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

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

Melbourne Aquino

22 October - 11th November           Pinoy Cubism

 

Melbourne Aquino’s painting is derived from the urban environment of Manila, which it’s self is the basis of the Filipino understanding of Cubism. Historically described as Barong Barong this kind of painting draws a graphic parallel between the shanties of the city and the faceted surfaces of cubist paintings. More importantly there is a dialogue between the constructive inventiveness brought to found objects by Cubism and the inventiveness of necessity applied to the traditional Filipino Balai or house re-interpreted with available or found materials in the urban environment. Aquino’s paintings that obviously refer to overlaid and torn posters connect this intuitive cognizance of Cubism to the arresting beauty of dilapidation that is the patina of Manila.

Melbourne Aquino. D CV2 VIVA-13.

I came across Aquino’s painting in a group exhibition at the Astra Gallery in Makati, Metro Manila. When I made the obvious association with torn posters he was quick to point out that his work is all paint. Then looking closely at the works I realized that I was observing a mode of painting rather than the representation of an image.  These graphically alert paintings hover at an edge, between representation and process, between what we know and what we assume we know. They are beguiling in their beauty and instinctively honest abstract paintings.

There was treat waiting for me when I mentioned to Aquino that I’d like to see more of his work. Quietly he handed me an iPhone and I started swiping. I collected a cold beer, found a quiet corner and went on swiping, and then swiped some more.

Melbourne Aquino. B CV2 VIVA-7.

Melbourne Aquino. C CV2 VIVA-12

I wasn’t looking at two paintings by a young artist in a group exhibition. I was looking at years of intently focused engagement with a process and an image that had been explored with meticulous, detailed observations. Like artists before him, Aquino has laid claim to his imagery. These are not paintings of torn posters; they are of torn posters reminiscent of Melbourne Aquino’s paintings.

-Tony Twigg 

Alfredo Aquilizan & Isabel Gaudinez-Aquilizan

 20 August - 16 September      Passage, Another Country, 2017

 

The art of the Filipino-Australian artists Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan is a traveler's tale, be that of the immigrant or the nomad. They have considered what is left behind, what is carried with the travelers on their journey and they have mined their own families’ migration to Australia as the subject and the substance of their art. 

Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan. Passage, Another Country, 2017. Cardboard construction with photographs of horizons.

They began working with their chosen medium, the travelers' discarded cardboard carton in a Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation project of 2012, “Inhabit another country”. This installation was an extrapolation of the homes built along the shoreline of Mindanao by the Bajau, the gypsies of the Sulu Sea. These encrustations are but one aspect of a broader architecture of poverty that has become a subject of Filipino Art and it imbued with an innate humanity. In recent museum scaled installations the Aquilizans have romanticized these necessities of habitation as boats, the travelers' vehicle and the nomads' home. 

The boat is an image with a deep resonance in Australian cultural psyche. From the armadas of convict ships in our mythic past to the fishing boats that ferried contemporary migrants euphemistically described as irregular maritime arrivals. Migration has defined Australia. The vast migrant ships assembled by the Aquilizans have also become an apparent destination in themselves, hinting at the darkest fate of the immigrant, a perpetual journey. 

The two shoe like walking boats exhibited here were made during the Aquilizans' recent residency at the Mosman Art Gallery that was part of the Bayanihan Philippine Art Project, a suite of exhibitions celebrating Filipino culture presented in various Sydney art galleries. And as in the Aqulizians' work, the Bayanihan Art Project addressed the migrants' central concerns of home, of be-longing and of utilitarian possessions reconfigured as cultural artifacts. 

- Tony Twigg, 2017