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

 

Thomas Kuss & Bahman Kermany

14 August - 17 September      Two Paintings   

More on Thomas Kuss   More on Bahman Kermany 

The first question for Thomas and Bahman is why show together? The answer is simple, “we're friends, we like talking to each other about ourselves” and “yes, we’ve been friends for a long time.”  Inadvertently their show is a consideration of Islam in Australia.

Bahman’s Iranian mother grew up in an English boarding school. She married his father in Iran and when Bahman was 14 moved on to join her brother in Australia. Bahman’s father wasn’t interested in travelling, which has obliged Bahman to live a life of duality, shuttling between parents  and cultures. He describes Iranian culture and Islam through ancient poetry surviving across the ever-changing political landscape of Persia his preferred name for Iran, which he identifies as a colonial construction. His painting, the smaller of the two presents the image of Zahak, an autocrat drawn from the Shah Name - The book of Kings. An ancient mythological text that tells of the tyrant, a reflection he says of Islamic State’s contemporary brutalisation of Iranian culture.

Thomas’ Chinese mother married his mixed German/Vanuatuan heritage father in Sydney where he was born. He came to Islam through his marriage to Basma, a Sudanese, 3 months ago on the first day of Eid.  Her parents live in the United Arab Emirates within the oasis of Al Ain where his wedding took place, which is the subject of his painting. He is not religious person but went with his father-in-law and the other men of the family to the Mosque where he joined their ritual of prayer. And while praying he described the unusual sensation of his deceased father visiting him to share the joy of his wedding. Perhaps suggesting that in each religion there is an undeclared universality.

Against the clear certainty of Thomas’s journey from Sydney to marry to Basma, for Bahman the key to his journey from Iran to Sydney is doubt. In Iran there is no doubt. For him doubt is the key to free thought. Inadvertently their two paintings encapsulate the polarities of a religious understanding - the idea of maintaining ancient ritual and lore while assimilating it into a modern life. What is without doubt is the sincerity of each artists experience of Islam.

Tony Twigg

Suzy Evans

10 July - 13 August      Bengerang    

More on the artist

Suzy Evans is a descendant of the Gomeroi Nation through her maternal grandparents who lived at Bengerang a place near Moree to the north west of Sydney. She describes the dancing figures in her paintings as the representation of “the all of the Gomeroi people”. And her exhibition is SLOT’S belated offering to the celebration of NADOC WEEK, 2022, which we are proud to support.

Suzy is also a neighbour. She lives a few streets away in Waterloo. Coincidently her terraced house is part of a row identified as a heritage item by the City of Sydney Council in their recent rezoning of our area. Inadvertently they point to the fact that an Australia heritage is a faceted condition. Irrespective of our ancestry, indigenous, settler or migrant, in Australia we are part of our countries heritage, described in the Uluru Statement from the Heart of 2017 as stretching “from the creation, according to common law from ”time immemorial”, and according to science more than 60,000 years ago.” Concurrently as Australians we are responsible for and to our heritage that stretches from the beginning to the present and into the future.

In 1967, perhaps belatedly the people of the Commonwealth of Australia voted at a referendum to include Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islanders in their settler society. Soon there will be a corresponding referendum prompted by the Uluru Statement from the Heart that is an invitation from the Indigenous people of Australia to join them in what will become our country.

We must accept this profound invitation. It has proposed a referendum that will recognise the indigenous people of Australia in the constitution and give voice to their heritage in parliament. It behoves us to ask, what does this mean?  And the point is that we don’t know what it means yet. The point is that we have to invent what it means and what it means as Suzy Evans might say - to become the all of the Australian people - to stand at the next beginning of our culture.

Tony Twigg

Michelle Le Dain

26 September - 24 October      20x20 in 2020

Link to artist's website 

Michelle Le Dain’s work 20 x 20 in 2020 is her road to here. Not symbolically but literally, she is photographing the road ahead as it spreads out in front of her. 

An exhibition, One and one is four: The Bauhaus photocollages of Josef Albers at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC) that Michelle saw in 2017 marked the beginning of this project that traces the road and the various directional marks “written” on it. She described it as “photographs of the path – of connections that have disappeared”. In part a diary, but rather than recording daily events she has articulated her passing as formal compositions. As such this collection of roads is an epoch of travel measured in a suite of graphic poems.

Michelle’s own epoch of travel began with her birth in Toronto, Canada. Her parents moved to Staten Island, the next island on from Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River. An exchange program with Sydney University in 1988 landed her in love with Australia. Eventually she moved here with her Canadian husband. Two children and a divorce left her thinking that her principal regret in life would be to not pursue creativity. She enrolled at the National Art School. With her Masters Degree complete a residency at Workspace Academy in Connecticut followed, which is when she went to MOMA to see the Albers' exhibition. 

Her own collages are produced in the medium of hertime, on a computer in photo-shop. They juxtaposes graphic elements drawn from the real world that like the works of Albers make no references beyond the compositional phenomena at play on the surface of the work.  Here beauty is a matter of poise, tension and inflection with a long history that is belied by the graphic immediacy of Michelle’s work.

Tony Twigg

Artist Statement

Michelle Le Dain is an emerging multidisciplinary artist from New York who lives and  works in Sydney. She examines the possibilities of play, spontaneity and intuition as  means of a manifold visual language across the fields of video, photography, installation  and painting. In her ongoing project Roadwork (2017-) she reconfigures the ubiquitous  signifiers of the urban landscape, such as found street markings and road signs into  abstract photographic collages. 

Michelle Le Dain graduated 2016 with a Master of Fine Art from the National Art School,  Australia. 

20 x 20 in 2020  

Le Dain’s ongoing project Roadwork originated in 2017 while in the US on an artist  residency after completing her MFA. This project evolved spontaneously through process  and sequence. She set out on a 60-day morning run challenge to record and post a daily  observation on Instagram using her Iphone. The Josef Albers exhibition One and One is  Four: The Bauhaus Photo Collages (2017) at Museum of Modern Art, New York, was a  huge influence to this body of work in its playful experimentation, perception and form.  The project crossed over many cities and countries photographing road markings  including New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Montreal, France, Japan, England Sydney,  Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth.

Covid-19 has taken this project out of its original form, confining it to Sydney. These 23  select images past and current represent the connections and memories with what we  once had and what we are hopeful for again. Le Dain uses digital collage to experiment  taking her palette directly from the road. Playing with line and colour, she uses her indoor  studio space to engage directly with the outside world. She continues to find, follow and  photograph painted road markings in and around Sydney until travel restrictions are lifted. 

Michelle Le Dain

@michelleledain

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

Ana Pollak

link to artist's website

12 January - 10 February       Towers

Ana’s farther and her grandparents came to Australia as refugees from Europe. Ana herself has lived for the last 30 years, since 1987 in a house she built with her partner David on Dangar Island, about an hour and a half north of Sydney in the Hawkesbury River. Ana is no stranger to the Australian landscape where these towers began to form in her imagination.

They are an idea she carried with her to Hong Kong, another island where the verticality of the eucalypt gives way to the built environment, literally towers.  Hong Kong offers the unique urban experience of encountering multi story buildings at the middle level. As with Ana’s towers, buildings are appreciated without reference to the top or bottom. The towers of Dangar and the buildings of Hong Kong are each a set of pragmatic structures that pulsate with rhythms without reference to the narrative constraints of a beginning or end.

 

In Hong Kong as a guest of the Nock Art Foundation to study calligraphy, as she described “people embraced me in the brotherhood of the line.” Ana makes drawings.  Impressively she won the celebrated Dobell Drawing Prize in 2007, and before all else, these towers are drawings made with lines collected “outside the front door” on Dangar Island.

Looking at Ana’s towers I found myself reflecting on the bamboo scaffolding used on the building sites of South East Asian cities. Structures Ana said she had marveled at in Hong Kong where they are tightly wrapped in a fabric covering hinting at “the bones” beneath the “skin”. All these enigmatic structures have something in common. It is that a person made the decision on the spot, about how to fit one bit into another, about which bit of material was best suited to bridge a particular gap. Here a person has solved a problem and it’s that solution that becomes art because it carries with it someone’s humanity. Birds, animals even insects make comparable structures that in fairness have an equal claim as ART. Their work points to the universality of Ana’s expression. It reaches from the devastation of war-torn Europe across the Australian isle to our Asian future, “the brotherhood of line” indeed.

Back in Australia and after 6 weeks in her studio Ana’s work is offered as art, prompting the questions. What do you seen in your imagery? Her response, “pass”. What is your process? – “pass”. How do you begin? – “pass”. And how do you conclude? “That’s the tricky thing that everyone’s having a problem with, when the tower falls over, when it gets too tall for the studio”. Apparently this is a liner experience without beginning or end.

- Tony Twigg

Kathryn Cowen

Link to artist's site

02 December - 6 January      #Otherworlds

Kathryn Cowen. #Otherworlds {in daylight}
2017. Ultraviolet light, posca pen, acrylic, aerosol, and fluorescent paint on board. 1.5x2 m

Kathryn Cowen. #Otherworlds {at dusk}
2017. Ultraviolet light, posca pen, acrylic, aerosol, and fluorescent paint on board. 1.5x2m

This large scale landscape in an amalgam of disparate elements gleaned from a variety of sources. The intention was to create a strange environment that is  inspired by the world and yet presents a portal to an alternate reality; a meeting place of the real and the imagined.

This painting installation is an experiment. For the first time I have incorporated light as a medium. In order to further explore my interest in time, space, place and memory; two versions of the landscape are held within the one painting. The reading of the work will morph from day to night. Once darkness descends, ultraviolet light interacts with the painted work in order to transform the space and reveal an alternate dimension, a world that is “Other”.

#Otherworlds. 2017. Installation view in daylight.

#Otherworlds. 2017. Installation view at dusk.

With thanks to Tony Twigg for providing a venue to bring art to the street and so
generously accommodating this crazy experiment at SLOT.

And to my partner in life and love, Matt Macadam. Without his encouragement, support, lighting and installation skills this project could not have been realised.

Kathryn Cowen

December 2017

Jack Frawley

11 November - 02 December      Blessed

 

 

 

Jack Frawley. The Persecuted. 2017.

 

BLESSED

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they who mourn,
for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness
for they shall be satisfied.

Blessed are the merciful,
for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure of heart,
for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they shall be called children of God.

Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 

                                                                                                                       Matthew 5 : 3-10

Jack Frawley. The Blessed. 2017. Coloured Print.