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Mark Salvatus
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Raw is the way Mark Salvatus likes his art.
And so he is just a little uncomfortable standing in the lecture theatre within the La Trobe University Visual Arts Centre, talking about his work to a group of students.
This elegant, comfortable space, alongside the well-proportioned galleries that front onto View Street, is like chalk to the cheese of some places he has recently worked in.
Instead of creating work for the careful lighting and clean white walls of galleries, Salvatus is best-known for scribbling on walls in the street.
His art, he says, is “people-based – a mutual interaction to create an environment.”
Everywhere the Filippino artist goes, his enthusiasm for “the random, the accidental, the chance” fires his imagination, and ends up being incorporated into his work.
While in Bendigo, where he is currently artist-in-residence, Salvatus has installed a version of his Secret Garden, which grew out of the interaction he had with prisoners at the Manila City Jail.
Low down on one wall, a little door opens onto a tangle of green plastic, which represents a vegetable garden grown in secret by the inmates in a crowded provincial jail in the Philippines.
He couldn’t install them in Bendigo, but he brought out with him a number of little trees and plant shapes created from plastic drink bottles, made by his art-student prisoners from Manila City Jail.
Up on the wall alongside the tiny lit secret garden space is a big drawing of a snarling tiger, above which are the words “Do or Die”, the motto of one of the gangs inside the Jail.
“My theory is, if you are inside a prison, you become creative,” he says.
Salvatus started out in advertising, but got bored, so he took some of the theories he had learned at the University of Santo Tomas and applied them to developing his own art practice.
With the help of a couple of scholarships he was able to spend time in Barcelona and in South Korea, where he began the project which has gradually come to be associated with his name.
Because he is first and foremost a street artist, he asked permission to set himself up alongside a wall, where he invited (by means of a printed card which explained who he was and what he was doing) passers-by to take something personal, such a watch or shoe or phone, and trace around it on the wall.
Then, using soft lead pencils, Salvatus “wrapped” the stencil, drawing in a pattern of bandages like a mummy’s cloth.
“Pencil is ephemeral,” he says, “and the common objects became like a collective memory.
“It’s become an ongoing project, that I do everywhere I go, using the same process and I always get the same reaction.
“People say, I don’t know how to draw, then they realise they only have to trace an object, and it becomes very personal.
“The nicest feedback comes from ordinary people, not the curators or the critics.”
La Trobe has been bringing artists to Bendigo from the Philippines for several years, through an arrangement with the Ateneo Art Gallery.
As Salvatus says, it’s a very different experience, working in a city the size of Bendigo, compared with the chaotic press of 11 million people in a city like Manila.
Most of those 11 million don’t feel that art in galleries is for them (“It’s for rich people”), so Salvatus wants to take it into the streets where they live.
“Everything you see in Manila is like art,” he says. “Laundry hanging on a line is an installation, people lying in the street is performance art.
“Street artists are becoming more intelligent, moving away from spraypaint and stickers to something newer.”
Although his show in the View Street gallery is not quite the installation as he would have liked to display it, he has complemented his Secret Garden with a new work he has called Intimation.
Taken on a tour of the old Bendigo prison, he became intrigued by a knife cupboard still sitting in the kitchen area. Behind that cupboard, with its steel grid and padlock, he could hear the stories of those who have passed through Victoria’s oldest prison.
Most of those 11 million don’t feel that art in galleries is for them (“It’s for rich people”), so Salvatus wants to take it into the streets where they live.
“Everything you see in Manila is like art,” he says. “Laundry hanging on a line is an installation, people lying in the street is performance art.
“Street artists are becoming more intelligent, moving away from spraypaint and stickers to something newer.”
Although his show in the View Street gallery is not quite the installation as he would have liked to display it, he has complemented his Secret Garden with a new work he has called Intimation.
Taken on a tour of the old Bendigo prison, he became intrigued by a knife cupboard still sitting in the kitchen area. Behind that cupboard, with its steel grid and padlock, he could hear the stories of those who have passed through Victoria’s oldest prison.
This was another of his “chance encounters”, so he has borrowed that old cupboard, and set it on the floor of the gallery space, with lights to reflect the bars up against his “Do or Die” emblem on the wall.
“Of course it’s hard when you do projects which are not works that sell,” he says of his practice, which will take him to New York, Massachusetts and Yokohama later this year.
“Street art is now being shown in galleries and museums much more,” he says.
“You’re being true to yourself by invading all spaces.”
Secret Garden, an installation by Mark Salvatus, is at the La Trobe Visual Arts Centre until May 15.
“Of course it’s hard when you do projects which are not works that sell,” he says of his practice, which will take him to New York, Massachusetts and Yokohama later this year.
“Street art is now being shown in galleries and museums much more,” he says.
“You’re being true to yourself by invading all spaces.”
Secret Garden, an installation by Mark Salvatus, is at the La Trobe Visual Arts Centre until May 15.
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