30. Tony Twigg | 6 Fish boxes
When I arrived in Kuala Lumpur in late 2004 to spend a year as artist in residence at Rimbun Dahan on the out skirts of KL I was lost for a place to begin. One afternoon walking around my semi-rural neighbourhood I came across a stack of timber pallets apparently discarded beside the road. I was fascinated by them.
In time I discovered that they were used to place between tubs of fish so that they could be stacked. I collected a few of them, which I displayed in my studio. Collected some more and began working with them as collage elements. While each of the pallets was the same size and design and made from similar off-cut timber discarded from a sawmill, each pallet differed from the others to accommodate the various dimensions of the timber used to make it.
As I worked on my collage pieces I noticed that my decisions were conditioned by the alignment of timbers within each pallet. I realised that I had embarked on a set of collaborative works. My decisions were preempted by one or many Malaysian artisans working in a remote kampong far from my place at the western edge of Malaysian society. In my opinion his was genuinely a cross-cultural work. To me this hand full of works proposed many others that evolved during my residence, however this group remained intact. They were exhibited in a window gallery in Singapore and were the centrepiece of an exhibition that concluded my residency. Works from that show were sold, some went to Taksu Gallery, a commercial gallery in Singapore and others went to Galleria Duemila in Manila for a second showing - this group were brought back to Sydney with me when I returned. Now they are in SLOT.
Tony Twigg
Constantine Nicholas is a highly literate artist, in both the realm of ideas and the process of making art.
His works, with their applied gold leaf and glistening laters of vanish evoke the opulence of a past civilisation that on closer inspection reveals its self to be ours.
It’s a cautionary tale that he offers of our ecology in peril and the consequences of ignoring the situation read at a universal level.
32. Roberto M.A. Robles | From the Old Pond, I Ponder
I encountered the works of Roberto Robles at Galleria Duemila in Manila.
Passing them there as I came and went, they slowly revealed their compassionate depth to me. Years later I happened to be in Manila when his show opened “his annual exhibition at the Galleria Duemila, entitled “From the Old Pond I Ponder…The title comes from a popular 300-year old haiku by Matsuo Basho to which Robles constantly refers for renewed inner peace and inspiration.”
“The Old Pond series is part of a continuing process of seeing into his own mind and finding serenity in everything, especially through nature. This contemplative nature is also present in Basho’s haiku, where he presents his own mind as timeless and endless, serene and potent.”
“A parallel theme Robles aims to explore in this exhibit is the concept of art as object and the object as art. This idea is consistent with those of the Zen artist who tries to suggest the simplest possible means the inherent nature of the aesthetic object. His job is to suggest the essence, the eternal qualities of the
object.”
“Robles will incorporate a new element in this exhibition in response to the dimensions of the gallery’s new space. He has prepared small paper sculptures echoing the essence of a kite and other familiar objects.
These will be presented as part of an installation work to compliment the wall-bound works. Like the paintings and consistent with his style in stone sculptures, Robles emphasises on the quality of rawness alluding to the ideas of natural and unfinished…And in this search, Robles continues to see the old pond as his state of mind.”
Roberto’s kite like object graced his exhibition with perfection and with generosity he let it to me – to carry to and from Manila – for its exhibition in SLOT.
The quoted text is from an essay written for Roberto Robles show, From the old pond I ponder at Galleria Duemila by Victoria “Boots” Herrera.
33. Rachel Apelt | Nett
I met Rachel sitting at a table of artists out side the Penguin Café in Malate, Manila, a famous Filipino artists bar. And like other Australian artists who found them selves in Manila she was entranced by a culture both remote and accessible. Her fascinations with the Latino hybrid of the Pacific lead her to Mexico, the country that had colonised The Philippines on behalf of Spain. Eventually she returned to Australia where she made her work for SLOT.
If you look closely you will notice that her Nett is composed of people, holding hands, and feet in an embrace that, if given the chance to do what nets do, would capture those who strayed into its arms. She wrote of the piece - “In Nett, the making was a means of discharging half-formed, repetitive and banal thoughts…sometimes discharging all, but mostly not. It yearned for a silence, a moment of nett space after deducting habitual interpretations, meanings, ideology, and rationalisation…That fleeting raw state of being: a bland inchoate state, where everything is possible; and a blind state, where it is difficult to differentiate between possibilities. Nett is suspended in the ‘fertile void’, a mute space of possibility and impossibility. It attempts to net the thought that is time-space between the inevitable massing, muting and
absorption of culture”
Rachel Apelt
34. Tony Maranon | The sculptors of Iloilo
Iloilo is an old city on the southern tip of Panay Island. It's not far from Cebu where the Spaniard, Legaspi began the colonisation of the Philippines in 1521. It's also a city of sculptors.
The sculptors studios are at the edge of the city centre. Informal structures, built on the narrow footpaths. The size of wardrobes, they open up during the day spilling their contents and the sculptors across the roadway. Overwhelmingly their work is religious ranging from life size Christ figures to small retablo carvings. Remarkably these artists have not developed the finely honed ability to produce elaborate kitsch. These provincial sculptors have maintained the relative innocence of the folk artist.
Walking around their studios a remarkable fact reveals itself. This is a dynasty of sculptors dating back to 1950’s. So along with Tony Maranon, who is said to be the original Maranon, we have nephew of Maranon and Roming and Larry Maranon. Today Tony Maranon’s grandson works in his studio. These are the doors from his studio, painted by Tony Maranon as his dependents have also painted their studio doors.
Religious images are found almost everywhere in the Philippines, from the antique Spanish era cathedrals to the sides of jeepneys but rarely are they painted with the depth of devotion displayed here. Interestingly there is a dual divinity in the vernacular of the Christianity practised along the streets of the cities and in the barrios of the Philippines where native religious objects called Anting Anting are revered. These objects combine reinterpretations of Christian religious iconography and pagan mysticism to satisfy a deep and popular need for religion with out making a clear distinction between the two understandings of religion.
As I stood admiring these doors for the second or possibly third time Tony Maranon’s grandson came close and said, in almost a whisper - “do you want to buy them?” On one hand there was my desire for the objects and on the other the question, should I remove these clearly revered cultural artefacts? I asked my friend, Joseph Albana who happened to be part of the Iloilo historical society - his reply - “its time for Tony Maranon’s grandson to paint his own doors”. Which obliquely may offer an insight into Anting Anting - it is important to make you own god if your god is to be your true god.
35. Ruark Lewis | Banalities for the Perfect House
Banalities for the Perfect House was a collaborative installation & performance work premiered at Sydney's Performance Space theatre on Sept 9 2005 by Rainer Linz and Ruark Lewis. The work proposed the house as a condition through which we perceive the world - taking as its performance text, distillations of newspapers, cookery books, and snippets of overheard conversation. In all there are seven Banalities: Banalities for the Perfect House, Banalities for Napoleon, Banalities for the Modern Kitchen, Banalities for Solid Mandala, Banalities for Newspapers, Banalities for the Times and Misreading for Barricades.
The set for the piece was retrieved from storage then applied to the entire exterior of the building that houses SLOT where, Banalities became a a sort of poem that Ruark described as - “ traversing it as if through rooms filled with words whose meanings, to are still under construction.”
Fascinatingly the work leaps from medium to medium - from text to performance to installation to architecture and back to text with a lightness and ease that is reflected in the meanings we fell obliged to ascribe to the words that constitute the work. It means anything and nothing, is impossible to define yet appears none-the-less abundant in meaning and irrefutably present. It renders a slot along Botany Road, enigmatic.
Hayati Mokhtar
Lena Cobangbang
Hayati Mokhtar
Tony Twigg
Merilyn Fairskye
Milenko Prvacki
37. Claire Martin | Blockbusters of Twentieth Century art
7 years after the Twentieth Century became a fully known entity, Claire Martin has produced a work that articulates the conceptual breadth of the century that created art as we now know it.
Of course it is an obvious assertion - how could the art of ones immediate past do anything but define the art that one knows. Yet picking over the bones of a century of art as Clair Martin’s work invites us to do we are invited to evaluate what has been, which Clair has done for us by scaling her exhibits. They are ranked by size in relation to their perceived importance in her eyes.
For me the satisfaction of this show is not the historic evaluation of artistic merit but the
fastidiousness of each creation and the breadth of inclusion achieved in the work that
renders art icons as fetish objects.
