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

Ro Murray

29 December - 01 February      #Fuelled 1 & 2

Link to artist's website

Ro Murray spent 30 years as an architect. She designed extensions to people’s homes. Then, because of an accident – or was it an epiphany? She threw it in for art, and studied at The National Art School from 2007 to 2010.

In conversation, Ro described these works as wall weavings. They are woven from the material of industrial doors but they could be made of anything. Ro’s interest is not in becoming the master of any particular idiom. She prefers pragmatic choices when realising her vision and here she has done that with insight. The material and the images she has made appear inseparable.

Their inception occurred in a lecture given by Lyn Cook on the work of Anni Albers who began as Anni Fleischmann studying at the Bauhaus, the epicentre of European modernism. She became Albers by marrying a lecturer there, Josef Albers. When the Bauhaus closed in 1933 they moved to the USA where together they helped invent the mid-20th century modernism of the New York School, and it’s credo of flatness. This is the idea that the surface of a painting is not an illusion; it is the fact that it is a 2 dimensional surface interrupted by paint. 

Ro’s credentials are impeccable. Her colour choice obliterates any sense of illusion and connects her to the constructivist origin of the Bauhaus. So why then do her images look like calligraphic signs that might be Chinese, or Korean or Japanese? Is that in her eye or in our mind?

People often enjoy seeing the street reflected in SLOT exhibits. With tEasterhis exhibit I can’t help seeing SLOT reflected in the window of the Vietnamese restaurant opposite. It sits comfortably there provoking the idea that a painting is simultaneously intimate and universal, an allusion and a fact. Is that an accident or is it a revelation?  

  - 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

Sally Clarke

link to artist's website

8 April - 12 May       The Wonder Quilt, 1998-2018

Sally Clarke with assistance from Lesley Clarke, Brenda Factor, Frances Factor and Trudi Factor, The Wonder Quilt, 1998-2018, Wonder Cloths (for domestic cleaning),150 x 200cm.

 
Sally Clarke’s “Wonder Quilt” could be part of a small but concise exhibition currently on display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Three works from the 1970’s and 80’s, each made in a technique usually associated with women’s craft. Ewa Pachucka a Polish artist then living in Sydney crocheted a vast sculptural installation, a Melbourne artist Elizabeth Gower contributed a wall sculpture sewn from diaphanous fabric while the American Miriam Schapiro’s work is a collage of appliqued fabrics. Each work, like Sally’s has one foot in the male orientated tradition of fine art and another in the home spun female craft of sewing and each stakes a claim for the Feminist with in our understanding of art.

In a satiric manner Sally evokes a further analogy with “women’s work” by choosing a domestic cleaning product “Wonder Cloths” as her quilting medium. She further challenges the masculine concept of the author, the so-called auteur by working from within a collective of collaborating artists - Lesley Clarke, Brenda Factor, Frances Factor and Trudi Factor.

This is not a heroic expression of individuality that proposes an alternate reality. It is a subversive conversation that seeks to alter and succeeds in altering our collective understanding of reality. It is the project of Feminism.

- Tony Twigg

Sally Clarke with assistance from Lesley Clarke, Brenda Factor, Frances Factor and Trudi Factor, The Wonder Quilt, 1998-2018, Wonder Cloths (for domestic cleaning), 150 x 200cm.  The wonder quilt exists as both a domestic quilt and geometric painting. Its underlying grid structure is shared by decorative patterning and high modernism. As an organising structure for painting the grid goes back at least to the Renaissance period; as an organising structure for pattern it has existed for thousands of years. Many machines and hands have contributed to the Wonder Quilt. The Wonder Cloths - synthetic and lurid - were manufactured in Taiwan before they travelled the high seas to their distribution point in Sydney. The quilt was made with assistance from a small collective of women family members in my lounge room, an antidote to the model of the lone, tormented genius artist. The quilt was revised in 2018.

About Sally Clarke
Informed by a background in both social sciences and visual arts, Sally Clarke's practice critiques the hierarchical and, in particular, gendered constructions of space and the way spaces, materials, and bodies become defined from one another through the attribution of visual, social and cultural codes. Clarke engages with the way power, and the desire for it, drives such divisions and how this plays out in artistic representations and the cultural contexts from which they emerge. Her works explore how these types of relationships can be re-imagined.

Much of Clarke's work has been preoccupied with material and visual significations of domestic space and all that entails. She explores how low-status materials, forms and representations can take their position among very public and dominant discourses including high modernism, the master narratives of landscape painting and contemporary conceptual art through media such as paint, plasticine and floor vinyl and formats that range from two-dimensional surfaces to installation.

Clarke completed her PhD in Philosophy (Fine Arts) in 2008 and, after fourteen years of working as an academic at the College of Fine Arts UNSW, Sydney, established AirSpace Projects with artist and designer Brenda Factor in 2014. AirSpace Projects formed part of her artistic project until 2017 when it transitioned into its new life as a not-for-profit association. 

- Sally Clarke