119. Arthur Apanski | Excess and hope for little Ethan

It is not surprising to learn that Arthur studied theatre production, his expansive paintings construct a theatrical narrative. It is surprising, however, to learn that he is a self-taught artist, only coming to painting full-time in 2006 after moving to the Illawarra, south of Sydney.

His meticulously painted canvases range in subject matter, political, environmental, humanitarian all proactive. Their hyper-real, surreal imagery create a tension between the man-made and the nature world. 

Arthur is interested in exploring possible futures and the role that we play in them.

This painting, Excess and hope for little Ethan (2012), fuses notions of fertility and bounty with a darker-side of mortality – grenades, a gas mask and ghostly sculls adorn a cyborg-like male figure composites of nostalgic terror reminding us of the historical markers that guide our navigation of this place, our planet. 

This exhibition has been facilitated by artist Mai Nguyen-Long as part of Slot’s Illawarra Series.

Jayanto’s tea bags hang with beauty, delicately stained by dried tannin into a kind of exoticism that we are quick to think of as Asian. Jayanto is from Indonesia. But he’s just as quick to point out that the tea bag was invented somewhere in America during the 1970’s while tea is of course, Chinese, like him.

“I created Conversations with used tea bags, which I began collecting in 1997. Each tea bag…contains a memory of either my family or my friends. In our conversations, every tea bag tells a story of daily life’s grievances and joys. I embrace their history and intertwine it with my own. I encourage viewers to recognise flesh, mind and spirit in order to create individual meaning.” This is how Jayanto described his tea bag installation to me and he continued, “Nothing is ever wasted and all materials of waste contain their unique history. They serve as tactile reminders of the past and give meaning to the present.”

On the day Jayanto installed this piece and over yet another cup of tea his conversation turned to Indonesia’s infamous Black May, race riots that occurred in May 1998 – triggered by food shortages and mass unemployment they eventually led to the resignation of Indonesia’s President Suharto and the fall of his government. The main target of the violence was the ethnic Chinese, however, most of the people who died in the riots were the Indonesian looters of the Chinese owned shops. Jayanto offered the title of Bessie Smiths immortal song of racial intolerance “Strange Fruit” to sum up his piece.

Curated by Tony Twigg

Each year since 1951 the Blake Prize for religious art has been offered to Australians. Like the more famous Archibald Prize it encourages artists to lend their skills to a higher calling. This year SLOT is responding to the Blake Prize with an exhibition of religious and meta-religious art.

My interest in religious art began in Manila while watching the annual Black Nazarene procession – when an ancient figure of Christ is paraded in the street through such frenzy that each year several people are crushed to death. After the figure of Christ passed I was surprised to see another making its way through the crowd then another and another. Patiently it was explained to me that it is the image that is sacred not the object and while there are many shadow objects there is one intangible image.

This idea inverts our usual understanding of art where worthiness is measured by an objects unique artistic merit irrespective of its subject matter while copies are shunned.

In our exhibition that contrasts religious and secular art colonialism emerges as the common concern. That religious art was employed as an instrument of colonisation in South East Asia is demonstrated by the banner of Thanh Teresa that was made for a Saigon (Ho Chi Min City) church in 1952 while the Viet Minh were fighting for Vietnam’s independence from France. The Banner opulently celebrates the French, Saint Therese of the child of Jesus, a nun surrounded here by Vietnamese symbols of good luck firmly amalgamated with the Fleur de Lis, a symbol that has united the holy trinity and the French nation since the middle ages.

In the Philippines veneration of religious images has morphed into a personal identification with religious figures. The Virgin Mary has become the Filipina mother and the Santo Nino, the child Christ has become the Filipino child, both possessed by the church physically and meta-physically in an endlessly repeating cycle.

In contrast to the arcane art of a single absolute faith SLOT offers meta-religious art, an unholy hegemony of Nationalism, leftist politics and abstraction, the faith of modernity perhaps.

But while it might be tempting to identify Modernism as a religion it would entail ignoring a central ideal, the single word shouted by Joko Widodo at the conclusion of his inauguration speech as President of Indonesia – MEDREKA freedom – the faith of modernities meta-religion.

Gomeroi attacking Major Mitchell and his native companion

Gomeroi (Kamilaroi or Gamilaroi) people form one of the largest indigenous nations of Australia. They live in an area of north western New South Wales stretching from Murrurundi in the upper Hunter to Mungindi on the Queensland border and have a fierce reputation as warriors. Major Mitchell was Australia’s fourth Surveyor General and the explorer who coined the phrase “Australia Felix” to describe the glorious landscape tended by the Gomeroi. He was also the first nonAboriginal to visit Moree where Suzy Evans 

people, the Gomeroi live. Most of the trees that Major Mitchell famously marked, “like dogs” have gone and along with them trees carved by the Gomeroi as funerary markers. But the record of violent confrontation that is associated with Mitchell’s three expeditions remains.

Suzy said that she had Albert Tucker’s portraits of Australian explorers and the paintings of Sydney Nolan in mid when she made her work. She admires their pictures, in particular the way that Tucker paints parrots alighting on the heads of his explorers but cant help finding their interpretation of the genocidal appropriation of the Australian landscape absurd. In particular it’s hard to reconcile their mythology of a hostile and punishing landscape with Mitchell’s observation of an “Australia Felix”, the fortunate and bountiful Australia. It reminds us that mythology is simply myth and that when it comes to a telling of our countries history our mythic representation rests is in the hands of our artists.

Suzy Evans splendid work gives us a diminutive Major Mitchell being seen off the wall by a flight of Gomeroi. She takes on her role as myth-maker as surely as she does the role of image maker in this work that was exhibited the recent Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award held at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. Where Suzy says with delight it colonised an entire wall.

Curated by Mai Nguyen-Long

“Born in Hanoi, Australian artist George Burchett grew up in exile. 15 years later he was granted his rightful citizenship. By this time he had lived in Vietnam, Russia, Bulgaria, Cambodia, and France. After relocating to Australia…a 2006 visit to Hanoi confirmed his decision to return and live there.

This SLOT work has its genesis in an appreciation for 1925-1945 historical drawings, from the era of French colonisation, combined with Burchett’s own research into his father’s journalistic photographs, spanning 1954-1966, and including a close association with the independence leader Ho Chi Minh. 

The figure in conical hat is…his father…repeated…as if some disposable, faceless stereotype. Burchett comments ‘propaganda, is a statement of stubborn persistence and resistance.’ Suspended in space like apparitions…these figures seem determined to be recognised, to form a statement of belonging all of their own. An inked finger, violent, impertinent, dirty, punctuates the top left hand area of the work, titled Democracy.

This work is…a Memoriam to the life of Burchett’s Father…Wilfred Burchett was an Australian (minus 17 years of barred citizenship) with an interest in presenting news stories from more than one perspective…

Whatever the case or situation, the impact upon Burchett, as an individual and as artist, would be inevitable…the multiple forces that have pained, scarred and enriched his life…a testimony to the intergenerational effects of war.”

Mai Nguyen-Long

Curated by Mai Nguyen-Long

American photographer and cinematographer Jamie Maxtone-Graham has produced numerous portfolios since moving to Hanoi in 2007. Through his work, he looks to define his understanding of life in Vietnam that began with a visit in 1990 to shoot the feature documentary From Hollywood to Hanoi.

In 2007 Maxtone-Graham became a Fulbright Research Fellow with the idea of photographing Western influence on contemporary Vietnamese youth culture.  He discovered that “none of it is…clear or neat or simple...It's very nuanced and complex.”  While direct Western influence may exist, it is filtered through the developed countries of the region: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan’. State of Youth, the resulting portfolio contains 40 images in total.

With a background as a commercial and narrative cinematographer in New York and Los Angeles, his recent series provokes viewers presumed associations, with works that are not ideological or representative, but rather as he comments “open-ended…no question to answer or theme to impose”.

For Wendy Bornholdt SLOT is not empty.

She has given us the space of SLOT conditioned, caressed perhaps with a single, elegantly spare gesture. A two word statement on the window that reads: “Low Tide”.

Her text is both literature and a graphic intervention. As Wendy observed, “it is difficult to look at a word and understand it with out saying it and so generate an image – it’s a place to go – to the beach at low tide whence and where there is much to find.”

Read graphically the text also operates as a kind of boundary marker. Its all here now but might not be when the tide comes in.  Stuck on the surface of the window the text can’t help mingling with the reflections of our neighbourhood. Here, cars and trucks grind past along the road, more vehicles are abandoned beside it, a butcher, $2 shop, the tailor’s sign relentlessly flashing - all swimming in the surface of the window around Wendy’s sliver of text. It offers nothing more to the inside wall of SLOT than a shadow of its self and then only for a few hours each morning. Yet it draws a mysterious curtain across the wall that persists as a meditation on the poetry of absence and transience.

Wendy has given us back our place with the invitation to imagine it other wise.

To describe Russell Jeff, as an outsider artist is one way of saying that his art has yet to be absorbed by the thin veneer that is Sydney’s art word. The sustained passion of his remarkable body of work stands oblivious to the mannered conventions of our art scene. 

Russell Jeff invented this picture. While referring, perhaps unwittingly to both the natural world and the idea of art his collection of painted marks, fastidiously arranged flicks and dots convey the emotional depth of a world known only to Russell Jeff that he will share with anyone who cares to spend time with his painting.

Russel was adopted by a couple from Sutherland who lived there until 1968 when they moved to Sawtell near Coffs Harbour. Russel went on to leave school at 16. Worked as a labourer for a couple of years before joining the air force at 19. They took Russell as a boy, 4 years later they gave Russell back - the man who went on working as a labourer along the north coast. About 15 years ago he moved to Sydney. He was homeless for a while working at Flemington market. As he reached 50 illness struck, massive surgery to his stomach and bowel put him into “housing”, the department of housing flats around the corner from SLOT in Waterloo. For a while he had a job in a plastics factory in Gymea that lasted until the Dollar hit parity with the US currency and since then, he’s been on the “rock and roll”. A TV show inspired Russell to paint. He bought some brushes, found some materials and began. 4 years later he has made a visionary body work. It is the sort of journey that ennobles the human sprit. 

Maryanne Coutts’s drawing Dress code is a kind of diary. Two years ago she set out to record her clothing choices on a daily basis and now she has brought her document to Slot.

When Maryanne began her objective was to faithfully document the clothes she wore but, with time, the project has grown to reflect other aspects of her life. When she travels she makes a record in her sketchbook, while working in her studio Maryanne’s daily notes become meditative studies of her costume. In her office, Maryanne is also Head of Drawing at the National Art School in Darlinghurst, her notes are made on paper that she finds there. Papers that travel across her desk seem to temper her focus on the self and inspire an impersonal reading of her costume.

Of course all art is a reflection of the artist’s life and preoccupations. This piece though abandons the convention of an artist working in a consistent manner. It proposes the idea that an artist may choose a drawing style in the same way that any one of us might choose our clothes, capriciously inconsistently - but nevertheless and hopefully appropriate to the dress code of the occasion.

We may dress to be seen, we may dress to avoid detection, or pull on a pair of jeans 

because its autumn. In Maryanne’s playful work the eddies and rushes of life are laid out in her simple choices of clobber. Spread out before us is a year of Maryanne’s life.

Ask Roger Foley-Fogg when he made his Psychedelic mandalas he will reply that it was when he was a kid. That’s when he started noticing the diffused opalescent light that has guided his long life of illumination.

He catalogues these Psychedelic mandalas dating from 1966, which is when Life magazine ran a cover story on the phoneme of Psychedelic art. For Roger who worked under the name Elis D. Fogg as the wizard of rock show lighting during the late 60’s and 70’s the interest in his opalescent light had become rapturous. His vision roared with the voice of rock and roll to become the immersive art of the counter culture.

The history of Fogg’s art is also the history of lighting technology. Defining and redefining what is possible morphed Roger’s art from the theatre to the gallery wall. The availability of LED lights, low voltage circuits and simple digital technology permitted this Psychedelic mandala, the current manifestation of Rogers’s vision that was assembled for his retrospective at Hazlehurst Gallery in 2010.

This work then has its date 1966 – 2010, emphasising the fact that this is the vision that propelled Roger Foley-Fogg’s life, a perception of psychedelic meditation.

Marie McMahon’s paintings are a kind of landscape. A reconstruction assembled from 

observational notes that reduce the landscape to its component parts.

These colour ribbons describe afternoons spent examining the rock ledges of Botany Bay that are exposed between the tides. A zonation that is littered as she describes poetically “with flotsam and jetsam not entirely sea or land where sponges, pumice and ambiguous water-worn objects are strewn between rock-holes reflecting the sky in hemispheres of water. “

A zonation she explains is a natural history description “of the patterns of distribution of life forms - and their concentration in bands or zones of colour and texture.” And she comments - “I’ve borrowed the word to describe an aesthetic zonation where elements are arranged in bands and zones, or coloured or shaped or textured to repeat the zonation found in nature.”

The romanticism of Marie’s imagery is objectified in her paintings that are simultaneously an invention of a new reality on the paintings surface and a representation of something diagrammatically that records an observed zonation.