Annelies Jahn + Jane Burton Taylor

14 May - 11 June 2022     Bearing Witness

Annelies Jahn

Jane Burton-Taylor 

SLOT is proud to present this work, by Annelies Jahn and Jane Burton Taylor as our contribution to Reconciliation Week, 27 May - 3 June 2022. The work celebrates Paul Keating’s Redfern Speech delivered on the 10th of December 1992 in Redfern Park, only a short walk from here. 

The speech was a courageous expression of reconciliation with Australia’s First Nations people. It stands among others: The Yirrkala bark petitions of 1963, the referendum of 1967 that repealed section 127 of our constitution, which stipulated “aboriginal natives shall not be counted (in the Australian census)”, the Gurindji strike of 1966 that lead to Gough Whitlam symbolically recognising land rights in 1975, The “Mabo decision” of the High Court that overturned the legal doctrine of Terra Nullis (‘nobody’s land') paving the way for Native Title in 1993 and Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generation on behalf of the Australian Parliament in 2008. Courageous and humane as all these steps towards equality have been, it cannot be denied that they were slow in coming, shamefully slow in coming.

In discussing the Aboriginal contribution to modern Australia through agriculture, exploration, commerce, sport, literature, music and art, Keating declared, “In all these things they (the First Nations people) have shaped our knowledge of this continent and of ourselves. They have shaped our identity.” It is a point observed by Jahn and Burton Taylor with a lament also drawn from Keating’s speech,  “how much we have lost by living so apart”.  Here it is offered in the maternal voice of “Mother Country” as opposed to the nationalistic voice of “Father Land”. For here it is not a question of what we might harvest from our land but how we might nurture our land as a people lead by our land’s first inhabitants.

It is accidental that this exhibition also coincides with the 2022 Federal election where The Aboriginal Voice to Parliament is at issue. It is the next in the list of courageous steps that Australia must take towards nationhood, a step that Anthony Albanese has promised to take as a referendum held in the first term of his government. The voice was born as an idea in the 2017, Uluru Statement from the Heart. It is a hand held out by Aboriginal Australia to the settlers as a map of reconciliation. It identifies a shared future where we might comment - how much we have gained by living together. 

Tony Twigg

Jack Frawley

27 October - 5 December      Pandemic    

More on the artist

Jack Frawley’s work Pandemic is on the money.  It fortuitously marks the resumption of SLOT’s exhibition program, which was suspended in response to the recent Covid lock down. Jack’s work was devised as a satire of “buzzwords”, invented to describe the paralysing catastrophe that is Covid-19. Words that have become clichés in our over popularised mass media. By identifying these “catch phrases” with jockeys’ racing silks on the eve of Melbourne Cup, the race, as the cliché has it, that ‘stops a nation’; Jack has poetically observed our Prime Minister’s much parodied assertion that Covid-19 vaccination is not a race.

It is probably cynical to wonder at our exiting lockdown just in time for the Spring Racing Carnival. Or, that international travel will recommence immediately prior to Christmas. But it isn’t cynical to identify our media’s normalisation of confronting situations by over familiarising us with the words, expressions and images used to describe them. They are rendered as clichés where meaning is leached through overuse, leaving us with only an appreciation of the expression's articulation as its content. This is the essence of news as entertainment.

The behemoth of our materialist culture rolled on throughout lockdown. We ate, drank and net-flixed our way through it. Now we are being coaxed from isolation and back into a “robust” consumerism, not through an eradication of the virus, not by the sudden and jubilant partying portrayed on television, but through an easy acceptance of what was once portrayed as perilous. This is the work of clichés, those so artfully identified by Jack Fawley that permit us to face the future of the pandemic “armed” only with a vaccine, the so called “jab”. 

Tony Twigg

Juni Salvador

11 April - 8 May    "Sit still and enjoy the view ... after Whistler"

Link to artist's website

Juni Salvador is a Filipino artist living in Australia. He came here with his family when his wife took up the offer of a teaching post in 2007. Since then he has “shuttled” between his family in Sydney and his colleagues in Manila, a coterie of artists who were taught and influenced by the highly regarded Filipino conceptualist, instillation artist and teacher, Roberto Chabet. 

All was well, then Covid 19 hit. Juni was in Manila and on his way to the airport when Australia’s international border was closed. His flight was cancelled. Then Manila went into lock-down. He was marooned in the small apartment he and his wife maintain. Roadblocks were set up between city sectors to control the spread of the virus. Juni waited it out, for months until an Australian repatriation flight landed him in Sydney, which is where he sat as 3 three meals a day came and went for 2 weeks of quarantine.  He had brought notebooks and pencils to make an in-quarantine art. However his life in quarantine became one of silence, of reflection and meditation on his predicament, isolation, in an immediate sense and more generally in both Australia and the Philippines.  

In Sydney Juni has made a number of installations for SLOT. Mostly they have celebrated his delight in Op Shops. Half charity, half bargain stores they recycle the discarded possessions of the “middle class” deemed “too good to throw away”.  As they say, “it’s a first world problem”. For Juni these shops offer a portrait of Australia spelt out in objects so valued that they are sold twice. Never would he remove the vital price tag that precisely quantifies the value of each item. In Juni’s hands these items become the landscape or as in this piece, the room-scape where the meditative consideration of his predicament takes place. It's where he sat, gazing across the carpet at an ever-growing pagoda of take-away food containers.

Juni drew my attention to the picture at the centre of his installation, oil on canvas by I.Martinoc (?) of a European landscape, value - $20.00. “Of course it’s kitsch” he said “but I like something about it”. And true, it’s hard not to be caught gazing at a far distant mountain almost obscured by the vastness of pictorial space. In the glorious isolation that this insignificant picture offers it’s easy to think that Juni found Australia as he gazed out of his quarantine hotel room. And as we follow his gaze into this distant mirror of our place we might wonder, will we catch a reflection or not of the observer, Juni Salvador?

Tony Twigg