52. Match Box Projects

Match Box Projects are twin sisters, Leanne and Namoi Shedlezki. They have invented an alternative to the art gallery in the form of a clear perspex folio cases. Curated exhibitions are assembled by invited artists who make works the size of match boxes. Their portable and transparent gallery space is easily carried on public transport, into bars, cafes and other places where people gather. It becomes the focus of conversations and impromptu exhibitions as they travel around the city, the country and the planet. 

In SLOT Match Box Projects has presented a survey exhibition that documents their project, which offers an alternative to the conventional art experience found in galleries behind closed doors. Their intimate and personalised alternative that is part exhibit and part performance reaches people who might not usually find their way to art galleries or an experience of art.

I conjunction with their exhibit in SLOT, Match Box Projects are launching their guide to the alternative galleries of Sydney identified as ARIs (Artist Run Initiatives). It includes a map and factual information published on the web and as a fold out brochure. Fascinatingly it identified the alternative galleries of Sydney, they are : At the Vanishing Point, Bill+George, Boomalli, Black and Blue Gallery, China Heights, Don't Look Experimental New Media Gallery, Factory 49, Firstdraft, Gaffa, Half Dozen, ICAN, Kudos, Locksmith, MOP, Oh Really!, Peloton, Runway, SLOT and SNO (Sydney Non-objective). 

At the age 42 Goran Tomic says he’s an outsider, guilty of thinking too deeply.

He has been presenting performance works in the artist run gallery, At the Vanishing Point, in Newtown, although he might more correctly be described as a street artist than a performance artist. The street is his subject and it’s his venue. Images that begin as drawing can become prints that become small posters when they are glued to back street walls and there, they can become photographs. He is engaged in an activity even a life style that generates art as it’s bi-product rather than being engaged in the production of art as a commodity that would be purchased by astute admires.

Like SLOT Goran Tomic seems interested in presenting art, uninvited and without permission and if it turns up in the mainstream, well that would be a curious parallel - he’s a thoughtful outsider.

In that sprit he has presented a magnificent exhibition of two collage works that look like they have been torn from an accumulation of poster pastings on walls beside pollution heavy roads. But are they? Take a closer look - they have been adjusted with paint and collage intervention. Composed with a deft hand that is alert to the aesthetic qualities of the street and the particular accidental or inadvertent beauty that is found there. And with a shade of irony he has placed them back beside a pollution heavy road as ART.

Juni Salvador is an artist who has been working at the avant grad edge of Filipino art for many years. Now he has emigrated to Australia with his wife who is a teacher and their children. In an effort to get to know his new home he has been collecting images of Australia and its culture soured from Op shops. This is the material for his exhibition that has been arranged as an artwork in the space of SLOT. 

To accompany the exhibition he has supplied detailed and revealing notes - 

“What is…what is not. 

HOME AND DOMESTICITY…LANDSCAPE ARTIST

I have been working with since the birth of my first son in 1993 domestic icons/consumer objects and ready-mades. Inspired by my kids toys, artworks and clutter creating visual metaphors, puns and clues. It is my landscape. I am a domesticated artist, have been since 17 years ago and more so when my daughter was born in 2002.That was the year of my last solo Philippine show. Fatherhood, family and art co-existing? Always … maybe. 

Lately I have been incorporating puzzles and photographs in my assemblage, installation and collage employing them as symbols of loss, confusion and recovery/discovery. Spray paints, ply boards and generally stuff that you could get in hardware stores and shopping malls. Usual haunts of a domesticated person. 

BEING HERE NOR THERE…LIVING LIKE A REFUGEE

My imagery has always been personal and semi autobiographical. More so since migrating to Sydney, Australia in 2007.My current works are a reflection of my floating status. Being here nor there…living like a “refugee”. Settling down looking for a spot in my new Australian landscape. So much yet so little time. The family has settled but myself. What better subject than my lost self. I am my landscape.”

Jumaadi explained that he met Mawarini at the Adelaide Festival Centre where he had an artist in residence position in 2008. Mawarini was one of the artists helping him realise his project. In conversation Mawarini told of stories growing up in a small finishing village in Sulawesi where the fisherman delivered fish as big as her. 

After high schooling in Bandung, West Java, Mawarini moved to Australia, studied art in Melbourne and travelled on the Adelaide. Jumaadi replied with stories of his own childhood in a fishing village in East Java where he was trained to collect mud crabs, bare handed. 12 years ago he moved to Sydney. 

After his residency Jumaadi returned to Sydney, Mawarini remained in Adelaide and their conversation evolved from a conversation about “our collective identity away from our birth place…to become some kind of collaborative project that we refer to as the “Jelly fish project”. Jumaadi continues describing Cerita, which means story “I collectively sent her 26 drawings of jelly fish like creatures combined with the fish traps that my father used to make. This series of drawings also depicts lovers, trees and many other images that often appear in my obscure narrative, influenced by Javanese folkloric tradition and shadow puppetry. To my surprise a week later she sent beautiful drawings added to my story.”

This is the work that is displayed in SLOT. Jumaadi feels that it is more like the process of two musicians jamming than that of two artists collaborating. Again Jumaadi explains - “we are connected by signs, symbols and the metaphors of our childhood memories. In each of our studios, many more Cerita are taking shape through drawing, painting, artists books, sculpture and also stories.” 

Mawarini concludes with her artists statement - “My work is about exploring everyday routines, observing object and small things in this life. Life is mundane, frequently banal, but never fail to surprise or shock. I do believe that simple things in life always hold some surprise.”

Artists of the 17th Parallel (A-17P): Mai Long, Dominic Golding, Van Thanh Rudd  

“When SLOT invited me to curate a show, specific events inspired me to invite Dominic Golding and Van Thanh Rudd who both stand out side the stereotypical Asian-Australian to exhibit with me. 

I came to know Rudd when works by each of us were criticised by the Vietnamese Community of Australia as being politically and culturally insensitive. I came across Golding via the ABC Compass program. He is a Melbourne based performer who describes his work as being more like “poetic happenings (where) no-one escapes criticism”.

The works of Rudd and Golding’s are brave, irreverent, honest and searching. Together we are asking hard questions of ourselves and others that inevitably lead to a consideration of the Vietnam War…and, more specifically, the division at the 17thParallel…a schism of self and psyche.

We formed A-17P not because of any racial or political affiliation, but by force of history and circumstance. It is long-awaited tangible evidence that we can talk to each other despite the inward-looking attempts of the Vietnamese community to dictate a singular Vietnamese identity.

It is widely known that the large majority of Vietnamese in Australia arrived as refugees, or through the family reunion scheme following the end of the Vietnam War. It is a less known that Vietnamese also arrived in Australia before the Vietnam War via the Colombo Plan scholarship scheme for example. Vietnamese Australians are not a homogenous group, but we are all Australians. Our challenge is to respect differences, and to celebrate the positive, shared aspects of being Australian. The question is: what does this mean; and who defines it?”

Mai Long 

Note 1 - This is an edited version of Mai Long’s curatorial rationale of her show

Note 2 - The 17th Parallel divided Vietnam into 2 states - the Communist North and the Capitalist South from 1954 - 1975

Gabrielle Bates is an artists working mainly in and around Sydney. I met her in Malaysia when she had a succession of artist in resident positions. She took up the offer to use the apartment and studio attached to SLOT while it was vacant and also the offer to present an exhibition of her work in SLOT prior to leaving.

Photographs of her work indicate that she choose a collection of religious artefacts that line the apartments corridor as her subject matter. The pictures depict various saints and gods tossed into a cardboard box as though they are moving out, or in. Painted as a kind of still life - memento mori, perhaps. Similarly the exhibit in SLOT looks like a neatly piled stack of an artists work that has been delivered or is about to be collected - on route - from where or to where - for an exhibition or memento mori travelling on with the artist?

The show is reflective of an artists peripatetic life, moving from residency to residency - finding short term accomodation in between and exhibitions that serve to build a career. It is a romantic life style moving fast enough for the tracks to evaporate before they have settled.

Vienna Parreno is a Filipino Australian artist. That is an Asian artist who views Asia in part from an Australia perspective. This idea was examined by Binghui Huangfu of the Asia-Australia Arts Centre, who curated an exhibition, Open letter for Asia-linkin 2005. It included Vienna among the 11 artist selected for the project that toured this new hybridised art to - Bangkok, Manila and Kuala Lumpur. Notoriously two works by Vienna were removed and a third altered for the Kuala Lumpur leg of the tour without her consent by the National Art Gallery of Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur. Inadvertently illustrating the cultural divide that remains between Australia and South East Asia art.

The problem lay in the nudity depicted in some of Vienna’ filmic photographic installations. However in other works by Vienna there is a more aberrant intent than nudity. For example - The Shadow - that she describes -“Walking around I took photographs off randomly chosen strangers in the street. Photographing places they have been to, people they have met. I followed strangers for no other reason than I did not know what to do with myself and because it was sometimes easier to be led” aberrant, perhaps? But her interest in 

silent, random voyeurism is clear.

Here in SLOT we have an installation of objects charged by their title - War on Warhol - referring to the notorious American artist Andy Warhol who like Vienna had an interest in film and voyeurism. The more famous aspect of Warhol’s work celebrated the commodification of personalities by the media. He shoveled stars with a golden shovel into a media illusion in a manner that Vienna’s has parodie in her installation.

Fully exploited labour is a title given to many exhibitions and individual works by Pat Hoffie. It refers to her use of cheaper, often offshore labor in the production of her art works - signalling her focus shifting from the finished work to the process of integration and translation that takes place in a cross cultural collaboration. As the critic Louise Martin Chew observed of a 2006 exhibition also titled, Fully exploited labour - “Hoffie believes that the social responsibility of artists is more important than what they produce.”

The photographs exhibited in SLOT or magic lanterns as Pat describes them display historic images of the “Kanaka” - indentured labourers - “black birded” from the Pacific islands as cheap labour for the cane fields of north Queensland from 1863. Is there a cruel truth in titling repurposed photographs of these deceased men - Fully exploited labour? Pat described the graphic over lay on her photographs by explaining “I have used stylistic elements and imagery of Russian Constructivism as part of my ongoing Fully exploited labour series for the past two decades.” This Constructivism was the art of the, Bolsheviki Revolution that liberated the enslaved workers of Russia in 1917. They could have been the brothers and comrades of these enslaved “Kanaka” Islanders in their international struggle against the exploitation of the labouring class. Instead the practise of “black birding” was progressively made illegal by the Federation of Australia under the Restricted Immigration Act of 1901 - The White Australia Policy. That policy was progressively abandoned from 1966 permitting South Seas Islanders to again be recruited as (paid) labour for Australian farms.

Fully exploited labour is again the title of a book Pat Hoffie wrote on her work that was edited by Sally Butler. It was launched at an exhibition, Madame Illuminata Crack’s Phantasmagorical Armchair Exhibit for Ecologically Sustainable Recreation, which was where the works in the SLOT edition of Fully exploited labor, were first exhibited. Describing that show Pat Hoffie commented - “The installation also includes images from Fully Exploited Labour – a series of photographs of South Sea Islander “Kanaka” workers that I have been compiling for two decades…I’m always interested in history. I think that's one of the things that art does, it makes the invisible visible. It brings out things that you think you know and it lets you see them in another way.” 

“Sticks are really nice things if you care to take a look at them” - Loris Quantock 

Loris Quantock has been working with sticks since 2001. What began as a personal and meditative experience of the landscape has become an understanding of its fragility that she expresses through assemblage and installation.

We usually think of the landscape as distant open space but for Loris it is an imitate examination of the scrub bush around Sydney. It offers the source material for her assemblages. They are named for the location where she walked, slowly examining the bush while collecting a particular kind of twig that is endemic to the area.

In her studio the walk is reassembled as a single passage of twigs, step by step, beginning to end. Massed on the wall as a brittle line the work is ambiguous. It is up to the patina of the sticks, aged, dry and glossy along with the formalised flicker of the surface to describe the landscape. 

This is Loris’s most ambitious work to date. The dancing flicker of the surface creates dramatic tension along a line drawn with incredible sureness and a graceful knowing. For Loris the work is foremost about moving through the landscape. She explains that “windy days are great, the leaf litter starts dancing around your feet”, which suggests something of the randomness accommodated in her piece as it alertly steps, surely across the 3.3 meter breadth of SLOT - edge to edge.