RUSSELL JEFF

Painting.

Until 18 April 2015

To describe Russell Jeff, as an outsider artist is one way of saying that his art has yet to be absorbed by the thin veneer that is Sydney’s art word. Out here the sustained passion of his remarkable body of work stands “Enr Mally-like” oblivious to the mannered conventions of our art scene. Seemingly it is made up - out of nothing.

    Russell Jeff. Painting 2015, acrylic on board 100 x 250 cm

Russell Jeff invented this. And “this” sits a little uncomfortably out side what is usually considered art. While referring, perhaps unwittingly to both the natural world and the idea of art these collections of painted marks, these fastidiously arranged flicks and dots convey the emotional depth of a world known only to Russell Jeff.

Russel was adopted by a couple from Sutherland who lived there until 1968 when they moved to Sawtell near Coffs Harbour. Russel went on to leave school at 16. Worked as a labourer for a couple of years before joining the air force at 19 in 1978. They took Russell as a boy, 4 years later they gave Russell back - the man who went on working as a labourer along the north coast of New South Wales.  Then about 15 years ago he moved to Sydney. He was homeless for a while working at Flemington market. As he reached 50 illness struck, massive surgery to his stomach and bowel put him into “housing”, the department of housing flats around the corner from SLOT in Waterloo. For a while he had a job in a plastics factory in Gymea that lasted until Dollar hit parity with the US currency and since then, he’s been on the “rock and roll”.

 Russell Jeff. Painting (detail) 2015, acrylic on board 100 x 250 cm

It was Ken Harris who has a Sunday afternoon show on TVS about painting that Russell says inspired him to paint. He bought some brushes, found some materials and began.

Wanting to get a gauge on what he was doing he set up a display in the tunnel at central railway – a lady walked past and said I could even buy that. It was encouragement enough for Russell.

4 years later Russell Jeff has made the visionary journey to these works, which is the kind of journey that ennobles the human sprit.

 

WENDY BORNHOLDT

Low Tide.

Until 14 March 2015

For Wendy Bornholdt the emptiness of SLOT is not empty.

She has given us the space of SLOT conditioned, caressed perhaps with a single, elegantly spare gesture of text on the window, a two word statement that reads: “Low Tide”.

This text is both literature and a graphic intervention. As Wendy observed, “it is difficult to look at a word and understand it without saying it silently while at the same time generating an image in your head. Low tides are full of potential. They are time limited opportunities for discovery and revelation…. uncoverings of sorts.”

Read graphically the text also operates as a kind of boundary marker. Stuck on the surface of the window it can’t help mingling with the reflections of our place. Here, cars and trucks grind past along the road, more vehicles are abandoned beside it, a butcher, $2 shop, the tailor’s sign relentlessly flashing all swimming in the surface of the window around Wendy’s sliver of text. It offers nothing more to the inside wall of SLOT than a shadow of its self and then only for a few hours each morning. Yet it draws a mysterious curtain across the wall that persists with quiet tenacity to invite a meditation on the poetry of absence.

Wendy has given us back our place with the invitation to imagine it other wise. This is one of the principal functions of art.

S. A. ADAIR

‘inkening’

February 2015 - July 2015

This fusion of tangled branches is pragmatically beautiful. Shaped at once by S.A. Adair’s material, then by her method, the constraints of our exhibition space and finally Sally’s compassionate hand that seems to be the junior partner in this collaboration but is of course is at it’s heart.

It was previously titled s.o.e., sense of edge and was shown at the Belconnen Art Centre in Canberra. There and here Sally has considered the space around the object as an unseen partner in the work. And it is this quality, rather than a polemic or narrative that Sally maintains in her practise. It has an indeterminate edge. Rather than offering an alternative reality, this art is simply scribbled over a reality that we already have. It’s an addition to the world as we know it with the ambition of becoming part of it.

 See more of Sally’s work at

 saadair.com.au

DIP is a partner window project of SLOT. It is located on the corner of Abbercrombie Street and Golden Grove, Darlington; about a ten minute walk from SLOT. The space is made available by Lloyd Suttor, who runs a bed and breakfast at the location.

JAMIE MAXTONE-GRAHAM

State of Youth.

Until 7 February 2015

American photographer and cinematographer Jamie Maxtone-Graham has produced numerous portfolios since moving to live in Hanoi full time in 2007. Through these bodies of work, he looks to locate his place within a given environment or, at least, to define some relationship with it. 

His understanding of life in Vietnam began with a visit in 1990 to shoot the feature documentary From Hollywood to Hanoi. In 2007-08 he became a Fullbright Research Fellow. With the simple idea of photographing Western influence on contemporary Vietnamese youth culture, he learned that 'none of it is...clear or neat or simple...It's very nuanced and complex.'

While direct Western influence may exist, it is often 'more likely filtered through the popular cultural iterations of more developed countries in the region: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan'. State of Youth is the resulting body of work. The full series consists of 40 images. 

Jamie's background has moved between commercial and narrative cinematography and photography and could be described as bordering on 'social realist with a theatrical edge'.  Turning to predominantly portraiture in 2009, this recent series demonstrates a deep sensitivity towards his 'collaborators', and observations on the passing of time and mortality. Touching on Colonialism and ideas of the 'outsider', Jamie explores ways of flattening power relations, searching to create works that are not ideological or representative, but rather 'open-ended...no question to answer or theme to impose.'

This exhibition was coordinated by artist Mai Nguyen-Long during a recent Hanoi visit. For more about Jamie's work visit jamiemaxtonegraham.com. 

GEORGE BURCHETTDemocracy.

Until 10 January 2015

Born in Hanoi, Australian artist George Burchett was delivered in exile. 15 years later he was granted his rightful citizenship. By this time he had lived in Vietnam, Russia, Bulgaria, Cambodia and France. After relocating to Australia, despite his best efforts, Burchett just never felt at home. A 2006 visit to Hanoi confirmed his decision to return and live there.

This SLOT work has its genesis in an appreciation for 1925-1945 historical drawings from the era of French colonisation, combined with Burchett's own research into his father's journalistic photographs spanning 1954-1966, and including a close association with the independence leader Ho Chi Minh.

The figure in conical hat is in fact interpreted directly from a photo of his father wearing a conical hat. It is repeated across the page in vermin-like fashion, as if some disposable faceless stereotype. Burchett reclaims the symbol in an ironic play on propaganda countering propaganda, a statement of stubborn persistence and resistance. 

Suspended in space like apparitions across the page these figures seem determined to be recognised; to form a statement of belonging all of their own. An inked finger, violent, impertinent, dirty punctuates the top left hand area of the work, titled Democracy (mis/spelt in Greek).

The work is quite simply a memoriam to the life of Burchett's father, this year posthumously awarded for his journalistic achievements. Wilfred Burchett was an Australian (minus 17 years of barred citizenship) with an interest in presenting news stories from more than one perspective - an endeavour which necessitated interviewing the "enemy" and finding their humanity, as well as the "democratic" forces in conflict.

Whatever the case or situation, the impact upon Burchett, as an individual and as artist, would be inevitable.  I have a sense that Democracy is only the tip of the iceberg, the beginning of a very personal journey to reclaim, deconstruct, reconstruct, the multiple forces that have pained, scarred and enriched his life, and a testimony to the intergenerational effects of war. 

 - Mai Nguyen Long.

This exhibition has been facilitated by Mai Nguyen Long following her recent self-driven residency in Vietnam.  

SUZY EVANSGomeroi attacking Major Mitchell and his native companion.

Until 13 December 2014

Gomeroi (Kamilaroi or Gamilaroi) people form one of the largest indigenous nations of Australia. They live in an area of north western New South Wales stretching from Murrurundi in the upper Hunter to Mungindi on the Queensland border and have a fierce reputation as warriors. Major Mitchell was Australia's fourth Surveyor General and the explorer who coined the phrase "Australia Felix" to describe the glorious landscape that he "discovered". He was also the first non-Aboriginal to visit Moree where Suzy Evans' people, the Gameroi live. 

Most of the trees that Major Mitchell famously marked - "like doges" - have gone and along with them trees carved by the Gomeroi as funerary markers, but the record of violent confrontation that is associated with Mitchell's three expeditions remains. 

Suzy said taht she had Albert Tucker's portraits of Australian explorers and the paintings of Sydney Nolan in mind when she made her work. She admires their pictures, in particular the way that Tucker paints parrots alighting on the heads of his explorers, but can't help finding their interpretation of teh genocidal appropriation of the Australian landscape absurd. In particular, it's hard to reconcile their mythology of a hostile and punishing landscape with Mitchell's observation of an "Australian Felix", the fortunate and bountiful Australia. It reminds us that mythology is simply myth and that when it comes to telling of our country's history our mythic representation rests in the hands of our artists. 

Suzy Evans' splendid work gives us a diminutive Major Mitchell being seen off the wall by a flight of Gomeroi. She takes on her role as myth-maker as surely as she does the role of image maker in this work that was exhibited in the recent Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award held at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, where Suzy says with delight: "it filled an entire wall!"

Suzy is a local to Redfern, SLOTs neighbourhood.

RELIGIOUS & META-RELIGIOUS ART IN SOUTHEAST ASIA
curated by Tony Twigg
Until 15 November 2014

Each year since 1951the Blake Prize for religious art has been offered. Like the more famous Archibald Prize for portraiture it encourages artists to lend their skills to a higher calling. This year SLOT is responding to the Blake Prize with an exhibition of religious and meta-religious art.



My own interest in religious art began in Manila while watching the annual Black Nazarene procession - when an ancient figure of Christ is paraded in the street through such frenzy that each year several people are crushed to death. After the figure of Christ passed I was surprised to see another making its way through the crown, then another, and another. Patiently it was explained to me that it is the image that is sacred not the object, and while there are many objects, there is only one image.

This idea inverts our usual understanding of art where worthiness is measured by an object's artistic merit or monetary value irrespective of its subject matter. 

In our exhibition that contrasts religious and secular art, colonialism emerges as a common concern. That religious art was employed as an instrument of colonization in South East Asia is demonstrated by the banner of Thanh Teresa that was made for a Saigon (Ho Chi Min City) church in 1952, while the Viet Minh were fighting for Vietnam's independence from France. The banner opulently celebrates the French Saint Therese of the child of Jesus, a nun surrounded here by Vietnamese symbols of good luck and firmly amalgamated with the Fleur-de-lis, a symbol that has united the Holy Trinity and the French nation since the Middle Ages. 

In the Philippines, where colonialism was more successful, veneration of religious images has morphed into a personal identification with religious figures. The Virgin Mary has become the Filipina mother and the Santo Nino, the child Christ, has become the Filipino child, both possessed by the Church physically and meta-physically in an endlessly repeating cycle. 

In contrast to this arcane art predicated on a single absolute truth, SLOT offers meta-religious art - an unholy hegemony of Nationalism, leftist politics and abstraction - in essence Modernism. 

And while it might be tempting to identify Modernism as a religion, it would entail ignoring a central ideal - the single word shouted by Indonesia's Joko Widodo at the conclusion of his inauguration speech, "MERDEKA" - or Freedom - it is an elusive thing in South East Asia, yet its presence and its absence ask the central question - what we are to become?

- Tony Twigg