101. Richard Tipping | Urban animals
February 2013
Often SLOT artists will examine our neighbourhood – its oddities and confluences, from a single moment along a continuum from one thing to another. We are offered a look at ourselves along this head long dash to gentrified urbanity that can be comfortingly obscure.
The concrete poet and artist Richard Tipping recently moved to Redfern. However it is not the stereotypes of the past or the future that have caught his eye as he beat the pavement from Redfern Park to SLOT.
It is as he says, our pets. “Urban Animals is an on-going series on animals and their
images in the city and surrounds, trying for poignancy and the mysterious more than
simply documentation.”
This suite of ‘images was snapped on a smart phone from a pedestrian point of view and then uploaded to a blog. They can be accessed along with the stories behind these peculiar urban critters via the QR code that leads to Richard’s Urban Animals blogspot.
102. Susannah Williams
April 2013
Experimental drawing project in parts
Over the next five weeks local Redfern artist Susie Williams will work directly in SLOTs window to create a series of experimental drawings that will first take form, and then shift direction through time. The window will function as an ‘open studio’ where passers-by can track the formation and development of ideas in the form of drawings.
Susie will begin with her ‘Artist in Transit’ project, a collaboration with architect turned artist Ro Murray. While Murray was an artist in residency at Hill End west of Sydney she and Susie exchanged drawings via the post that responded to their separate locations. Framed around the idea of ‘the sound of silence’, this project will read colour and form to trigger an imagined sound. In SLOT’s window, Susie will extend their conversation through an improvised installation, drawing in guest collaborators, sound artist Warren Armstrong and photographer Peter Morgan.
This is an organic project that explores the development of a site through experimental art practices. Carrying the general theme of ‘silent drawings speaking across time and space’, Susie will consider drawing as notation and its differing modes of legibility.
103. Roger Foley and Jess Cook | Light collaboration
May 2013
To coincide with Sydney’s VIVID festival of lights, Australia’s pioneer of Lumino Kinetic Art - Roger Foley-Fogg (AKA Ellis D. Fogg) – returns to SLOT with a collaborative artwork created with Jess Cook Creative Director of 107 Projects, a local art space and theatre in Redfern. Utilising LED rope lights and steel mesh, this dynamic lightwork will be a marriage of their shared experience as installation artists.
They met in India in 2011, when Jess assisted Roger with his Lumino Kinetic Installation for the exhibition Racism and Reconciliation curated by Sahar Zaman for Art-Konsult Gallery, Delhi. Their partnership was strengthened earlier this year when Roger presented his exhibition, Tales from the Fogg: My Life and Loves, at 107 Projects Jess has contributedinstallations made from cloth woven into fences in projects involving hundreds of participants collaborating to transform their shared public space. Roger describes his interest in light as being fostered by his mother. He joined the legendary Yellow House in 1971 and has consistently used all forms of ‘light’, with a passion to bring art forms and artists together, working with diverse groups including the Gija people in the desert of The Kimberley in Western Australia.
This simply constructed work pulses through time with a spell binding insistence that art will out last the traffic along Botany Road.
104. Leanne Waterhouse | Solitary cohabitation revisited
August 2013
These discs of pattern and light floating in SLOTs window are a secondary response to Rorschach inkblots, the psychological tests used to analyse personality characteristics. This work, first produced as faux inkblots for the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art in Darwin was devised to test the environmental psyche of life in the top end.
Leanne has reprinted, deconstructed, and assembled these images to create a new installation that responds to the unique site of SLOT, and brought to us via the Dispatch project. This is a project curated by Richard Stride connecting window galleries across Australia. Artworks are travelling around the country via ‘the post’ to be realised from a set of instructions at their destination gallery. Dispatch extends traditional definitions of the gallery in a project that unites window galleries across the country and the artists who show in them.
Writing about her work Leanne observes, “I like to think of these strips as big rain. The seasons play a huge role in how we behave and interact with each other here in the top end.” She continued, “These digital images are a personal interpretation of ways in which the mind has been examined in the past and the social experiments for the changing ideas we seek to understand ourselves…More broadly, it links between our environment and mental health.”
Dispatch A program of exchange exhibitions between various artist run window galleries around Australia that was initiated by Richard Stride, co-director of Current Projects Current Projects @ Ryan Renshaw Windowbox, Ryan Renshaw Gallery, 137 Warry St. Fortitude Valley, Brisbane.
105. Diokno Pasilan | Ballarat ID
September 2013
Diokno Pasilan one of a number of Filipino artists who live in Australia and maintain a presence in the Filipino art world. He is in Sydney from Ballarat in Victoria to attend Sydney Contemporary Art Fair where his work is being represented by Drawing Room, a commercial gallery from Manila in the Philippines. It’s a dizzying collision of identifies, and on the way through he has put up this exhibition in SLOT that its self considers the nature of identity.
These portraits are made from iron dust using a photographic process. Diokno builds his images from iron filings, which are then sprayed with salt water to begin the oxidation process that literally fuses the image into the paper. Collectively this is a portrait of Ballarat, Diokno’s new home after 16 years in Western Australia.
This suite of portraits refers to an earlier body of work made in Diokno’s home province of Palawan, in the Philippines. He photographed senior citizens then worked over the photographs in coffee writing their stories of home and heritage.
He makes the point that a place is the people who live there - they give a place its identity in as much as an individual’s identity might be the product of a place. It is the migrants tale and one that Diokno and his Filipino compatriots know well as they move between their homes in Australia and the Philippines.
106. Megan Hanson | Hey and Co.
October 2013
Curated by Alex Bellemore
Megan Hanson makes art concerning the agency of objects, with a particular interest in the image as object. Seeing her practice as a co-production between herself and the things she engages with. Hanson attempts to decentralise the artist from the traditional role of master and curator, in favour of shared authorship between herself and the variant constituents of the work. Understanding the photographic image as a unique container whereby its being is inextricably linked to that which it represents, Hanson probes to extract elements that are otherwise outside of this definition in an attempt to engage with the medium’s expanded forms.
In Meg & Co at SLOT, Megan explores photographic materiality through its characteristics of repetition and reproduction, seen in the series of white concrete casts of inflatable travel neck pillows: Zachary Jackson Levon and Elijah Joseph Daniel furnish-John (2013). The artists also engages with food matter, resulting in a conversation between herself, 1.25 liners of soda water, a bag of Cheetos and some dramatic stage lighting, as seen in the video loop Comm@, des Cheese Balls. What manifests can be seen as the result of
co-production between Hanson and the various agents, whereby the artist no-longer author, rather participant in a networked material dialogue.
Alex Bellemore
107. Hermisanto & Tony Twigg | 2003=2013
November 2013
When the SLOT project began in 2003 I was in Manila. My ambition was to defeat the constraints of freight carriers and government regulations through an art that travelled as a proposition. To be realised at the moment of exhibition by an artist’s assistant or collaborator. In the 10 years that SLOT has operated we have realised a number of such projects. The first was conceived by my friend Hermisanto.
In 2003, as I was heading to the airport on my way back to Sydney, Hermisanto handed me a tightly rolled wad of drawings. Smaller than a magazine larger than a cigar it slipped into my pocket and hours later it was sitting on a table in my studio. Flattened out the drawings became a show. I peeled them off the pile, one by one pinning them to the wall as a single work that I found inspirational. When the show ended, I slipped the drawings into a draw and slowly realised that I planed to revise the work as our celebration of SLOT’S decade.
Hermisanto set the tenant of the work by offering nothing other than his marks, no hanging instructions, no way up, no title, no signature he offered a work that promised to accommodate the imposition of any order yet remain true to its self.
Like a musical instrument, Hermisanto;s drawings play many tunes, they have no particular truth but offer as many truths as one might choose to concoct.
I have followed Hermi into this work, into what Filipino artists call an interaction. And I am delighted by it as a celebration of our first decade. It is the conversation that we have maintained with our neighbourhood that may stretch as far as St Peters and also stretches to Manila ... to Ho Chi Min City, Phuket, Yogyakarta,
Singapore and even Kuala Lumpur.
108. Ida Lawrence & Eko Bambang Wisnu | Nge-Kost
November 20133
Kost translates from Bahasa as a room in a boarding house. The kost is popular with students in Indonesia, functioning as a complete living ecosystem: bedroom, living room, eat-in-entertainment zone and storage space. When faced with the proposition of making a work for SLOT, Ida and Eko – who met in Yogyakarta in such a kost while studying at art school – realised that SLOT mirrored the same dimensions of the average boarding room. In response they have created an urban kost with its bower bird-like collection of objects make-do-aesthetics and furniture making a connection this neighbourhood as furniture recycled in boarding houses that jostle with the progress of gentrification. Lino from Indonesia echoes suburban 1950s Australian décor, a plastic clothes rack from Jogja is the same as one plucked from a $2 shop, and 2-minute noodles are handy everywhere.
Eko said, ‘It's a very small space and everyone can see what you are doing. I am very excited.’ Ida added, ‘Working in the window is not so dissimilar to living in a kost where everyone sees and knows everything.’
Both artists work with a range of materials across media, from street art to video to performance, drawing and painting. Last month they produced their first collaborative work in Australia, a tower of mattresses for Bondi’s Sculpture by the Sea titled Goodnight Uncle John. This then is the second collaborative work of Ida who grew up in SLOT's neighbourhood, Alexandria and Eko’s who is from Yogyakarta in Indonesia, which defines their shared space.
109. Charlie Cooper | Sea change
December 20133
Charlie Cooper is a Sydney painter. His paintings are immediately graphic but what appears at first glance to be an abstract composition turns out to be the product of a long interest in the language of road signage - flat paint on bitumen aptly installed here at one of Sydney’s busiest intersections.
But it is not all speed humps and blistering bitumen, as Charlie explains: “My ‘Sea Change’ paintings can be seen as the material of future archaeology. The fragmented road surfaces allude to damage caused by storm surges, floods, land slippages etc., the increasingly familiar results of extreme weather events. The shattered assemblages are intended to evoke the sublime, the sense of awe in the face of nature’s wrath. The title ‘Sea Change’ refers not only to coastal damage brought about by rising sea levels, but also to a global shift in attitude regarding the future”.
Charlie is represented by Annandale Galleries where Sea Change was part of a stunning exhibition earlier this year titled Road Works. The works all moved beyond the conventional rectangular canvas of paintings, fracturing the pictures surface into a composition of elements strewn across the wall that splintered the rigid formality of the road into an arcane beauty. This then is a fragment of that beauty.
