148. Marlene Sarnoff | You get what you choose

These works are drawn from a much larger collection of 365 works, the product of a disciplined daily practice - the daily making an artwork, photographing it and posting it on Instagram across a year. The resulting work is a combination of social media, technology, and art. 

“Made from a diverse range of found things this is an investigation of the found object be it the rejected, the disposable, the temporary or forgotten objects that are all discovered things that invite the possibilities of artistic practise. Most importantly they permit spontaneity, freedom, chance encounters and the unexpected as well as meeting the practical demands of a daily practice. The result is accidentally miraculous, a meditation on the unexpectedly and an immersion in the pleasures of popular culture. 

It simply is a means of seeing everyday objects in a new light. As Henri Lefebvre, a theorist on this subject, notes the "concept of everydayness (can) reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary.”

Marlene Sarnoff

The subject matter of these paintings is readily accessible. The title of the installation is neatly wrapped. Being a Silent witness to the built environment Glen has observed its geometry.

While Glen’s paintings of buildings are a springboard for his geometric image making he never reduces them to mere compositions. He retains the materiality of the surfaces he observes. They are the vehicle of his spatial narrative. Through them he is able to document a human trail through an urban environment that is the product of unbridled profit making. It is a precious world in these paintings where the uncertainty of unending urban development comes to mind.

These pieces are minimal in form. The variations that mark their individuality trace their making from folded sheets of porcelain. Inspired by  Kintsugi , the Japanese art of mending broken pottery, the traces of the pieces making are left as a marks of its individuality.

The form of the works conjures an intimate domestic setting reflective of Keiko’s childhood memories. Here beauty is sought through making, mending and arrangement. It is controlled and it is driven by a process of working with an innate knowing passed down through generations.

“This work draws on Australia’s long and powerful indigenous history, and its engagement with more recent white history…(and is)…timed to coincide with ANZAC Day, a National Day to commemorate sacrifice.” Pia Larsen

We are observing the contribution and sacrifice of indigenous people to the wider Australian war effort and incorporating an Indigenous honour roll that was first exhibited at the Damien Minton Gallery in Redfern as part of The Coloured Digger II exhibition.

“The Indigenous honour roll titled, He came and joined the colours, mixes 

‘Indigenous Poppies,’ created with the colours of the Australian Aboriginal Flag, designed in 1971by Harold Thomas, and ‘National Poppies’ using the colours and symbols from Australia’s National flag…with particular reference to 2nd World War Sapper Bert Beros’s poem, ‘The Coloured Digger’.” 

Pia Larsen

“The best clothes, the best moves, the best hair”… Soul Train. 

I was watching a video of George Michael dancing on stage in Rio de Janeiro 1991. He could do anything.

Figure out how to put satisfying marks onto a slippery surface. Subtle private marks, not big gestures. Nothing about imparting any wisdom to the world.

….”I wish there could be a club in a plain-looking suburb where you could walk through the door on a Friday night and find a funk paradise - everyone you have ever liked or loved or slept with or rejected or been rejected by, adorable people you’ve never met, strangers looking into each other’s faces and bursting out laughing”…. Helen Garner

Is painting the good object?

Leave some things unanswered.

Jan Fieldsend

Jan Fieldsend is an artist I have collaborated with. And from first hand experience witnessed her acute sensitivity to materials. It extends to humble materials, cast-offs that are transformed into eye catching art works.

Here foiled wall paper has been adjusted with acrylic paint. Jan described that she had not painted since her early twenties and in returning to painting she was hoping to take the risks that she didn’t have the courage to take earlier in her life.

The golden wall paper was chosen for this work with an eye to SLOTs location on a busy road. She can see the lights of passing traffic reflected in the shimmering paper lending it a discotheque quality to her abstract painting.

Anie Nheu

Romancing the colony. 

Romancing the colony is Slot’s response to the Bayanihan Art Project, a series of exhibitions across Sydney galleries focusing on Filipino artists. Here the Filipino, William Gaudinez and the Australian, Valentine Brown offer romantic views of colonisation in their respective countries.

The Filipino, William Gaudinez works in the votive Retablo form introduced by the Spanish one of his countries many colonisers. He is painting a history from read across 500 years from before the Spanish to the end of Spanish colonisation and the establishment of the Filipino Republic. His reading of colonisation connects the mythic Bayanihan past of shared work to a present day amalgamation of the past as series of purposeful and scared interventions.

Valentine Brown’s map of Australia is a folk art form that also represents our continent as seen from outside, the colonialists view. His is illustrating the Banjo Patterson poem Saltbush Bill, a fragment of 19th century folk lore that  records a battle between the long term resident and the new chum fought over rights to this place with out reference to Aboriginal Australian ownership.

These two romantic views of colonisation illustrate mythology as an invention that connects us to the place of our birth irrespective of historical truth, racial origin or length of tenure.

The art of the Filipino/Australian artists Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan is a traveller's tale, of the immigrant and the nomad. They have considered what the traveller leaves behind, and what is carried on with the traveller in works mined from their own family’s migration to Australia.

Recently they have been working in the traveler’s material, discarded carboard cartons. Their 2012 project at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, ”Inhabit another country” was an extrapolation of the homes built along the Mindanao shoreline by the Bujoy, the sea gypsies of the Sulu Sea. Now these encrustations of habitation have become boats, the traveller’s vehicle and the nomads home. These dwelling boats become part of a broader architecture of poverty that is a subject of Filipino Art where it is imbued with an innate humanity. 

The boat is an image with a deep resonance in Australian. From the armadas of convict ships that began Australia  colonisation to the fishing boats ferrying those migrants now euphemistically identified as irregular maritime arrivals. 

Migration has defined Australia. Now the vast migrant ships assembled by the Aquilizan's have become a destination in them selves, hinting at the darkest fate of the immigrant, condemned to a perpetual journey through rejection.

The two shoe-like walking boats exhibited here were made during the Aquilizan's recent residency at the Mosman Gallery that was part of the Bayanihan Art Project, a suite of exhibitions celebrating Filipino culture presented in various Sydney art galleries. And as in the Aquilizan's work for the Bayanihan Art Project this piece addresses the migrants central concerns of home, of be-longing and of utilitarian possessions reconfigured as cultural artefacts. 

The application of paint is a question.

As works are made they accumulate a patina of notations, of corrected errors, revised decisions, and the compromises of craftsmanship that become a history of process. In theory at least it is a truth of the work’s making.

When a work is “re-made” from a previous work this is even more pronounced. An echo of the past lingers, shattered on the surface of the new. Truth again shimmers as a vale of history tempering a view of the new.

Then. 

Paint, tracing like a blind mans finger reveals the object washed of its romanticised past. The truth of the fact revealed is an object and nothing more. Consider the object in paint, balance it with tone, embellish it with colour, make it beautiful and finish it with paint.

Beauty, is it truth? Could beauty conceal truth? Could there be truth either side of the paint? Would truth be the position between what was and what could be? And if it were, would it be painted?

Tony Twigg

Melbourne Aquino’s painting is derived from the urban environment of Manila, which historically is the basis of a Filipino understanding of Cubism known as Barong Barong, a kind of painting drawn from the faceted surfaces of the city’s  shanties. More broadly there is a dialogue between the constructive 

inventiveness brought to found objects by Cubism and the inventiveness of necessity applied to found materials re-interpreted as the furniture of the urban environment. Aquino’s paintings that obviously refer to overlaid and torn posters connect an intuitive understanding of Cubism to the arresting beauty of dilapidation that is the patina of Manila.

I came across Aquino’s painting in a group exhibition at the Astra Gallery in Makati, Metro Manila. When I made the obvious association with torn posters he was quick to point out that his work is all paint. Then looking closely at the works I realised that I was observing a mode of painting rather than the 

representation of an image. These graphically alert paintings hover at an edge, between representation and process, between what we know and what we assume we know. They are beguiling in their beauty and instinctively inventive abstract paintings.

There was treat waiting for me when I mentioned to Aquino that I’d like to see more of his work. Quietly he handed me an iPhone and I started swiping. I collected a beer, found a quiet corner and went on swiping, and then swiped some more. I wasn’t looking at two paintings in a group exhibition. I was 

looking at years of intently focused engagement with a process and an image that had been explored with meticulously detailed observations. Like artists before him Aquino has laid claim to his imagery. These are not paintings of torn posters; it is that torn posters are reminiscent of Melbourne Aquino’s paintings.