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

 

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

Tony Twigg

15th September - 19th October     The Idea of Subject
Link to website with artist information

Usually a picture is of something. It might be a picture of a person, or a building or a landscape. Early on the idea of a picture’s subject was complicated by religious art. For example the subject might be a person, Christ who is not a particular man but a symbol of people’s humanity, or a building, the Kaaba, which is not a building shrouded in black cloth but the essence of Islam. And in Sydney we have our own wrapped thing, the landscape at Little Bay packaged by Christo as an altar to our cult of contemporary art. We keep these images in our memories where they cease to be pictures of particular things and become symbols that stand for all we know about a particular thing.

The picture then is not of something, but is a something that has been invented. Often fashioned along strict guidelines set down by culture permitting our pictures to be read by others as language. For some a stick is a stick is a stick while for others a stick is a tree is a magic wand. However in either case the subject is made and then remade each time it is read, eventually becoming, a sort of mirror reflecting our understanding or lack of it, of the self, the enduring subject of all art.

I have come to think of this as the method of making or inventing art. It is the experience through time of making and remaking a single thing that automatically changes each time it is made. For example, the constructed work here was made in 1989, remade in 1997 and remade again in 2016. The process was articulated metaphorically, codified as language and identified as myth. Evolving in this manner it could eventually be reduced to pattern. There are precedents in art making of legible matters, for example the crosshatching or rarrking in Aboriginal bark painting and the geometrical arabesque arrangements of polygons in Islamic art and architecture. My drawings are of similar patterns. And if this constructed work could be seen as a figure, each drawing would be seen as a portrait or more correctly a visage, an expressions caught in ripples of time connecting the past with the future that are stretched, teased out and exposed across a present that is our now.

- Tony Twigg

Anca Frankenhaeuser

24 March - 27 April      The Wrapsody of the Daily Paper

Link to artist's website

Anca Frankenhaeuser is a dancer, a celebrated dancer and choreographer who traveled from Finland to London to dance with the London Contemporary Dance Theatre. And in the dance of life she found Patrick there who danced her on to Australia, as David Bowie sang, “Under the moonlight, this serious moonlight, lets dance, lets dance, dance, dance, dance…………”


Among their many projects, Anca and Patrick dance with the group Australian Dance Artists that works with the Australian sculptor and performance artist Ken Unsworth to realize gloriously theatrical works that merge the various arts into a single expression. For Anca another unusual thing started happening when she reached Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald began arriving, tossed over the front fence skidding to a halt on the damp grass wrapped in glad wrap.

The silvery plastic sheet could only be saved - wound relentlessly around itself - growing more substantial day by day. As Anca said, this isn’t plastic wound around a form; it’s plastic all the way through. As she wound, in an elaborate calculation based on a time / weight ratio, her winding became 2,375 days worth that is 6 years and 6 months of winding. Or as Patrick put it, “I watch television and Anca does this at the same time.”

-Tony Twigg

Stephen Flanagan

17 June - 21 July      No Fork

Stephen Flanagan. No Fork, 2018. Assemblage of found industrial blue prints on Botany Road.

   

Stephen Flanagan is not an artist.

He is a little cagey about what he is but he is clear on the fact that his working life started at 16 as an apprentice Instrument Artificer. That translates as, a mechanical craftsman who worked on instruments. They might have been, hydraulic or pneumatic or electrical, but they were all calibrated. They were tuned and they were maintained with the attention that a craftsman brings to art. For Stephen it is a bygone era of delight. Now digital instruments self-calibrate at the press of a button; or, don’t, in which case they are replaced in an economically rational manner.

In his own words, Stephen is “a discerning collector of useless materials” who came across a case of antique blue prints while exploring one of the redundant industrial sites along Botany Road. It doesn’t matter whether or not these drawings are art, their lines do a mindful dance in blue.  The blue print process gives them a legibility that rests in the blur of something that doesn’t quite become a photograph. They are mechanical, 100% in form and content.

“The theme is the demise of the manufacturing industry and the dominance of residential development” is how Stephen described his work. And sure enough the mechanical era is being brushed aside to make way for technology, in the relentless march towards a just utopia, a revised abundance of material benefit that is and has been Botany Road.

Along this march, Stephen, the connoisseur, found pause for thought in a bundle of drawings, meticulously crafted, judiciously archived that he has given the mantle of art. A transitory state where words like speculative and conditional remind us that art is not an answer - it’s a question. A sort of half way house between the stuff of reality and the stuff of museums where things can make it clear that it’s not only artists who make art.

-Tony Twigg 

Jenny Pollak

13 May - 16 June      Dictionary of Love and Loss

Link to artist's website

Jenny Pollak. Dictionary of Love and Loss, 2018. On view at 38 Botany Road, Waterloo.

 

Jenny Pollak’s work, Dictionary of Love and Loss is about language. The Dharug language of the indigenous inhabitants of the Sydney basin, which includes the lower reaches of the Hawkesbury River where Jenny lives.

Chillingly, the absence of that language along the banks of the Hawkesbury recalls Kate Grenville’s colonial history, The Secret River and the TV series of the same name that documents the xenophobic slaughter of the Dharug speakers.

Those people live in a way in the bones scattered across Pollak’s chairs each marked in language as a family group, mother, father, daughter, son. They live as a lament in a world that progresses inexorably towards a utopian global homogenization.

The uniformity of material satisfaction comes with it’s own xenophobia that silences the other as effectively as the Dharug speakers were slaughtered two centuries ago. Our bones might be added to Pollak’s chairs and shrouded there in a mist of language that speaks only of this place, Dharug.
Language is the tool of colonization. It’s the open door into our brains where the work of ours soon to be masters is completed. But while Dharug survives, and we are thinking of it now and in defiance perhaps, it permits a love of our land.

Tony Twigg

At the mouth of the Hawkesbury river, north of Sydney, lies a body of water called Broken Bay. Although I have often wondered what this bay was called by the original inhabitants of this country I think the name well reflects the violent history that took place following the invasion of these lands by the British in 1788.

The four chairs in this installation represent a family unit: mother  father  daughter  son:   enale  enalgun  beung  niae
 

Images of bones superimposed on the front of the chairs are superimposed with the very first map of the area to be made by the British after the arrival of the First Fleet and are a metaphor for connection to place. 

The words that form a screen between the viewer and the chairs are from a word list of the language spoken by the original custodians and inhabitants of this land.

 

Jenny Pollak

Adam Laerkesen

link to artist's website

11 March - 7 April       My Song is not Your Song

 

Adam Laerkesen. My Song is not Your Song. 2017. Wood bull head, anchor rope, painting on wood.

Adam is a northern European, born in New Zealand who arrived in Sydney, as a 15 year old via the Gold Coast, but that probably isn’t why his song is not your song.

Drawing, 9 hours a week of it was the basic training he received while studying sculpture at the National Art School. According to Adam it’s “a method of honing the eye”.  After a stint at the Sydney College of Art it was still there when his education gave way to the need for making. And it’s here. This is a drawing.

Adam Laerkesen. My Song is not Your Song. 2017.

Hearing Adam talk about his work is like listening to a detailed discussion about the function of drawing: “always about taking inanimate forms and animating them”; “try not to make it about the self, to make it about the other”; “keep it open ended”; “suspend logic as a way of holding the viewer to the work”.

We must look and look again at this precariously attractive image that is drawn from intuition.  There is no plan here. History is little more than a license to practice assemblage. Intuition for Adam is filtered through daydreams. He describes states of mind at the edge of sleep, when in tiredness dreams flash across our eyes and the space between waking and the assertion of consciousness. “It mirrors the narrative of found objects, which have lost their function and are in the process of finding a new one.”

A key to the work is the yellow painting in the top left had corner.  Visually it’s a crucial element that Adam says was painted by his son, playfully in his studio somewhere in the past. For Adam, it offers fatherhood as a premise for the work, “the camel trying to pass through the needle's eye” as Adam comments in a fractured metaphor that draws the melancholy on a quest for innocence.

Tony Twigg

 

Marlene Sarroff

8 February - 11 March      You Get What You Choose : 365 Day Instagram Project

Marlene Sarroff. You Get What You Choose, 2016-2017. Assemblages of Found Objects.

These works are a small collection of a much larger collection of 365 works, the product of a disciplined daily practice of making an artwork, photographing it and posting it on Instagram. The work is a combination of Social Media, Technology, and Art.

Marlene Sarroff. You Get What You Choose. 2017. Assemblages of found objects

The work is made from a diverse range of found things. It is an investigation of the ordinary from the perspective of the "found" be it the rejected, the disposable, the temporary or forgotten objects that are intrinsically part of this creative process. All discovered things create vital possibilities that are transcended through a daily practice of living the everyday aesthetically.

Most important is allowing spontaneity, freedom, chance encounters and the unexpected as well as  meeting the demands  of a daily practice of  being vitally alert. What transpires in making the work is  accidentally miraculous, an engagement with a new kind of anthropology, an immersion in the pleasures of popular culture, or a meditation on what happens unexpectedly. 

It simply is a means of seeing everyday objects in a new light. As Henri Lefebvre, a theorist on this subject, notes the "concept of everydayness (can) reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary.  At a philosophical level the celebration of the everyday has oppositional and dissident overtones, offering a voice to the silenced and proposing possibilities for change. 

Instagram, is an important component in the creation of this project. Posting the work daily creates another aspect of showing  art  by presenting the Project to an  audience that can see and follow as the Project evolves over 365 Days.  Each day is different and presents a spontaneous creation pertaining to the day of the artist.Instagram is contributing to the Project as the works will be installed in the gallery space (future)  in the same order as posted on Instagram.  The idea of having an instant viewing audience daily is inspirational for the artist and propels the work to continually be created and shared. The artist is assessing the overall look as the work evolves. Each day photographing the work and to ensure a good image, prior to posting is paramount.

Marlene Sarroff

https://www.instagram.com/marlenesarroffstudio

Beginning of Marlene Sarroff's installation of 'You Get What You Choose'.      

Marlene's thoughts on her process in assemblages of found objects made an impression on me in how, through art practice, aesthetics can be used as a vehicle for mindful living in our daily lives. Through finding the manufactured discards and mindful personal response,  creative process takes place using simple assembling of disparate found pieces.   This body of work follows a strict parameter as described in Marlene's text.  In this process, this project has humbly and deeply encapsulated art practice as an ethos for life lived in a mindful way.

Visually, the artworks exemplify art making incorporating materials with trace of the 'intelligence of manufacturing' with technologies of our time.  It is important for Marlene that the found materials are not 'interfered with'.  The integrity of the found materials is to be kept intact as much as possible. The outcome and process are dictated by the materials' characteristics. This in itself is a way of relating with respect in one's day to day encounters, being with another being or our environment.  

Our environment is mostly surrounded with manufactured materials.  The discards appearing in Marlene's works are office stationery, foam materials for packaging consumer products, advertising off cuts, rubber mats, factory discards.  The emphasis of creativity and making of this body of artwork is shifted from the making to the aesthetic 'response' and deep appreciation of the materials followed with visual recognition of creative possibilities to repurpose the found pieces into a artworks.  The result is a 'mash' of the 'intelligence of manufacturing' of our time and Marlene's aesthetic judgments.   On that basis, 'of the time' is intrinsic in the expressions of these works. 

The works also lend themselves to reflect the excess of the society we live in, a reading suggested by Marlene's title 'You Choose What You Get'. The title suggests abundance of materials.  There are choices and the certainty of  getting what one chooses is never an issue.  All that is needed is a decision.  This is not unlike the shopping experience in an affluent, capitalist society, where the options of getting a product serving the same purpose are plentiful. Good judgement and decision are all it takes to take one home. 

   

As the industrial wastes are re-purposed for the desired aesthetic experience, Marlene has assembled endless permutations of these to be had.  The artworks are displayed in the lit Slot window, itself a repurposed shop window on Botany Road.  They promise a delightful experience with its spendour of colours, textures and shapes-  a vision of Utopia of materiality in a lightbox.  The viewers get to choose the aesthetic experience brought to them through 'a work a day' from Marlene's  studio.

Anie Nheu 

February 2017

Marlene Sarroff. You Get What You Choose, 2016-2017.

 

Charles Cooper & Pia Larsen

6 November - 10 December      Flag Wavering

 

Pia Larsen and Charles Cooper have assembled an exhibition of nine Sydney artists meditating on the national symbol of the U.S.A and what underlies the American Project at the moment of that country’s cyclic rebirth, the Presidential election. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pia Larsen. Welcome & Last Drinks.  

Paper, bottles, gouache, digital prints, 

watercolour & ink. Dimensions variable

Below: Charles Cooper. Old Glory. Watercolour 

on paper. 18 x 26cm

Assemblage of Flag Wavering.

  

Charles Cooper. Old Glory. Watercolour on paper. 18 x 26cm 

 

Pia Larsen. Welcome & Last Drinks. Paper, bottles, gouache, digital prints, watercolour & ink. Dimensions variable

Margaret Roberts. 50 black stars and half a Strzeminski painting. Tulle + floor tape. 75 x 35cm

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nicole Ellis 

Faded and Down Home 1 & 2

Cotton on wood

loose cotton pieces. 

241cm x 2.5cm

 

Left: Frank Littler. Flags of perpetual war 1, 2 & 3. Oil paint on canvas paper. 30 x 42cm & 28 x 36cm.  Right: Lynne Eastaway. Fold. Acrylic paint on Belgian linen. 13 x 18 x 8cm.

Wendy Murray. GIANTS & DODGERS (& I’m not talking sport). Acrylic monoprint (serigraph) from letterpress positive set at Hamilton Ink Spot. 76 x 51cm/ installation variable

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tony Twigg. Stars & Stripes. 

 Enamel paint on timber construction

found objects. 195 x 31 x 12cm

 

 

Maryanne Coutts. Black News/White News: Stars & Stripes. Watercolour + gouache on paper. 31 x 31cm.  

Pia Larsen's bottles on the lower right