In 2002 Ray Hughes asked me to bring an exhibition of paintings to his gallery from my friend, Charlie Co, a celebrated Filipino social realist painter. Along with Charlie’s show I delivered an exhibition of Filipino abstract painting. I added a suite of my own constructions to paintings by my friend, Gus Albor and cardboard collages by Roberto Robles, whose I had come to admire at Galleria Duemila where my own work is exhibited in Manila. With these shows completed I began imagining that I would need a gallery to go on exhibiting the art of my Filipino colleagues in Sydney. A vain fantasy until I realised that I already had a gallery, the front window of my studio, a shop at 38 Botany Road, Alexandria. SLOT was born. The ambition became and remains to engage with the neighbourhood, the one around Redfern and the one around South East Asia through art.
I built a wall, fitted the ceiling, contrived a door and installed some lights. The first exhibition, a collection of my drawings opened in October 2003 as I left Sydney for Manila to set up my installation in the Pinto Gallery at Antipolo. The second show was an installation by Catriona Stanton, an Australian artist and friend. As I was returning to Sydney from Manila my friend and artist Hermisanto handed me a tightly rolled drawings, they became SLOT’s third show. One of my ideas was that we could negate the distance between South East Asia and Australia with installations delivered as emailed instructions, to be realised in Sydney by me. Junyee, the grandfather of Filipino installation art is the only artist to act on my proposal and emailed one of SLOT’s most memorable early shows, Skins, as two jpgs and a few lines of text.
After moving to Alexandria in 2000 I watched with interest the interventions of a sign-maker. He left hand written signs offering the essentials of a transient life style, a bed, a TV or a washing machine for sale with a mobile phone number on pieces of junk littered around the neighbourhood. As I watched, photographed and collected it I realised that these works were far from littered – they were most observantly placed in the urban environment. In a couple of months, I had collected enough work for a show, which was exhibited a few months later.
There was no response when I sent a text to the sign-maker saying the show had opened but one morning I discovered a pile of rubbish stacked in front of SLOT. It was art rubbish. And of course, it was delivered by the sign-maker. There was a framed print of a Degas painting faded to a light damaged blue. An empty frame already rusted – disastrous and discarded paintings on canvas – drawings – empty stretchers and much more, all stacked with great and possibly intuitively considered placement. I left the splendid intervention in place and then curiously – people began removing elements. Presumably taking the rubbish home to once again venerate it as art - unwittingly confirming the sign-maker as an artist with an alchemist power and SLOT as the agent.
Working in the studio behind SLOT I noticed people pause to read the page of notes on each show posted on the glass door to the old shop. I guessed that they also paused to consider the works while they waited for their order from the take-away restaurant next door. In the street I noticed people turn their heads, without breaking stride to view the shows as they walked past. Late one winter night, walking home down Regent Street, a street of dark shuttered shops I saw a single figure standing, gazing into the light of SLOT – I thought, warming the bones at the hearth of humanity. Once someone slipped a note of thanks under the door, the butcher across the road became an art critic and people mentioned gladly being caught in traffic at the lights on Botany Road because it gave them a chance to check out SLOT. The point being that SLOT was bringing art to people who would not normally think of going to an art gallery and doing it in a way that made art part of a life experience as opposed to a cultural experience. Occasionally the cognoscenti noticed – after an opening one night I was sitting in a restaurant next to Tony Bond, then curator of contemporary art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales who explained to me that he viewed SLOT from a car on his way to the airport. And as if to prove his point, went on to lucidly discuss the last 6 months of SLOT shows.
After a while people started asking how they might show at SLOT. The answer was and remains simple: send an email describing what you would like to do, attach some photographs of your work, there is no fee to exhibit and sadly no fee paid to exhibitors - we will get back to you with a date. Over time saying yes evolved from an inclination to be an article of faith. In its history SLOT has said no once, to a high school friend of my nephew. I can’t remember why but I regret it, because, while it is ridiculous to say that all art is equal it is far from ridiculous to believe that all art has merit and so every art should have its turn.
Without question the most luminous artist to show in SLOT is Roger Foley AKA Elis D. Fogg, the creator
of psychedelic light shows that illuminated the Counter Culture.
This is the ideology that underpins the ethos of SLOT. Another reference is Tony Coleing’s, Avago, a tiny window he maintained next door to Roslyn Oxley’s first galley, the largest and coolest in 1980’s Sydney. Tony Coleing offered the magnificent invitation to have a go and like his window, SLOT celebrates art made by everyone and art made for everyone. But despite SLOT’s overt egalitarianism it is hard to find the shows that disappoint. Perhaps this has something to do with the space - it invites a single large work, as Tony Bond described “it’s the Roslyn Oxley of window galleries” where there are few physical limitations and no intellectual constraints. I was thrilled when Merilyn Fairskye asked to put up a show. Other artists followed – Ian Millis made two installations, Richard Tipping exhibited some photographs, Charlie Cooper put up a painting, Andrew Leslie tailored one of his optical works to fit SLOT, Christopher Hodges made an illuminated installation, Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan contributed three installations culled from their much larger museum works, Billy Gruner exhibited posters announcing exhibitions in another time and place, Joe Frost painted a mural of the other side of the street and Ruark Lewis installed Banalities of a Perfect House across the entire facade of the building. These are the land mark exhibitions.
Generally speaking, these artists bent SLOT to accommodate existing works. Between these shows others made works to accommodate SLOT’s proportions. Loris Quantock, a school teacher who had developed a way of recording her bush walks in meditative constructions made from twigs collected along her way made one such piece that traversed SLOT side to side. Stephen Flanagan began by asking, “I’m not an artist but how can I show in SLOT?” and went on to produce a fascinating installation made from blue prints he had salvaged from an abandoned factory further down Botany Road. Russel Jeff knocked on the studio door asking if I would like to look at his paintings – of course yes, I am interested to look at all art. He was living on the “rock-n-roll” in the Waterloo Housing Commission towers and his story told of life as a discarded individual. His abstract paintings in contrast presented the image of an individual in command of a single vision at peace in their excitation. He produced a work for SLOT at the size of SLOT, glorious in its spiritual warmth and intellectual rigor – a clear triumph. Since then, we run into each other around the neighbourhood. He found a job working at a bakery in another suburb, still lives in Waterloo and seems a happy man.
There would be few parables that illustrate as succinctly the virtue of social inclusivity over exclusivity. Juni Salvador is one of the more enigmatic artists associated with SLOT. I had seen and admired his work in Manila but not met him until he arrived in Sydney with his children and his wife Edna who had come here to help set up a Stiner school on the upper north shore. Juni never found his way into the Sydney art world but in Manila he is part of a coterie of artists who were taught and influenced by Roberto Chabet, a celebrated and insightful Filipino conceptual artist. Between trips back to Manila to make and exhibit his work Juni contributed four revealing autobiographic works to SLOT that focused on his Australian experience. As I watched these works evolve, I realised that he was devising a kind of installation that was idiosyncratically SLOT’s. Here a work occupies both wall space and floor space in a casual and spacious arrangement of elements. Its clean theatrical presence, like a diorama, is designed to be isolated in a vitrine. When Juni was returning to Manila, I commented on this by saying that I could see his and Chabet’s influence in other pieces being made for SLOT - he replied simply - “you noticed Tony”. It delights me to see in art, a Filipino train of thought being shared locally through SLOT.
It’s a grand claim but probably true that demonstrates SLOT’s successful interaction with its neighbourhood, around Redfern and in South East Asia. SLOT is not all my own work. Beyond the artists who are central to the project I have been assisted by friends and colleagues working as administrators and curators, they are: Alex Bellemore, Victoria Demafeliz, Gina Fairley, Leah Haynes, Pat Hoffie, Glenn Locklee, Mai Nguyen-Long, Ian Milliss, Constantine Nicholas, Sophie O’Brien, Emma Smith, Tracy Tucker and Chloe Wolifson. In 2015 Anie Nheu joined the project as collaborator. Since then, she has attracted many artists to SLOT, men and predominately women who have produced individualistic and clearly resolved works while maintaining both a family and a job. Their lifestyle is a reflection of our contemporary society’s opportunities and expectations. The quality of their work; however, is a measure of their resolve that art should be made and shared. A resolve that SLOT shares, fundamentally.
Tony Twigg
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