192. David Helmers | Thin skinned
6 December 2020 – 2 January 2021
David Helmers is a thinker. He is a philosopher and an academic who has considered our experience of objects. Some of which are the objects that he makes. They are simultaneously rigid and so light that they seem to be floating up from the floor of SLOT.
The idea that connects David’s philosophy to his art is “New Materialism”. This he explains is the appreciation of an object’s intrinsic qualities as opposed to those imposed by the social associations it provokes. He illustrated the idea by considering an Yves Saint Laurent spots coat, you might appreciate it because of its fine tailoring or as the entry price to a particular social set.
In art this dichotomy is reflected in the 20th century idea of abstract art that abandoned the need for illusion and symbology. Our experience of these art objects is restricted to an experience of their physical properties. It follows then that the experience of an art object would be much the same as our experience of a similar non-art object. What would change is the mode of our appreciation of the object. David is proposing that we accord all objects the consideration we reserve for art. In this way art expands our appreciation of the physical world and leads to a deeper understand of it.
Since then the nature of art has changed. A need for narrative has brought a sense of meaning-full-ness into an understanding of visual art objects. In various ways we expect to be able to read them, which I think throws up the dichotomy that David is considering. Perceptively so I feel, as we enter an era where our experience of the physical object and the mediated object are becoming interchangeable.
193. Adam Laerkesen | Drunk on the moon
3 January – 6 February 2021
Adam Laerkesen’s arresting installation reads like a still life. It is set out in a clear theatrical manner that seems to me, allegorical. And Adam agrees, inviting the obvious question – so what’s the allegory? To which he replies, “I like to leave that a bit open-ended.”
“There’s a drunken figure on the left,” he explains - I can see it sprawled across a lectern, drunk on prayer and wine, “and a female voice, among the woods under a full moon” he continues. And yes there is a malevolence lurking for me in the form of a classically draped ironing board she-wolf, tensed and ready to pounce. Ridden by a cloven-footed tree ladder I wonder? “No” advises Adam, “it’s just a hoof that I carved at the end of a piece of wood as a conclusion”.
After a while our conversation turned to the mythological figures Bob Dylan refers to in his songs. Which left me wondering, when later that night I found myself listening to “Isis” on Dylan’s, Desire album.
“I married Isis on the fifth day of May – but could not hold on to her very long – so I cut off my hair and rode straight away – for the wild unknown country where I could not go wrong…Isis, oh Isis, you mystical child – what drives me to you is what drives me insane – I still can remember the way that you smiled - on the fifth day of May in the drizzling rain.” Google the song’s meaning and you will read – “Isis is a mystery, and the story makes no real sense – it is just a set of irrational images without the sequence that we so crave. And that’s why it works. It tempts you to think there is a meaningful sequence, but as you try to grab it, it walks away.”
Or as a friend of mine pointed out recently, the trick to meaning-fullness is in the gaps you leave between things for the viewer’s mind to fill in later. It keeps the work alive and assures its relevance to an audience. As a method it took Dylan from speed freak rock star to Nobel Laureate and it seems to work for Adam Laerkesen as well.
7 February – 6 March
Jayanto Tan’s installation, Mantra, I’m a ghost in my own home is SLOTs offering in celebration of Chinese New Year.
For Jayanto New Year is poignant. The Chines character, Double Happiness that is both the subject and form of his installation is a celebration of marriage. In this case, perhaps it articulates remnant marriages and marriages yet to be forged between Jayanto and his many homes.
Jayanto is Chinese, although he was born in Indonesia, which casts him as a part of many sub-croups including the Peranakan culture. That is the culture of Chinese immigrants who assimilated the Malay culture and in the process established a uniquely hybrid culture expressed in dress, cuisine and architecture. Now Jayanto is also an Australian, a condition that he has wittily summarised with the invention of the Pandan Lamington, pandan being a Malay food additive that turns everything an optimistic green colour. Here in the wide brown land a green lamington offers double happiness for sure. One can be found on the left in Jayanto’s finely sculptured
ceramic work where it has been married with other delicacies into a wreath, a European symbol that simultaneously celebrates birth and death as the unity of eternal life.
In response the Double Happiness of Jayanto’s piece has been deeply considered. As he observes “the thousands text of ‘Double Happiness’ could read as my mantra for future happiness…Perhaps there is no future!”
7 March – 9 April 2021
Freya Jobbins is quick to point out that her work Firewall No 1 is part of a series. Each piece is engaged with the “firewalls” that people set up in public spaces to isolate themselves from engagement. She is thinking of noise reducing headphones and the habit people have of scanning their phones that for Freya, says do not approach me. Her over-riding interest here is the mask, in this case constructed from surrealistically disassembled body parts harvested from dolls. These works simultaneously conceal and reveal.
Freya was born in Johannesburg. Her parents migrated there from Germany and in 1974 they moved on to Australia, which handed Freya a life in the western suburbs of Sydney. After high school in Campbeltown she joined the police force. A brutal car accident brought her a second marriage, 2 more children and when they started going to school the opportunity to make art. Now 55 and engaged in a vigorous art practice in Picton on Sydney’s western edge she commented “I don’t make art to sell, I make it as commentary, to use my voice”.
It is impossible to avoid the obvious connection between Freya’s mask and the Covid 19 mask that has replaced sunglasses as the mask of choice on Sydney public transport. Like the Niqab it hints at exoticism by focusing our attention on the unusually necked eyes of the people we encounter and offers mystery by concealing their age. Or as Saima Islam commented in a facebook post, “I love my freedom that burka and niqab has provided me. I love the way it give me courage to behaviour among all the other individual and be confident toward the journey of life.” Above all the Covid 19 mask provides a safe position from which to observe the world and the people encountered there. As opposed to for example the Venetian carnival mask that obscures the eyes in a manner that permits an evening of aberrant behaviour. Here Freya’s presents a final dichotomy, chillingly the clear and unmasked beauty of a young woman is concealed beneath a lather of hands that bares an uncanny resemblance to the mask of Hannibal Lector.
11 April – 8 May 2001
Juni Salvador is a Filipino artist living in Australia. He came here with his family in 2007. Since then he has “shuttled” between his family in Sydney and his colleagues and an art practise in Manila.
All was well, then Covid 19 hit. Juni was in Manila and on his way to the airport when Australia’s international border closed. His flight was cancelled. Then Manila went into lock-down. He was marooned in the small apartment he and his wife maintain there. Roadblocks were set up between city sectors to control the spread of the virus. Juni waited it out, for months until an Australian repatriation flight landed him back in Sydney, which is where he sat as 3 three meals a day came and went for his 2 weeks of quarantine. He had brought notebooks and pencils to make an in-quarantine art. However his life in quarantine became one of silence, of reflection a meditation on his isolation, in an immediate sense and more generally in both Australia and the Philippines.
In Sydney Juni has made a number of installations for SLOT. Mostly they have celebrated his delight in Op Shops. Half charity, half bargain stores they recycle the discarded possessions of the “middle class” deemed “too good to through away”. As they say, “it’s a first world problem”. For Juni these shops offer a portrait of Australia spelt out in objects so valued that they are sold twice. Never would he remove the vital price tag that precisely quantifies the value of each item. In Juni’s hands these items become the landscape or as in this piece, the room-scape of his adopted home. Its where he sat, gazing across the carpet at an ever-growing pagoda of take-away food containers.
Juni drew my attention to the picture at the centre of his installation, oil on canvas by I. Martinoc (?) of a European landscape, value - $20.00. “Of course it’s kitsch” he said “but I like something about it”. And true, it’s hard not to be caught gazing at a far distant mountain almost obscured by the vastness of pictorial space. In the glorious isolation that this insignificant picture offers it’s easy to wonder if Australia found Juni as he gazed out of his quarantine hotel room.
9 May – 5 June 2021
Joe Frosts work; Miss Universe 2011 is offered as a compliment to his concurrent exhibition, Riders and Terrains, May 27 – June 19 at Liverpool St Gallery, 243A
Liverpool Street, Darlinghurst.
This work, which possibly offers some historical context to Joe’s current show, could more exactly be titled Miss Universal. With her clear hand, her third eye and lumbering breasts she is more mother than candidate in a beauty pageant .
A T-shirt dropped on a chair salutes the masterfully painted figure. It’s the painter’s shirt - left as a parting gesture perhaps? Perhaps as a kind of flourish, like a signature indicating that the act of painting has concluded and that the painting is now finished? Joe commented that he could see something cosmic in a blue smear on the right hand side of the shirt hinting that it may indeed be the universe that gave rise to his loosely assembled “mother”.
With that simple gesture Joe proposes a dichotomy. The apparent spontaneity of his painting belies its deliberate consideration. The fact that his freshly brushed marks hang together with poise and calibration is no accident. It’s the product of long and deliberate manipulation, which sits in stark contrast to the paint-splattered shirt. It is accidental.
There is a truth in the accidental application of paint that the painter
attempts to emulate. It is free, expressed with out inhibition or pretense. The paint is, as they say permitted to be paint and sit, with our reference to illusion on its surface. In this case little more than a paint rag.
198. Julie Green | Two drawings 2018/2019
6 June - 4 July 2021
Julie Green is not big. If you were to meet her you would likely think of her as a petite woman. Who’s eyes begin to sparkle as she describes a life that is anything but small.
From high school in the eastern suburbs to art school with time off in New York to study tap dancing. The bands, the galleries, on to Europe back to Sydney, finish art school, a job working for Ray Hughes in his art galley. She went on to work in a bookstore before travelling across Canada’s sub Arctic tundra with Louis Nowra and Vincent Ward researching Ward’s epic film Map of the Human Heart. Back in Sydney she opened her own gallery, which she describes as a meditation on verbal and nonverbal expression. There was an M.A. in art therapy, in 2000 study at Charlie Sheard’s studio schoolthat “made the bottom fall out of my taste bucket”.
Standing in front of Julie’s two drawings it’s their size and the scale of her marks that are arresting. It’s big and Julie explains, “after 20 years of sero-negative arthritis a new biologic drug treatment Humira gave me back my body”. That was a couple of years ago when Trump was in power and Sydney gasped under a blanket of smoke. Julie’s “fucked-up American flag” and heroically defiant tree are swathed in a celebration of mark making that revels in her new found freedom. She explained that she lay on the paper sheets first stretching toe to finger to mark her scale on the drawing. It follows that the arc of her drawn line is the arc of her reach. In this way Julie observes the idea that expressionist art is the physical measure of the artist while a reading of its subject is a measure of the observer’s intellect.
It might be a long bow to draw but in an art work there is a marriage between the artist and the viewer. Each arriving at roughly the same spot from different directions. For a moment caught in a single image before departing on divergent paths, each carrying perhaps, for a while at least some echo of their shared meditation. And so it is with Julie’s drawings.
