245. Vivien Haley | Vestige
21 December – 24 January
Arriving in Sydney as an 11-year-old with her emigrated parents Vivien Haley recalls the landscape as holding her attention. Five years later she was studying art. Painting first with Bill Brown, Robert Eddy and Peter Upward then sculpture with Ian Mackay and Ron Robertson-Swan, all luminaries of the Sydney art world in the 1970’s.
Art school ended, Vivien had a grant that gave her a studio in Darlinghurst, she had a job working for Rudy Komon, the gallery owner of the time, and working next for Charles Hewitt, the art framer of the time. Constantly moving, finding shows, making a life as she recalled, in a world that was making way for feminism.
Then came Wollongong, Stanwell Park, a guy flying a hang-glider and meeting Ian Gentle. Ian was a cult artist around Wollongong during the 1980’s when he made a unique contribution to Australian art by devising imagery that was imbued with our landscape. There was a child,
for Vivien, a job at Wollongong University and works purchased by the Wollongong City Gallery that documented her walks through the bush and along the beaches of Wollongong.
As life unfolded and Vivien’s art-making built a history, event by event it became clear that her subject was never the landscape, but rather observations made while moving through the landscape.
Now Vivien lives in an apartment around the corner from SLOT. These examples of her art are drawn from a larger collection exhibited at the Perc Tucker Gallery, Townsville
in 2023. The subject she says is “A new type of rock called plastiglomerate…emerging on our foreshores, as natural sediments and organic debris fuse with burnt and melted plastic.” The landscape, that once offered Vivian an innocent promise is now forebodingly tarnished. Perhaps it is simply the effluxion of life to progress from promise to regret but is it also our legacy to the planet?
246. Nguyen Nam Dong | Paintings
25 January – 28 February
This show is about friendship
There are 2 voices here, the voice of the artist, Nguyen Nam Dong Dong, the voice of Ann Proctor, their friendship that is encapsulated in this collection of work.
Ann is probably best described as an art academic. She travelled the world with her partner before arriving in Vietnam. A happenstance introduced her to Dong, variously described as a happy go lucky sort of guy, a second-hand dealer, connoisseur of Vietnamese beer, self-taught outsider artist, Shakespeare fan and finally motorbike chauffeur who accompanied Ann on her study of village temples around Hanoi as she worked on her PhD.
Another of Dong’s unusual qualities is a desire to give his art to friends. In Ann he found an enthusiastic recipient. Dong’s art travels with Ann. Respectfully packed and unpacked between stops on its journey to SLOT where it pauses, just long enough to become a consideration of the double voice in art, the artist and those who take responsibility for the artist’s work.
The miracle that preserves art after it leaves the artist's hands is a multi-faceted one. Monetary value ensures longevity, who would lose a Vincent van Gogh painting? There is faith, the sort of thing that preserved Vincent van Gogh paintings while they slowly acquired their startling value. And there is friendship, the thing that holds the heart in a connection with the artist through their pictures. This is the miracle that Ann and Dong are sharing with you.
247. Vivienne Dadour | The Lebanese Quarter Redfern
Lebanon/Syria to Redfern 1886 1 March – 4 April
Vivienne Dadour traces the story of the descendants of a Syrian migrant family who first settled in Redfern in the late nineteenth century. She notes that this history is commemorated by a public plaque; yet, when considering the suburb’s current demographics, this deeply embedded past is not immediately visible. The place becomes a site of movement, shaped by continual change in government legislation, social attitudes, and successive waves of “visitors.”
Vivienne’s family migrated in search of a better life, fleeing the socio-political pressures of the Ottoman governance. Her great-grandparents joined an established settlement to preserve cultural ties and cultivate a sense of belonging in unfamiliar territory.
This dynamic reveals a tension between the relative permanence of physical place and the shifting cultural identities that inhabit and redefine it over time. The evolving and the enduring rarely move in tandem — a pattern that has accelerated since the Second World War and has profoundly shaped contemporary Australia.