Life is Sweet - Contemporary Australian Watercolours (excerpt from ex. cat.)

Patrick Hartigan, Noel McKenna, Sanne Mestrom, Michelle Ussher, Pat Waters, John Wolseley
Curated by Bryony Nainby
Gippsland Regional Art Gallery, Sale, Victoria, Australia
2007

...Viewing Sanné Mestrom’s paintings is a disorientating experience. After a few moments, the surface geometry of translucent grey-hued shards begins to acquire depth, gradually transforming into a labyrinth of light and shadow. Within these spaces, transparent three-dimensional forms overlap and intersect, dissolving into one another in ways which fool our perception. Through this multi-perspectival rendering of space, the artist seeks to “enable the viewer to become aware of their processes of perception in order to reveal the ways that we perceive ‘truths’, rather than what we perceive to be true.” Infinite shades of grey dominate, little is black or white.

Mestrom’s work references ideological and geopolitical conflicts which arise from competing perspectives. The panels which make up ‘A history of space is the history of wars’ act as a series of windows onto social and political conflicts; violent episodes, such as the 1968 uprisings in Paris and Prague, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and the current war in Iraq which have risen from contested ideologies.

Mestrom’s monochromatic panels illustrate the influence of digital technologies on traditional media such as watercolour. Resembling computer generated architectural models, it is only upon close inspection that the artists hand in the work’s creation is revealed. Along the bottom edges the artist has relinquished formal control, allowing the paint to pool and bleed as evidence of its fluid nature and the potential risks inherent in its use....

Bryony Nainby
Curator of ‘Life is Sweet’ contemporary Australian watercolours