Suellen Symons who has lived in Redfern for many years is moving on. By way of farewell she has assembled an exhibit that recalls a moment, generations ago when the farm land of South Sydney was subdivided into the building sites of Redfern for the home makers of then.

Patiently Suellen has watched as the home makers of her own generation have claimed the same streets. Just as patiently she has watched apartment blocks replace the warehouses built over demolished terraces that replaced the farm-lets hewn from the not so virgin bush of Aboriginal Australia. There is a weariness to Suellen’s patience in her departure.

We all discover a new in the now of our arrival that is defined by what ever was there on that day. Then something changes; there is an improvement, other things are moved out. Decay does battle with sentimentality, then almost before we notice there is comfort in the fragments that survive from when it was that we knew it new.

The joy of Suellen’s parting gift to these, our streets that we have only ever known as old is a glimpse of their newness.

For Suellen it is an obituary for a now, a lament for what was and no-longer is, as she is subsumed by the now of elsewhere.

Juni Salvador tells a migrants tale. Not of riches won or of disgruntlement but of a man who has not found a home. It is the observer’s tale.

He came with his family to a good and steady life in Australia, job, car, a town house and weekends in his artist’s studio at a corner of the dining room table. In Juni’s hometown, Makati a city in Metro Manila his collage works are exhibited with a cohort of artists who are engaged in a protracted dialogue about art and anti-art. Here the same work seems out of context. In response Juni has adopted the new role of observer, a position he has explored across an open-ended series of installations made for SLOT.

These works have their materials in common, second hand art prints sourced from thrift shops in the northern suburbs of Sydney. Re-exhibited as ready-made art, usually with the price tag intact Juni points out that our visual culture is what we hang on our walls. Like the artist himself his materials hover in a provisional space between belonging and not belonging. Discarded by their owners they wait for someone with less discriminating requirements and a comparatively smaller budget to claim them. For Juni this charity 

collapses the province of poverty and opulence into fiction.

Here the handsomely framed print, value $15, which by the way is attributed on the back to Goya, has become the provisional context for a photograph. The image is of a homeless person’s washing hung out to dry on the wire fence of a parking lot. It’s a common sight in Manila where it is a function of necessity for new arrivals. Here draped in fairy lights - Juni weaves it into his migrants tale, be that from the province to Manila or from the third world to the first world. It is a tale of moths drawn to the allure of flashy lights and the migrants loss to them.

Glenn Locklee is a mysterious artist. His conversations, like his urgently painted pictures are littered with insights and confidences that avoid facts. His pictures, like his urgently delivered conversations craft “snap shots” into deliberate looking abstractions. The mystery of course is how the artist weaves life into art and then weaves art back into life.

These pictures seem to begin with a photograph, a snap shot of an image caught on the run between one place and another. It is rendered with the sureness and brevity of direct observation. The rest of the painting recasts the “snap shot” as a bit player in a formal abstract composition. One section of the picture may be a detail of the “snap shot” another may be a meditation on a surface texture drawn from the detail while another is simply an area of paint applied to the surface of the picture. But the subject of the painting might not be the “snap shot”; it might be the passage of thought from one place to 

another that is literally in the painting. This would be the fictional journey from an allusion of reality to a concrete fact, as truthful as the painting is real.

In a sense, these graphically arresting pictures are a bit like comics, they are parables of fact and have as little to do with fiction as they have with a representation of reality. It is a painting of parts.

Christopher Hodges is a Renaissance man, neighbour, raconteur, tourist, connoisseur, motorcyclist, art dealer, loving husband of Helen and artist.

As an artist, he celebrates modernity with an alertness that embraces sensuality. Modernism casts a long shadow in Waterloo, where tall grey apartment blocks reiterate Le Corbusier’s fabled “machine for living”. Beside them Christopher Hodges’ graphic sculpture speaks directly with an understanding of history and an innate experience of now. 

This exactly scaled work ascends and descends through a perfectly calibrated scale connecting a square with a rectangle that incidentally might be a slot before returning to a square. It also conceals a light in a delightfully inadequate manner. By day a string or two of pearls are glimpsed, as a tasteful accent to the white on white minimalism of the work itself. Across the evening and into the night it’s a different story. The work dips into blackness revelling in blazing red and green.

Forget about red stop and green go it’s Christmas, it’s go go go – go the Bunnies, and if you didn’t get it there are a couple of rabbits lurking about to make sure you do, “let’s dance”, and dance, dance, dance the night into light, the morning’s clarity and then the reason of the day. 

This work doesn’t waste a second of its 24-hour cycle as it shuttles us from mood to mood. Sure it’s a perfect work but it avoids the singularity of perfection. And that is why Christophe might be more a Renaissance man than a Modernist.

If you visit my grave,

My tomb will make you dance.

Be sure to bring a tambourine.

Rumi 

This installation explores a senses of belonging and loss. It focuses on a remembrance of Peranakan history and draws a connection between the past and the present, between Indonesia and Sydney. Discarded objects – emptied incense cases installed as a field, this work is offered as  a memorial to the artists late mother and as a gift to the Lunar New Year. It is thought of as is a bridge from the past in Peranakan Sumatra to the here and now of Sydney in a celebration of life.Peranakan is a term dating from the 15th century referring to Chinese migrants to the Malay world, the peninsula of Malaysia and surrounding islands of Indonesia where they developed a hybrid culture principally expressed in food, architecture and costume. Jayanto has also invited our audience to participate in a performance ritual with him and fellow artist Calche Raong.

“For the performance on 23th February at 3pm, I collaborate with Peranakan artist, Clache Raong. We wish to invite the audience to participate in a contemporary high tea ceremony in a long table under the lanterns. 

This performance is dedicated to Peranakan culture and a reminder of the good times that were shared together in life before the loved one passed away. We transcend them with love, the love of delicious Peranakan cakes made by Clache’s mother and the love of sharing them with acquaintances and watch a video of people eating, talking and having a good time and a while meditate to fold paper lantern. The papers lanterns needed to burn to celebrate the new beginning of life and promo harmony. We will wear our mother and grandmother Peranakan outfit. We will record the performance for 

documentation and future viewing. Performance duration will be 

approximately less than one hour.” 

Jayanto Damanik Tan

A few decades ago an invitation arrived. To an exhibition of Sydney Harbour paintings by Julian Twigg at the James Harvey Gallery. It was a surprise, because until then I’d been thinking of myself, Tony Twigg as the only Twigg in Australian art.

Years went by, swapping invitations to shows with Julian until I emailed him with the unlikely news that I had found another Twigg in Australian art. A marine artist whose picture of Sydney Harbour had turned up at Davidsons Auction House in Annandale.

Almost nothing is known of A. Twigg beyond a small collection of pictures that place his sailing boats on Sydney Harbour rendered with a startling schematic clarity. In that his work is not unlike Julian Twigg’s, but unlike Julian, A. Twigg painted portraits of boats. A profession described with an advertisement in the Business Cards column on page 1 of the Sydney Morning Herald, 10 November 1876, “Balmain Regatta – Owners of racing boats wishing to have a PAINTING of their boat with a view of the regatta can have them done on application to A. Twigg, Marine Artist No 10 Erskine St.” 

The photocopies here are of the 2 works by A. Twigg sold through Davidsons Auction House. I found another sold by the Bridget McDonnell Gallery in Melbourne. There is a painting of the Ballina Ferry in the collection of the Mitchell Library and one other, The Cimba & pilot boat through Sydney Heads. 5 known paintings and if the bidding at Davadisons Auction was an indication they are prised - the A. Twigg got a good price.

The oil painting of boats, Sailing Rose Bay was painted by Julian Twigg in 2017. Australian Galleries who represent Julian describe him as a “Painter, ceramicist and printmaker (who) completed a Diploma of Visual Art at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2000. His impasto paintings of maritime scenes are constructed from simplified forms and broad colour…Twigg’s works have been exhibited in Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia…”

My own work, A sail, by Tony Twigg is from a suite of such works made in 1980 as I considered taking on the life of an artist. Was it a decision or simply an eventuality, I don’t recall? But if the poetry of a boat is given to our shared name, we have sailed it through Australian Art, for a century and a half.  

Anca Frankenhaeuser is a dancer, a celebrated dancer and a choreographer who traveled from Finland to London to dance with the London Contemporary Dance Theatre. And in the dance of life she found Patrick who danced her on to Australia, “Under the moonlight” as David Bowie sang “this serious 

moonlight, lets dance, lets dance, dance, dance, dance…………”

For Anca an unusual thing started happening when she reached Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald began arriving, tossed over the front fence skidding to a halt on the damp grass rolled in glad wrap.The silvery plastic sheet could only be saved - wound relentlessly around itself - growing more substantial day by day. As Anca said, this isn’t plastic wound around a form; it’s plastic all the way through. On she wound - in an elaborate calculation based on a time / weight ratio her winding became 2,375 days worth that is 6 years and 6 months of winding. Or as Patrick put it, “I watch television and Anca does this at the same time.”

With time, the silvery plastic objects like the silvery plastic sheets could only be saved. Slipped in between things around the house. Between keepsakes, photographs and nick-knacks along with utensils and books. As ponderous perhaps as the newspaper they waited, then they gestated into art.

One idea of art is that it must be seen to become art. In other words, it needs to sit on something. A problem Anca solved on through-out night, when the street was littered with plastic items that had lost their function at the moment they hit the footpath. Somewhere between there and here, all that plastic, for want of a better word, became an art exhibition.

Of course Anca’s objects are vessels. They hold her whimsy, her inventiveness, her sense of this way rather than that way. They plot a place to dwell, behind the newspaper and the television, oblivious to the concerns of either, in freedom.

Like many artists, Anie Nheu sees her life reflected in her art. She feels that because her life went one way rather than another her art has permission to follow. it becomes an exercise in mapping a life across generations to accommodate ancestors and locate art with in the pantheon of life concerns.

Anie was born on the road, as she said “moving from place to place with my parents since the civil war in East Timor”. To live a life, as she describes it, in 3 parts, drawn into a “harmonious whole” . This is the map. Sketched out on 3 hessian bags stitched together with twine. Anie’s painting has settled across the surface in a way that does not obscure its origin.

Of course the work is a painting, symbolic of nothing more or less than itself. It gracefully observes the conventions of abstraction and achieves a beauty that is new to the hessian sacks. But Anie has included some jarring elements. The work is improbably placed on the wall, as if she plans to continue working on it rather than display it for our consideration. There is a chair, arbitrarily placed that contradicts our scale. And far off to the side, a golden oval that could be something, perhaps someone, venerated. The painting that is a map is given a space that is not ours. It is somewhere else.

Paean, the title, what does it mean? “A song of praise”, of a life gracefully charted? From some other time to now the whole of life so far, laid out for consideration? A moment of quiet pleasure, of walking along a street to encounter something that is a lot like art, if not the very thing that art is.