Juni Salvador is a Filipino artist who spent 16 years living in Sydney. He arrived with his family in 2007 and while his children remain in Sydney he returned with his wife Edna to Manila in 2022. Having commuted between Sydney and Manila to his art practice Juni now makes the reverse commute to visit his children. He is a man of two cities and a man of two cultures.
In Sydney, he says, his landscape became St Vincent de Paul op shops. Shops that sell a particular kind of thing, possessions no longer desired by their owners but considered too valuable for one reason or another to be discarded. There is a counterpart in Manila, San Roque de Manila near Bulmentritt, a church with a basement that serves as a dump for discarded sacred objects. These images of saints remain in limbo long after their appeal has faded. Occasionally people walk through to select items for their own purpose. For those remaining there is a fire from time to time. In contrast, at Sydney’s secular Vinnies an object’s consignment to limbo is terminated with a price tag.
These objects sit at the conjunction of two value systems, the goodness of the object and the goodness of its price. In “Anonymous” of 2009, one of four shows Juni presented in SLOTwindow, he exhibited a collection of reproduced landscapes by McCubbin and Streeton along with lesser-known artists. All sourced from op shops, all light faded yet serviceable, all framed in a pastiche of prosperity and all with a price tag. $2 here $5 there, it was the romantic vision of Australia repackaged again
and again into an artifact of indeterminate value far removed from an appreciation of the land. The op shop focused a reading of Australian culture for Juni. In his corresponding exhibition, “Re inventing histories/re inventing stories” of 2024, show in Manila’s Drawing Room Gallery Juni presented a selection of artefacts that reference the Philippines, gathered from the same Sydney op shops. One fascinating piece included here is a souvenir picture-plate, titled “Dollar on a plate”. It’s bule and white glaze, in the manner of Delftware, itself a
European interoperation of Chinese porcelain, illustrates the icons of Filipino culture, now modestly priced at $3.00. Remarkably it was broken into 5 pieces by a previous owner who meticulously and amateuristically reassembled it. Preserved through adversity it was offered through the op shop to a new owner, who it was presumed would value it even more than it’s previous owner. We might wonder at the sentiment that afforded the plate preservation. For Juni it offered an insight to our perception of the Filipino and by extension himself.
Now the plate is back in Sydney, as Juni commented, “it’s come full circle”. Returned as a certified art work that with others of its kind, observe a vernacular reading of both Filipinoness and Australianness. Collectively these objects of ambiguous value propose a reading of the exotic where preconceptions masqueraded as insights.
15/10 - 21/10 2024
6/9 - 6/10 2024
This body of work was made in collaboration with my materials. Generally, they began life with another purpose and then they were fashioned by my response to their inherent properties.
Through my working, these materials have been informed by the intergenerational effects of migration. The plywood offcuts are remnants of previous projects that have been given a new purpose. Elsewhere forms shaped in plasters and others made in pumice intimate the Byproducts of displacement and disorder.
Cardboard boxes, an ambivalent material here suggest two readings, one is the aspirational drive for a better life, and the other, a homage to those who delivered a better life to the coming generation. Each an aspect of migration predicated on a system designed to
generate profit from cheap labour.
The incidental and unexpected behaviour of these materials demanded a response that gifted them another vocabulary. In each this new vocabulary is reflected in the resolution of the work.
The nature of these works, a product of their materials and assemblage, is at times contradictory and at others complimentary evoking for me
senses of detachment and attachment, presence and absence, contact and separation, abandonment and reclamation, permanent and transient.
Here, the process of making has become for me a way of engaging with the Byproducts of displacement and emplacements. Working with these repurposed materials, and assigning them new identities suggests a making good – a reordering of disorder. That is in itself, an arrival.
