78. Susannah Williams | To my dear mix II

Susannah William’s work, To my dear Mix II is an abstraction. While it might look like an invented arrangement of lines and shapes, it is also an analytical observation of a watercolour by the famous English naturalist and bird artist John Gould called, Native English birds c. 1820s. Gould sailed to Australia in 1838 and was responsible for naming and illustrating over 300 native bird species, many of which informed Charles Darwin’s writings.

This installation is the product of an elaborate process. First Gould’s image was reduced to an elementary structure, mapped as a series of measurements then plotted in strings and fragments of cardboard on the wall and nailed into place. Susannah has done her work, night after night which she describes as a formal investigation of an image through colour and line. To this she brings a consideration of five issues that she feels condition her response to the source image: history, movement, memory, feeling and space. Above all, Susannah aims to orchestrate the mood of a space.

The reproduction of Gould’s watercolour was found at Hill End where Susannah was a guest of Bathurst Regional Galleries, Artist in Residence program last year. This program celebrates and maintains a connection between the old gold mining town and Australian painting that dates back to the 1940s when artists including Russell Drysdale, Donald Friend, Paul Haeflinger and his wife Jean Ballette lived there in a community of landscape painters. The Ballette house is now a gallery and it is where Susannah made her first version of this work. It was a vital experience for her that she says delivered her clear 

insights into the mood of Australia, which she has now brought to SLOT.

Ingrid is a Masters Degree student at the Sydney College of the Arts who has made imagined self portraits of herself with facial hair.

As she comments, “Dernee role-plays the self-portrait…is it acting out accepted gender myths, or is it a stylised mirror to a more probing exploration of self?”

Ingrid makes video art works, which she sees as making a mark through time and space. For her this is a kind of drawing that focuses on the process of making marks as opposed to the completed drawing. In a similar way her drawing focus on the performance or process of making the drawing, which in this case is a consideration of her gender rather than the finished and framed work. The work then is retained as a record of her consideration rather than for its merit as an art work.

Roger Foley, the legendary Elis D. Fog celebrated for his psychedelic light shows that played across the rock bands of the 60’s and 70’s has produced a show for SLOT.

Together is made up of three sculptures - “Sol”, “One World” and “Hot” - it is an installation created for the winter months as a beacon of energy against our bleak city days. Roger brings together discs of light loosely based on an Aboriginal flag infused with the spirit of Gija - the people of the Kimberly region - to capture the energy, spirit and movement of their traditional Joonba dance. Though this installation, and indeed his entire body of work Roger aims to bring our world closer together and he does.

“Roger Foley-Fogg [b.1942] began producing Psychedelic Lightshows with rock bands, jazz and modern dance groups in the 1960s and received two grants from the then Australian Council for the Arts for multimedia events including work with composer Peter Sculthorpe and the Sydney and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras. In those days the artists were always in charge of the look of the whole event as well as the lighting and lightshow, a tradition Fogg continues to this day. Thus retaining his artistic integrity. His first gallery exhibition “WOOM”, in collaboration with Vivienne Binns at Watters Gallery Sydney in 1971, was critically acclaimed. Artist and writer James Gleeson wrote of the multimedia environment/installation - is this the art of the future? Fogg constructed the “Capsule Room” and later the “Laser Infinity Room” in Sydney’s The Yellow House 1971-3. He is also known for his work as a producer/designer/director of theatrical events featuring lumino kinetics [light sculpture] and lightshows, having produced a large body of work over the past 40 years for private and public clients including “Arts for Labor” for the re-election of Prime Minister Paul Keating in 1993.

Fogg has exhibited Light Installations at the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and was commissioned to produce a light installation “OP/EN” for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney in 1991. He also art directs a different Christmas Tree of Light at Darling Harbour each year. Fogg lightworks 

concerning spiritual matters were a finalist in The Blake Prize for Religious Art in 2003 and 2007, and his photographs of lightworks with the Gija people of the Kimberley have been exhibited at galleries in Melbourne, New York and Kununurra. Additionally, Fogg’s lightwork installations have been presented in Singapore, Bangkok, Hong Kong and India for the 2009 Diwali festival of lights and January 2011 part of the Australian-Indian exhibition “RACISIM AND RECONCILIATION” at Art Konsult Gallery, Delhi. In 2010 Fogg’s exhibition at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Art Center, “LUMINO KINETICS”, utilised 21 Lightworks and 9 films about Light as part of a long term multimedia project. Professor Ross Steele AM wrote about the exhibition: “an amazing exhibition of superb masterpieces of light…extraordinary 

creativity and humour… to change our way of seeing.”

Francesca Emerson

Elise described her work- “This project explores light within space. It also is a study that transforms the ephemeral into the permanent. Simply, it addresses the experience of being in the world and the idea that everything is a collection of experiences, rather than a fact. Light captures that idea beautifully for me.

Using a camera, I shot the movement of light through a given space spanning a given time, tracking the light as it moved through a room. The timeframe between each ‘capture’ is not rigid or precise. My decision when to shoot was based on my response to the light in the space - my experience of a moment in time. 

Tacking these fragments of captured light and time, I traced each image onto drafting film. Using a scalpel, I cut out by hand the areas of the original light source, leaving voids that in this space of the installation are active descriptors. The intimate, meditative process of cutting each sheet connected me back to the moment and the place – for want of a simple notion – it captured memory. 

As these individual sheets are suspended here, a tunnel of information is formed, physically overlapping ideas of time, memory and place – linking the original light source with this one. This interaction of natural light through the installed work is significant to me. If anything, I feel a sense of trapping moments in the earlier light patterns that change mood when transposed here, with the changing course of each day, and with atmospheric differences. 

It is ephemeral – it is ethereal – it is tangible. It is the sensuality of light.” 

Michael Downs described his project - “Recently Michael Downs has spent time in China. Working from a studio in Beijing he has developed a series of works that attempt to come to terms with the astonishing energies of a city and a country at a vortex of activity. A day in Beijing is a day without a moment of stasis. 

Millions of people are moving along 18 lane ring-roads in a landscape which alternates between 80-floor skyscrapers and garbage strewn hutongs. The swirl of noise, pollution and constant movement cannot be expressed within a settled frame. This installation takes digital images of collages made in Beijing and sprawls them across the window space. The vibrating grids connect one to another picking up the pulse of the composition and, like a reckless fairground ride, swoops around the space again. Downs works in a non-rectilinear format – that is his paintings burst out of their frame over thirty years ago and have never gone back. Energies within a landscape have been a source of fascination for him. Over the years these have varied from heavy, sculptural paintings, which took geology and physical geography as their starting point, to series that tried to manifest sounds in a landscape. The ‘air’ is not dead; it is seething with noise, electronic signals, winds, pollutants and, if you can overcome all that, an occasional birdsong. These sounds fill the spaces between the objects and they occupy Downs’s artworks. Another phenomenon that has informed his work is the collision between the ‘Euclidian’ nature of our architectural environment -right angles, perfect verticals and horizontals – in other words geometry - and the Fractal aspects of nature, where dimensions may be considered as 1.8 or 2.4, for example, as opposed to a strict one, two or three.”

This is Mai Nguyen-Long’s third exhibition with SLOT. Each body of work becoming more adventurous in its spatial engagement. In Red Dream she combines her papier-mâché dog, pumped up on steroids with a suite of alter-egos that fuse her dreamlike understanding of self with the traditional Asian forms of koi and geckos. 

Mai has woven a personal mythology into these animal characters that she describes as, “...a kind of butcher shop meets nursery”. In this installation made after horrific pictures of live cattle exports were screened on television, Mai has chosen to confront that violence - to register and package the violence cast against the “story book morals” employed to measure it. The title Red Dream is a metaphor for her realisation of disillusionment with those ideals from the perspective of an Asian-Australian. 

Red has many associations: flesh and blood, sexuality, eroticism and brothels, anger, hesitation and communism. In this installation Mai reads them against the imagery and objects of her childhood, toys, storybook illustrations, nursery rhymes, and memories. It leaves her hybrid characters with a kind of Grimm’s Fairytale quality, their playfulness edged with a dark maliciousness.

Tracy described her work and its associations in a poem -

“Awakening. Impacted by change.

Watching TV events unfolding, 

Like the earth’s layers showing evidence of change - passing.

Now we experience it.

No more selfdenial.

Spinning out, 

Outward spinning...pivotal realisation.

Impacting the environment...sequential, accumulative,

Finally nature strikes with big events.

The turning point.

Turning, returning.

Becoming alive – recycled – from life to death, back to life.

Start with point, end with point, 

Start with nothing, end with nothing.

Our soul appears from somewhere and ends where?

The cut piece turning, disks arranged in the spiral shape,

Turning on a steel rod – suspended – relying on the wind to spin.

Predetermined path on a rail.

Planning and arranging the journey, return.

Using memory, revisit - recall.

Rely on the elements for direction, movement

Winding and unwinding, rewinding...undoing?

Things can spin out of control.

Real life is not that forgiving.

The work shows us forward and backwards...turning. 

Re-turning, reassuring, reinforcing”.

Tracy Luff

Juni Salvador has been collecting found objects for most of his career. Moving from Manila in the Philippines to Sydney some years ago and then looking for a connection with his new place he turned to the ‘op-shop’ rather than the art supply store for his materials. This is where he found the iconic boomerang complete with its $2 price sticker. How do we read such objects: a discarded treasure, as throw away culture, commercial cliché, or an erudite metaphor for an artist, constantly moving between here and there? 

Over the past year Juni has photographed the boomerang in his Sydney home and in his home in Manila. Those mages that re randomly thrown up in his slideshow indicate that one location as hardly distinguishable from the other. Images slipping between boarders overlapping and layered are like memory and like its metaphor a boomerang – the indigenous Australian flying stick that follows a path back to its place of origin. 

The domestic setting of this piece invites the idea of home. The domestic environment and its ready-mades that are often visited by Juni in his work suggest that the digital picture frame used in SLOT is a stand-in for the family photo album. Here home is an indeterminate place defined more by sentiment than its physical location. And now, since Juni and his family became Australian citizens in September, home for him is even more an abstraction that merges each and every image screening here.