As requested by the artist, Michael Buzacott there is no text accompanying this exhibition.
The works are titled, on the left Circus figure, 2019 and on the right, Olympia 2024.
When Wendy Holz left high school, she thought of becoming a nurse. It didn’t eventuate. She thought of becoming a secretary but before she started training an aunt noticed a job going at the State Library. Forty years later Wendy can tell stories about her many jobs there. One of the more interesting was assisting the Field Librarian who travelled about examining proposed gifts to the library. Papers caught in a limbo between rubbish and material culture. The decision, to accept or reject each gift, brought into play the double role of a librarian, to care for books and to care for the narratives encoded in them. This is the material culture that Wendy has devoted her working life to.
In 2015 Wendy began a consideration of another kind of material culture, sculpture. She adopted a welder’s point of view. Studying first at the Tom Bass Sculpture School, then from 2017 on Saturdays at the National Art School where there is a focus on welded steel sculpture. She described her working process as “getting random pieces (of steel) out of the bins – then it’s push and pull until it seems right, but I can’t say what is right” It is a conversation in a language that has a vocabulary but no narrative, at least not the kind you might find in a library.
Like a pop song without words there is a mood here that has been crafted with a kind of reason that offers no explanation. It has a tangible presence that invites an intangible reading - of a wind, strong enough to blow something flat and something strong enough to stand against it. A contradiction perhaps, but there are no contradictions in this work. It is read in an instant but made in time with an understanding of poise and placement, crafted with such care that it appears precisely casual.To say that abstract art is enigmatic is to miss the salient point – that this work, like this art is not of our world. It is of someone’s imagination. Open to interpretation as metaphor but relentlessly evasive when it comes to meaning. Emphatically it is here holding in its presence something blowing past and through the pragmatic logistics of Botany Road.
Vilma Bader’s work, One performance, one discourse, chronicles a performance work made on Sydney’s rocky coastline near Maroubra where Vilma lives. Part documentation and part distillation this wall work articulates a litany of 250 mental disorders across 50 meters of text. Wound from one person to another in a performance that is replicated here as photographs, the work, prompts the question, why?
By way of explanation Vilma traces the work’s beginning to a period spent studying art at the Sydney College of Art that was then housed within the grounds of the old Callan Park Mental Hospital. A place where these disorders were once managed. And here, Vilma suggests that the act of naming these conditions is analogous to a colonisation of the psychic. Considering the unwinding process of her performance she comments “the patient appears to break free. But does she or more precisely, can she?”
Here in SLOT Vilma doesn’t answer any questions. Rather she re-visits her performance where the story of an unwinding is
played out, over and over again, so much so that it is rendered as a texture - a transcription rendered as a mood.There is nothing in Vilma’s life story to suggest that she has faced these troubling states of mind. But she is a traveller for whom art is a companion. From Mauritius with her parents, to Germany with her husband, to Sydney with her daughter to walking the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage she describes life as an intense meditation on a self, reflected in art, be it her own art or the art of others. For
most artists, the self is a companion. If it’s encountered then the artist is obliged to enter a dialogue with it, and that could become a questioning. An unravelling, a reassembling, another unravelling, something to be repeated and repeated again, not unlike the process of Vilma’s performance. A truth that might remain an indeterminate abstraction or be named. And once named, identified within the context of others, becoming as Vilma describes a kind of colonisation applied to the psychic.
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