JAYANTO DAMANIKUntitled tea bags (strange fruit)
Until 18 October 2014

Jayanto's tea bags hang with beauty, delicately stained by dried tannin into a kind of exoticism that we are quick to think of as Asian. Jayanto is Indonesian. But he's just as quick to point out that the tea bag was invented somewhere in America sometime in the 70's and that tea is of course Chinese. Indeed this artwork reaches across cultures - it's an artefact of the perverse colonialism that is the modern world. 

"I created conversations with used tea bags, which I began collecting in 1997. Each tea bag...contains a memory of either my family or my friends...every tea bag tells a story of daily life's grievances and joys. I embrace their history and intertwine it with my own. I encourage viewers to recognise flesh, mind and spirit in order to create individual meaning."

This is how Jayanto described his tea bag installation to Slot director Tony Twigg, continuing, "Nothing is ever wasted and all materials of waste contain their unique history. They serve as tactile reminders of the past and give meaning to the present."

On the day Jayanto installed this piece, and over yet another cup of tea, his conversation turned to Indonesia's famous Black May Race Riots that occurred in May 1998, triggered by food shortages and mass unemployment that eventually led to the resignation of Indonesia's President Suharto and the fall of his government. The main targets of the violence were the ethic Chinese, however, most of the people who died in the riots were the Indonesian looters who had targeted the Chinese owned shops. Jayanto plucked the title of Billie Holiday's immortal song of racial intolerance Strange Fruit to sum up his piece.

Jayanto's fruit dangles for us; artfully melodious in their arrangement they await our mediation as whispers. 

ARTHUR APANSKI

Until 27 September 2014

 

It is not surprising to learn that Arthur studied theatre production, his expansive paintings construct a theatrical narrative. It is surprising, however, to learn that he is a self-taught artist, only coming to painting full-time in 2006 after moving to the Illawarra, south of Sydney.

His meticulous canvases range in subject matter, their hyper-real, almost surreal imagery create a tension between the man-made and the nature world. Arthur is interested in exploring possible futures and the role that we play within that – proactive, political, environmental, humanitarian.

This painting, Excess and hope for little Ethan (2012), fuses notions of fertility and bounty with a darker-side of mortality – grenades, a gas mask and ghostly sculls – probe us to question man’s interruption to that natural cycle.

The cyborg-like male figure composites the nostalgic terror of a gas mask with a mechanical prosthetic limb, probing us to think of the historical markers that interrupt how we navigate our place on this planet.

Is Arthur’s epic painting a message of warning or hope? You will have to decide your own fate – our collective future. 

SUE BESSELL + JONI BRAHAM 
Until 30 August 2014

This exhibition brings together two very different artistic practices and yet, surprisingly, holds much in common. Just as Slot sits within a landscape of temporal experiences – of staccato traffic, people passing, grabbed moments between here and there – this exhibition captures ‘the creative process of interruption’, a phrase Sue Bessell used to describes her digital photographic prints.  

In a similar way, Joni Braham’s assemblage sculptures are collected fragments; found objects that carry narrative, interrupted, and retold in new forms. A piece of lace blown up Sue's black and white digital collage forms a backdrop while a fragment of material embellishes story-telling through a fantastical object. Both consider placement and material to draw our meaning.

 

Sue adds: ‘In unsettling the relationship between the photographic image and its corresponding reality, a space of contestation opens up, where new meanings and experience are located, where the liminal self resides.’

 

This installation screams and jars and yet celebrates life with humour and poignant checks and balances. ‘The evocative (re)assemblies transform self portraiture into self representation,’ Sue continued in her statement.

It is a sentiment echoed in Joni’s words: ‘There is a joy in making art from materials that originally were used for a completely different purpose…In some sense the figures often have a sense of power tinged with foreboding or mystique juxtaposed with playfulness and eccentricity.  Almost always female or androgynous they are bold and strong.  A feminist ethic informs works.’

Therein the work of both artist carry rewritten histories. The juxtapositions within Sue’s photographic work, between original and imperfect hand-manipulated marks are amplified by Joni’s completely idiosyncratic sculptures – both exploring the multiplicity of self representation, and beyond.

But mostly, what both artists do, is offer the viewer the platform upon which to invent their own story.

This exhibition has been facilitated by artist Mai Nguyen-Long as part of Slot’s Illawarra Series. Showing until 30 August.

JUDY BOURKE

e Wasted

Until 5 August 2014

Judy Bourke simply writes:

I don't send regular hand written letters anymore
I get e mail
I read e newspapers
I send e Christmas cards
I receive e newsletters
I generate e messages
I use e remote controls
I am creating e waste

Her sculptural collage takes the universal symbol for e-commerce and constructs it from antiquated technology: brick-sized mobile phone casing, data chips from superseded products, circuit boards from perhaps a transistor radio or facsimile machine - all against a backdrop of a data stream.

CURRENTLY @ D.I.P.

JIMMY NUTTALL
Sydney (Quantas)
@ D.I.P - Darlington Installation Project

Jimmy Nuttall's artfully draped silk scarf offers, as he says, 'a playful take on nationalism' with a 'luxury item presented in a provisional manner.' Of course, it is the Qantas silk scarf's iconic symbol and corporate logo draped across the gracious necks of flight attendants across generations, the "trolley-dolly" ambassadors of Australian good will, that might not be so.

Nationalism can become murky territory if we think too long, while Peter Allan sings along to "I still call Australia home", lifted as a Qantas commercial that might come back as a memory ruffling the playful elegance of Nuttall's iconic "sculpture", which also play's with the corporate name through its title.

D.I.P - or the Darlington Installation Project - is a satellite project of Slot and is a corner window gallery located at 30 Golden Grove on the corner of Abbercrombie Street.

Jimmy's exhibition continues Slot participation in Dispatch - a project linking window galleries across Australia.

JANICE FIELDSEND + MARIE McMAHON

Two artists go for a walk at Kamay, Botany Bay National Park

Until 5 July 2014

Slot is located at the start of Botany Road. This exhibition takes the other end of this urban artery as its inspiration - a wild landscape where the city meets the sea. It is the shared journey of two artists - Janice Fieldsend and Marie McMahon - and while their working styles are extremely individual, their passion 'to explore how nature becomes incorporated into culture'. as Jan describes, unifies their work. Their regular walks to this landscape over a prolonged period have brought about an alert synthesis in the work - one the found object more literally, while the other the texture and meter of that walk. Both have deep embedded poetics of location, history, time and memory.

ROGER FOLEY-FOGG + JESS COOK
Light Collaboration 2
27 May - 7 June 2014

A little over three years ago Roger Foley-Fogg (aka Ellis D. Fogg), Australia's doyen of psychedelic lighting design, proposed a work for Slot for the cooler months of the year so that he would warm the street with his art.

This is Roger's third response to Vivid Sydney, and another collaboration with Jess Cook, artistic director of the independent art space 107 Projects in Redfern - a shot walk from Slot. 

Extending this piece in Slot are two wall-based Lumino Kinetic works at 107 Projects, one after the late Martin Sharp and the other after Sonia Delaunay. 

In a third work Roger collaborates with Slot co-director artist Tony Twigg, projecting video works from his celebrated live light shows onto a "paper" screen made by Twigg.

In comparison to the soaring production values of Vivid, Redfern’s offering is a more spontaneous response to light and space.