Freya Jobbins

7 March – 9 April 2021      Firewall No. 1

Link to artist's website

Freya Jobbins is quick to point out that her work Firewall No 1 is part of a series. Each piece engaged with the “firewalls'' that people set up in public spaces to isolate themselves from community engagements. She is thinking of noise reducing headphones and the habit people have of scanning their phones that for Freya, says ‘do not approach me’ and now possibly also helps to maintain effectivesocial distancing. Her overriding interest is the mask, constructed from surrealistically disassembled body parts harvested from dolls. These works simultaneously conceal and reveal.

Freya was born in Johannesburg. Her parents migrated there from Germany and in 1974 they moved on to Australia, which handed Freya a life in the western suburbs ofSydney. After high school in Campbelltown she joined the police force becoming the first female weapons instructor in 1988. A brutal car accident brought her a second marriage, 2 more children and after they started going to school, the opportunity to make art. Now 55 and engaged in a vigorous and successful art practice in Picton at Sydney’s western edge, she commented, “I don’t make art to sell, I make it as commentary, to use my voice”.  

It is impossible to avoid the obvious connection between Freya’s mask and the Covid-19 mask that has replaced sunglasses as the mask of choice on Sydney public transport. Like the Niqab it 

hints at exoticism by focusing our attention on the unusually naked eyes of the people we encounter and offers mystery by concealing their age. Or as Saima Islam commented in a facebook post, “I love my freedom that burka and niqab has provided me. I love the way it give me courage to stand among all the other individual and be confident toward the journey of life.” Above all the Covid-19 mask provides a safe position from which to observe the world and the people encountered there. As opposed for example to the Venetian carnival mask that obscures the eyes in a manner that permits an evening of aberrant behavior. But as I consider Freya’s mask I can’t help finding an uncanny resemblance to Hannibal Lectors mask worn on this occasion by a young woman of clear and unmasked beauty. It’s a chilling dichotomy that focuses my attention on the events and concerns that are reconditioning Australia’s gender politics.

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