31 May - 27 June 2020
Lisa Pang (Lisa Sharp)’s work Crossing 2020 is an intersection. She
describes it as “emblematic of journeys we take, back and forth between places and positions.” It’s a diversion at the behest of the unexpected, which right now is Covid19. It’s a meditation on a space where polarities leach into each other.
Covid19 intervened, in Lisa’s life, isolating her in Sydney from her husband John, the Sharp part of her name and their children in Tokyo. It is but a single event in a labyrinthine life of crossings that began in the British Crown Colony of North Borneo. Lisa’s father, the Pang part of her name had arrived there from China when it was ruled by the British North Borneo Company it. He travelled on to Australia to study Architecture at Sydney University and returned with Lisa’s mum, Janis in 1966. At 12 Lisa came to Australia as a boarding school student.
Three decades later Lisa, a lawyer married with two children started thinking about art. Then, on the 1st of January 2020, she changed her name back to Lisa Pang from Lisa Sharp, not out of frustration with parenthood or marriage but in acknowledgement of something that had surfaced in her art while living in Japan - a leaching of one layer into another by way of a Crossing perhaps?
From across millennia the paper scrolls of China collide with the New York Times reporting the Covid19 crisis in Lisa’s piece Crossing 2020. The present and the past woven together at a moment when the swipe of a credit card is replacing the reverently tendered bank note. Her emphatic punctuation mark resonates with change that is as permanent as the leaves on the plane trees across the road that mark the changing of seasons.
26 July – 29 August
Anya Pesce describes her art-work Rupture elusively. She explains its making process in detail. Since 2015 Rudi, who owns a plastic fabrication shop in Fairfield has welcomed Anya into his factory where she uses a machine that extrudes plexiglas. On this occasion she pushed it beyond its limit. The extruded bubble in the plexiglass burst. In a single uncontrolled action, the brittle sheet of plexiglas became flesh, with flaying lips, enticingly enclosing an orifice. It’s sexy. Like a sports car, like a cocktail bar after dark and like all the shiny advertising that preys on the biology of our brains. Her art is visceral, drenched in a desirability that proposes a new category – Pop Abstraction.
In conversation Anya takes this idea further by describing the way her long education in art has l lead her from painting through installation art to the idea of making as opposed to fabricating. Her works are created in a single gestural action. And in that sense this work, Rupture is the epitome of Anya’s work to date. It is the fact of its own creation, a rupture.
30 August – 26 September
Rochelle Summerfield’s work, Doomed Innocent addresses the fish suffocating in billabongs along the lower Darling River at the height of the last drought. They bring to mind Dorothea Mackellar’s love poem to our land -
My Country.
“I love a sunburnt country …
Of droughts and flooding rains…
Her beauty and her terror
The wide brown land for me!”
Mackellar might be speaking of the Darling and the Menindee Lakes in her next stanza –
“A stark white ring-barked forest
All tragic to the moon”
That blistering monument of dead trees was left by the great-grand-fathers of the cotton farmers up stream on the Darling who have rendered “the wide brown land” - green, with irrigation - water, monetised by government, stored in private lakes and fenced off from the fish swimming under -
“Her pitiless blue sky
When sick at heart, around us
We see the cattle die “
The shear quantity of fish squandered along the Darling River underlines the fallacy of corporate agriculture, the cotton farmers of Cubbie Station and others who harness the land scape to a mechanised mono-culture ignoring the necessity of a diverse ecology. Or as Mackellar put it –
“An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land
All you who have not loved her
You will not understand “
And conversely, any who have loved her will understand Summerfield’s
painting - well.
27 September – 24 October 2020
Michelle Le Dain’s work 20 x 20 in 2020 is her road to here. Not symbolically but literally, she has photographed the road ahead as it spread out in front of her.
An exhibition, One and one is four: The Bauhaus photocollages of Josef Albers at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC) that Michelle saw in 2017 marked the beginning of this project. It traces the road and the various directional marks “written” on it. She described it as “photographs of the path – of connections that have disappeared”. In part a diary, but rather than recording daily events she has articulated her passing in pictures.
Michelle’s road began in Toronto. Her parents moved to Staten Island, the next island on from Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River. An exchange program with Sydney University in 1988 landed her in Australia. Eventually she moved here with her Canadian husband. Two children and a divorce later she enrolled at the National Art School. With her Masters Degree complete a residency at Workspace Academy in Connecticut, (USA} followed, which is when she went to MOMA to see the Albers exhibition in 2017. And then came the road back home, a collection of roads that is an epoch of travel measured in a suite of graphic poems.
25 October – 7 November
Pia Larsen - Line of Sight, Last Words, The Gordian Knot
Charles Cooper - Lying in state
Four years ago, Charles Cooper and Pia Larsen staged an exhibition of flags to coincide with the USA presidential election that was playful.
A few months ago when they proposed a show to coincide the upcoming Presidential election their mood was anything but playful, as is everything to do with the Trump presidency.
In Trump’ s self-declared era of ‘fake news’ the nuanced art of spin was replaced with narcissistic lies. Cant dictated by Rupert Murdoch and emblazoned with the idiotic catch cry, “Make America Great Again” - it begs the question, exactly when was it that America stop being great?
Cooper with his coffin and Larsen with her banners identify the two glaring issues facing the USA at this election. An inability to remedy or manage the Covid-19 pandemic and the racial and economic inequalities identified by the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor that initiated the black lives matter protest movement.
Together they ask a deeper question, are we watching the self identified paragon of freedom and democracy devolve into tacit civil war?
November 8 – 5 December 2020
Carlos Agamez work Dust to Dust documents his performance work of the same name. It references the biblical passage of life; from dust to dust and draws a poetic connection between the land and our passage across it.
He identifies as a migrant but is where he came from of any consequence? He is here now, in this land of many migrants where the past falls from our shoes as we walk, dust to dust.
This show is Slot’s offering to NAIDOC Week. It is our observation of the indigenous idea that we can never own our land, it is that the land owns us. It is a singularly simple and profoundly alert concept that dismisses the sentimental nationalism carried here, like dust on the shoes of successive waves of migration. And it’s an idea that Carlos reflects with a quote – “This we know – the Earth does not belong to man – man belongs to the Earth. This we know… Whatever befalls the Earth – befalls the sons of the Earth.” Chief Seattle The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell.
It’s hard to argue with Carlos’s point as the world begrudging moves to
constrain our climate changing carbon emissions. From dust to dust as we walk from here to there, the pleasure of that passage is all we ever own.