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!