George Alexander

11 June - 9 July      Naked Lunch    

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George Alexander’s piece, Naked Lunch is an artefact of Covid 19. It is an exercise in idleness, in diversion and perhaps futility - a hiatus engendered by the obliquity two-week quarantine that temporally isolated Australia from the pandemic.

George and his son Blaze had returned from Europe, lucky to have found the flight that landed them in suite L2U6 of a Haymarket hotel where their day had 3 important highlights, the delivery of breakfast, lunch and dinner. All presented in plain paper bags left anonymously outside their door. The artist in George began sketching images on them lifted from the films he was watching on his phone. He would freeze a frame, render it on a bag, and then, presumably recommence his wait for the next meal. I’m not sure if it was a pre-meditated work of art or one that casually evolved but now each bag is identified – “Quarantine series George Alexander paper bag 32 x 30 cm” - it’s become a sort of haphazard diary and a work that contemplates the process of waiting.

Waiting, across the casual accumulation of time through the disconnected moments of forgotten considerations. We all know this, we have all waited for a bus in an outer suburb and know the interminable passage of idle thoughts, ever vigilant for a bus, lest it be missed. It is realised here in George’s work. Stretched out across the floor. Opened up as segmented and disconnected units where the “meat” for living has been replaced  with  the   thoughts of “existing”. 

And we have all known the pleasure of idleness. The suspension of need and responsibility in a careless void where dancing images flash behind our eyelids while our thoughts slide across the past and an imagined future with equal ease. Here is a record for that euphoria - drawn by George Alexander while he waited to take on again the burdensome mantle of self-responsibility.  It’s hard to think of another moment when so many people were given the opportunity to ponder metaphysics in such comfortable circumstances. And while it is rare to come across visual art made in these circumstances for obvious reasons I wonder what pottery and prose was generated during those various and many two weeks. They, along with George’s drawing are the artefacts of a glorious, luxurious, meditative moment in our collective rather than personal history.   

Tony Twigg

 

Jack Frawley

27 October - 5 December      Pandemic    

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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

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

Anya Pesce

27 July - 29 August      Rupture

Link to artist's website

Anya Pesce says her art-work, Rupture,  evokes “the uncertainty and futility we are experiencing during the Covid 19 epidemic.”

She also explains its making process in detail. Since 2015, Rudi, who owns a plastic fabrication shop in Fairfield has welcomed Anya into his factory where she uses a machine that extrudes plexiglas, on this occasion beyond its limit. When the bubble burst, in a single uncontrolled action, the brittle sheet of plexiglas became flesh, with flaying lips, enticingly enclosing an orifice. It’s sexy. Like a sports car, a cocktail bar after dark and all the shiny advertising that preys on the biology of our brains, her art is visceral, with desirability that invites a new category – Pop Abstraction.

In conversation, Anya takes this idea further by describing the way her long education in art, at Meadow Bank TAFE, Charlie Sheard Studio School and the National Art School lead her from painting through installation art to the idea of making as opposed to fabricating, works in a single gestural action. And in that sense this work, Rupture would be the epitome of Anya’s work to date.

Reconciling the idea of spontaneous sexualized exuberance with Covid 19, is of course impossible, they preclude each other. But a meditation on it throws up questions about the nature of content in art-works: The content of a novel for example has little to do with the beauty of the printed page, however appealing it might be. In contrast the content of an abstract painting does not extend beyond an appreciation of its component parts however enticing it might be to impose symbolism on it. Needless to say it is difficult to read any art-work out side of the context of its making, its time and its culture, which unquestionably includes Covid19 at the moment.

-Tony Twigg

Rupture stands as a metaphor for the uncertainty and futility we are experiencing during this COVID-19 pandemic. When words are limited, emotions challenged and uncertainty prevails, a visual expression can instantly evoke a visceral response.

As an artist I obsessively search for new ideas, reimagining forms, shapes and colours to reinvent my work, while consistently using the same material, polymethyl methacrylate - acrylic.

During this COVID-19 pandemic, I embraced the stillness imposed on me during self-isolation, and was able to reflect on my existing practice to take the opportunity and experiment with new ideas and techniques.

To date my works have been made by my hand, manipulating the material with a predictable outcome. Rupture is the outcome of a shift in my practice which involves the use of machinery to determine the work.

In this technique, the material is heated and vacuum-suctioned via a template, which is simultaneously inflated and deflated with air, altering the surface. Mimicking breath, the material is challenged to the point of explosion, resulting in the work’s fractured surface.

Rupture resembles an open wound. In stark contrast to the forms typical of my practice, which are made with an impeccable surface. Here, a gaping hole exists, framed by shards of plastic that burst forward into the viewer’s space.

A tension exists due to the randomness of the fractured material framed by the external geometrical border.

-Anya Pesce