CAMILLE SERISIER 
Fringe Dwellers
29 December 2013 - 18 January 2014

These photographic works by Camille Serisier investigate our connection, or lack there of, with the natural environment. Made last September during a residency at Laughing Waters, 30 kilometers outside Melbourne in bush land, it was a landscape that reminded her of growing up in Wollongong on the South Coast, describing 'the bush was where you went to get away from adults and explore personal freedoms'.

Her works ask: "Are we merely stage players in this grand environment? Where does mythology and reality meet?" Camille sets about exploring narrative construction and interpretation, taking the traditional gendered narrative of the Australian bush and applying an eco-feminist critique.

Here a figure is inserted into a painterly landscape, masked with abstracted or deconstructed fragments that add to the dramatic 'stage craft' of the image.  It is not surprising to learn Camille trained as a scenic painter at Scenic Studios in Melbourne and Opera Australia in Sydney following her fine arts degree.

This exhibition comes to SLOT as part of the Dispatch project linking seven window galleries across Australia.

CHARLES COOPER

Sea Change
10 - 28 December 2013

My 'Sea Change' paintings can be seen as the material of future archaeology. The fragmented road surfaces allude to damage caused by storm surges, floods, land slippages etc. the increasingly familiar results of extreme weather events. The shattered assemblages are intended to evoke the sublime, the sense of awe in the face of nature's wrath.

The title 'Sea Change' refers not only to coastal damage brought about by rising sea levels, but also to a global shift in attitude regarding the future. (Charles Cooper)

Charlie's paintings are typically graphic in impact, and what appears at first glance to be a composition in abstraction, turns out to be a long interest in the vernacular of the road - signage, bitumen, road markings - aptly shown at SLOT, located at one of Sydney's busiest intersections.

Charles is represented by Annandale Galleries.

IDA LAWRENCE + EKO BAMBANG WISNU 
Nge-kost
12 November - 7 December 2013

Translated as a room in a boarding house, the kost is popular with students in Indonesia, functioning as a complete living ecosystem: bedroom, living room, eat-in entertainment zone, storage space. When faced with the proposition of making a work for SLOT, Ida and Eko - who met in Yogyakarta in such a kost while studying art art school - realised that SLOT mirrored almost the same floor dimension of the average boarding room.

Responding to the site, they have created this urban kost for living; its bower bird-like collection of objects and make-do aesthetics  of furniture reflect both Indonesian kost living and slot's neighbourhood as furniture is often recycled and reloved, and boarding houses jostle with gentrification, blurring objects between places.

Eko said, ' Working in the window is not so dissimilar to living in a kost where everyone sees and knows everything.' Both artists work in a range of materials and this is their first collaboration in Australia.

HERMISANTO + TONY TWIGG2003 = 2012
20 October - 9 November 2013

At the time SLOT opened in 2003, Tony Twigg was in Manila. Having spoken about the project with artists there, upon leaving the Philippines Hermisanto handed Tony a tightly rolled wad of drawings to carry on the plane. It was the first project that fully realized the ethos of SLOT: to have a conversation with our neighbourhood outside the conventional constraints of freight and the kind of  exchange routes reliant on institutional endorsement.

For our tenth anniversary, Tony has revisited Hermi's piece.

Original 2004 installation of Hermisanto's "Firedancer" 

 

Detail of revisited artwork now on show at SLOT

 

MEGAN HANSON
Meg & Co.
6 - 19 October 2013

Curated by Alex Bellemore, this exhibition combines photography, sculpture and light. Central to the installation is a collection of eight blow-up travel pillows that Megan has cast in concrete and stacked. Titled: Zachary, Jackson, Levon and Elijah, Joseph, Daniel, Furnish and John (2013) the objects become animated in themselves, and sit in conversation with a small looped video.

 

In her installation Megan plays with perspex sheeting, text and rope, the window cast in pink and green light - volume and weight become an enigma.

DIOKNO PASILAN 
Ballarat I.D.
18 September - 5 October 2013

This suite of portraits are made from iron dust. It cuts to the core of our contemporary sense of landscape, and the impact this mining boom has on us all.

Filipino artist Diokno Pasilan lived in Western Australia for 16-years, recently moving to the Victorian town of Ballarat, a place with its own history of resources. Built on gold mining at the turn of the century this is a portrait of the town today.

Diokno is in town for Sydney Contemporary, where his work will be presented by The Drawing Room. SLOT it delighted to present this satellite exhibition.

 

Installing exhibition with SLOT co-director Tony Twigg

 LEANNE WATERHOUSE
Solitary Cohabitation Revisited
18 August - 14 September 2013

As part of the Dispatch project this installation has come to SLOT from the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art in Darwin, where it was originally presented on large perspex sheets floated one in front of the other.

 

Leanne has deconstructed and reconstructed her faux Rorschach inkblots as a loose metaphor for the  effect the environment plays on our emotions and psyche.  Cut into lozenge-shaped forms and then stitched back together like DNA chains or torrential tropical rain, there is a lightness and energy to this installation that holds the space with a presence, despite its fragility. 

 

Echoing rain, and deeply influenced by living in the top end, Leanne says of this work, "I use the oval as a constant theme through much of my work - it has many layers of meaning. For me here it explores concepts of isolation, repeated thought, and 'over-thinking'. More broadly it links between our environment and mental health."

TONY TWIGG 
Aberrant Stripe Painting
15 July - 17 August 2013

 

"These clean, seemingly musically alert compositions are, I claim, aberrant. Aberrant at least with regard to 'Stripe Painting', an obscure genre of abstract painting that examined the retinal activity generated by precisely aligned vertical stripes of coloured paint across the surface of a canvas. For me, stripes become lines, grabbed up in bundles to be rearranged as 'compositions', or at least clusters of marks that have a precise physicality. Colour has been washed away leaving tone triumphant. A rhythmic placement of elements against the inferred presence of others is key to these works. It is a celebration of the intrusion of anarchy - a dual reality that has been orchestrated into a single composition." - Tony Twigg

Cleaning up the SLOT archive today, came across this note. Happy that we are still making an impact ten years on!

DEBORAH REDWOOD 
Crossings
16 June - 13 July 

Illawarra artist Deborah Redwood lived in Japan for five years. For SLOT she has created a Zen garden and Haiku.

The base of the sculpture here in Deborah's garden is the pattern for an unfolded Japanese fan. The unfolded fan also approximates the shape of many ancient bridges in Asia. It is across this bridge that two palm fronds shells unite in a movement reminiscent of yoga and tai chi, suggestive of the meeting of East and West.

COOK N FOGG

Light Collaboration
14 May - 15 June 2013

To coincide with Sydney's VIVID festival of lights, Australia's pioneer of Lumino Kinetic Art - Roger Foley-Fogg (also known as Ellis D Fogg) - returns to SLOT with a new collaborative artwork created with Redfern talent Jessica "Jess" Cook.

Utilising electronically controlled LEDs and steel mesh, this dynamic lightwork combines Cook's cloth weaving process with Foley's recent forays into rope lighting.  Despite a forty-year difference in their age, Cook 'n Fogg share a passion for artistic collaboration and alternative process.

The ribbon LEDs play wonderfully with the street scape, their bounced reflection on the shop window mingling with street signage and the tail lights of passing traffic.

SUSANNAH WILLIAMS

experimental drawing project in parts
31 March - 4 May 2013

Over the next five weeks Susie Williams will work directly in SLOTs window to create a series of experimental drawings that will effectively take form, and then change over time.

Check out the girls at work in the space as a timelapse on youtube.

Essentially the window will function as an 'open studio' where viewers can track the formation and development of ideas, both on the ground and via QR codes. 

  

Williams kicks off with her"Artist in Transit" project, a collaboration with former architect Ro Murray and guest collaborators sound artist Warren Armstrong and photographer Peter Morgan. Murray and Williams exchanged drawings during the mail when Murray was on residency at Hill End earlier this year and Williams based in Redfern, each loosely responding to their surrounding sounds through colour and form.

Warren created a sound scape while the girls were installing in SLOT. Have a listen at the following link sounds of silence.

Williams and Murray returned to the  SLOT 20 April creating a new drawing intervention using black tape.

The drawing in tape continued to alter, moving from the rear wall to the glass.

CARL SCRASE
Real Democracy Australia
 24 February - 30 March 2013

Carl says "I want to put democracy back on the agenda." Melbourne-based activist artist does exactly that using a ground-swell language of the streets with a probing poster campaign.

This interactive installation encourages comments from our sidewalk audience - posts that are then uploaded on twitter stimulating a broader dialogue.

Carl extends his SLOT show to the streets of Redfern, posing the questions through guerilla-style poster dialogue: Should whistleblowers be protected? Is representative democracy antiquated? Does anything matter more than the environment? How can we best acknowledge and respect the first nations of Australia?

 Tweet your responses or those that capture your passion under the hashtag #Gov2Au and Carl will retweet any that tag him with @carlscrase.

The posters can can be downloaded from the realdemocracyaustralia.org website and Carl is encouraging people to put them up in their workplaces and local zones.

RICHARD TIPPINGUrban Animals
21 January - 23 February 2013

Concrete poet and artist Richard Tipping has recently moved to Redfern. However, it is not the stereotypes that his eye honed towards as he beat the pavements from Redfern Park to SLOT As he says, "Urban Animals is an on-going series on animlas and their images in the city and surrounds, trying for poignancy and the mysterious more than simply documentation."
 

A suite of 'pics' snapped on a smart phone and then uploaded to a blog, these images are quirky and fun. They capture the speed of a pedestrian and the kind of transitions in a day. Utilising a QR code displayed in SLOTs window pedestrian viewers can visit Richard's urban animals blogspot and find out the stories behind these peculiar urban critters - where is James the pig now? did the vet bills get paid?   

richardtipping.blogspot.com.au