139. Roger Foley-Fogg | Mandala

Curated by Dr Sarah Been Lovett

“Foggs artwork has consistently reached beyond art gallery walls to environments where an unsuspecting non art audience can encounter and interact with the work ... such venues stretch from the Rock and Roll pubs of Foggs youth to SLOT - a window gallery in Redfern where for the past four years each winter, Fogg's works have enticed motorists and pedestrians alike ... This Sunday, 2 days after the Vivid launch of Fogs exhibition Lightshows 60s to now in The Rocks , SLOT will be revealed with two of Fogg's Circle in the Square Mandalas - to the delight of passing motorists and local residents - or visitors who enjoy a drive by viewing.” 

Dr Sarah Breen Lovett

“Most of my ideas come to me intuitively and this makes completing a work of art something like an act of faith. Bringing a work to completion requires a process of observation, contemplation, resilience and trust…Sometimes they are lost or destroyed in the process…”

“A two year residency at the Electron Microscope Unit, Sydney University, resulted in several bodies of work, the starting point of which were scanning electron micrographs I made of the microscopic tests (or skeletons) of single-celled marine protozoans. No larger than grains of sand, these organisms once lived in the waters of Broken Bay at the mouth of the Hawkesbury River before washing up on my local beach where they lay all but invisible to the naked eye.”

“In the work Mapping Home I wanted to present the organisms as a metaphor for the body and chose specimens that resembled heads. A map of the river and its catchment has been superimposed over the image of their bodies, its red and blue road systems serving as a metaphor for blood vessels and arteries.”
 

Jenny Pollak

 

Jenny’s work intrigues for its use of space - collapsing the macro, the man made geographic markings, onto the micro, the single cellular organisms found amongst the sands of Pittwater. In so doing, the work carries a surreal, uncanny feel. This is also arrived at by literally bringing what is invisible to the naked eye into the visible realm – bringing the unfamiliar into the everyday physical world. In the process the viewer looks to the familiar, that is themselves. Images of human skeletal parts and masks come to mind. 

The images carry the weight and feel of paleontological studies with their detailed geographical inscriptions coded onto the endemic organisms which assign them Identity. This contrasts with the lightness of the thin paper support and the way the prints are hung. The images float in the vitrine like biological specimens in 

formaldehyde. 

While the crushed effect gives the images a sculptural feel. It is as if the existence of these documented organisms are being crushed in the anticipation of being tossed out of sight. It is a metaphor for a silent observer’s documentation of the invisible and the voiceless.

Anie Nheu

“This installation explores my connections to country and identity - layered seemingly contradictory and in constant change.

My parents were born in Estonia. The arrived in Australia as children, refugees. I was born and grew up in Sydney. My love fro Sydney has always been…the land, the waters the smells, the sounds…Last year I went to Estonia, to see what I might find in the country of my ancestors…I spent much of my time alone in the forests, of Southern Estonia and also in small cities. Over time the land seeped up through my feet, my breath, my imagination and into me.

On my return to Sydney…my connection to this place took on a new significance…I was driven into a desire to learn more about the Gadigal and Wangle people who have lived in this land…Your country.Violence and injustice continue. How can I acknowledge? …What does this place say? I am constantly changing this installation…All the elements come and go - layers are put on, peeled away, things move around, my story continues…unspoken language given form.”

Anna Jaaniste

Anna has used the enclosed vitrine like space of SLOT to construct a layered installation that begins with what looks like large burnt holes, the trace of slings and arrows perhaps that pierce the glass wall. They are reflected and perhaps deflected by the shield that is the central image of the installation. It works as a mechanism of protection for the self and cultural identity. Read with the title - I am here - there is an exclamation that is an exuberant declaration of being alive in the here and now, in readiness to relate with the everyday pasers-by.

Anie Nheu

“When Tony asked me to do a collaborative work with him at SLOT I was joy…Tony wanted to use my folded yellow papers with his wooden sculptures…I suggested to him, I could make hallows, a circle, to hang the strings of paper folds.

I mentioned to Tony that the installation could be a response to migration, culture past and present. My grandfather migrated from China to Indonesia. He brought the yellow paper with him. As for me, I travelled to Australia from Indonesia as an illegal immigrant. I didn’t carry the yellow paper. We both entered new lands without proper permit papers. By coincidence, I cam across the yellow paper when I visited my sister in Taiwan. 

In Garden arrangement, I burned the yellow papers in the ceramic bowls to pay homage to family tradition and embrace my new culture in Australia. This installation reflects on 

history, spirituality, transition and myth.”

Jayanto Damanik Tan

Tony mentioned to me that he sees his seemingly ad hoc wooden pieces in the form of human figures, a kind of stupa that echos the idea of the body as a temple. Jayanto’s folded “yellow paper” blends the ideas of “Shi Jie” (world) and “Ji Le” (much happiness) with the folded shape of silver tael an ancient form of Chinese currency. Together they offer a spiritual blessing to the world, our garden where simple messages are exchanged and connections made. 

Anie Nheu

“My work explores the spiritual, myths, culture and hybridity often in relation to my cultural diaspora. With in my work I draw on qualities of the absurd and the ambiguous to investigate various archetypal forms. Through this process my art practice explores qualities located around the spiritual and the nomadic, particularly in relation to questions of cultural dislocation. Framed within a multi-disciplinary practice, I address aspects of our psychic and emotional condition through a poetic sensibility, often with theoretical 

elements in visceral effect.”

Yiwon Park

It is said that the magic of pottery resides in what it is and not the meaning it conveys. So it is with Yiwon Park’s art.

This work has a strong narrative drawn from the literature and visual art of Western Culture. However in Yiwon’s hands these archetypal images are set up to destroy symbolic meaning. In effect they elude to a new narrative and hence the title of the installation, Story of story. Still, pottery remains in these works. Yiwon balances immediacy and casual deliberation in sequences and repetitious patterns that propose independent filim-like narratives.

Anie Nheu

Jack Frawley is a linguist and a punter. He delights in the culture of both and their collision in his imagination. The elegance of identifying racing silks worn by jockeys are matched as they might be in a racing guide with the names of their mounts. Any set of names arranged as a list tends to through up a sort of absurd meaning. Any list of racing horse names is a perfect example of this phenomenon that is perfect automatic surrealism. Jack ads to the absurdity by lifting his horses names from a poignant fragment of prose written by Shakespeare. Perhaps the final absurdity is that the list reads more as a translation than trivialisation of Shakespeare’s cautionary sentiment - war is cruel agony.

Charles Cooper, Maryanne Coutts, Lynne Eastaway, Nicole Ellis, Pia Larsen, Frank Littler, Wendy Murray, Margaret Roberts, Tony Twigg  

Charles Cooper and Pier Larsen have assembled an exhibition of nine local artist’s who’s meditations on the national symbol of the U.S.A., the flag playfully considers the American project at the moment of its cyclic rebirth, the Presidential election. 

Li Wenmin has transported the timeless beauty of traditional Chinese painting to Botany Road.  The use of paper cuts and shadow puppetry has converted the Slot window into a light box, a Chinese lantern filled with changing images. Here the experiences and emotions of life are presented with a poetic sensibility.

Born in China and now living in Sydney the shadow play in Li’s work is a response to the displacement she feels living between the cultural and social differences of her two countries. It is the shadow of the complexity of her life.

“In the first half of 2016 I tutored interior architecture students a UNSW. One exercise was to build a model of a rectangular prism with holes cut through from side to side, like a tunnel. For the students the aim was to make something real and tangible, cut and glued together, out of cardboard, a thing. I made two little models myself to re-experience the difficulties and challenges of model making. I left them on my work table.

I used these little boxes as a subject of paintings that try to represent space through colour and shape…Flattening out the 3 dimensional object in light and shade, back onto a two dimensional object in light and shade…described only with colour.

The image is represented in successive paintings…trying to suggest the space between the boxes. In other paintings I am trying ato get the colour values right - turning colour TV back to black and white…As the light changes, as the day goes on, the shadows shift, shorten and then lengthen. /the image cannot be pinned down. It must be approximated, suggested, left to be gassed at.”

Lynn Cook

There is a discipline with this exercise, a study of the same subject captured at various times of day. Lynn suggests that there is no absolute truth, rather the subject displays different aspects of its self at different moments. With the various images assembled on the wall of SLOT I was surprised to find that more that any single image it was the relationships formed between the studies that interested me and informed my 

understanding now the subject.

Anie Nheu