in the Oz-ad-biz and with worn out eyes he started painting with an eyedropper!

Another version is that at St. Martins School of Art Guy became dissatisfied with the direct connection between his hand and the marks he made. After travelling to Australia he enrolled in the Master of Arts program at the Sydney College of the Arts where he began painting with an eyedropper as a way of distancing himself from mark making– then an image of space evolved. 

Like the nebula and Guy’s biography, his painting invites two readings. One as a pretty good illustration of space that carries all the culturally imbedded information we have about the unknowable space it represents.  The second as a spectre of abstract art. A ghost of High Modernism, Jackson Pollock is a well-known example of artists who distanced themselves from the mark making process. Pollock dribbled and flicked paint from his brush; Morgan used an eyedropper, in both cases inviting gravity into the mark making process with the effect of encouraging the paint to behave as paint.  This paint that represents nothing more than itself sits on a surface that is flat. There is no spatial consideration– a fact that Guy observes in a traditionally modernist manner with a narrow line top and bottom, not a pictorial device but a consequence of the selvedge of the canvas. He reminds us again that canvas is a surface, paint is paint and art is fact, as space itself is fact, both known and unknown.

To offer a pun, Guy's painting is indeed nebulous. He switches effortlessly between the opposed belief systems that govern both his subject and the practice of painting.

-Tony Twigg